Falling in love with a show: Countries Shaped Like Stars, in a new production at Fringe Theatre. A preview

Posted on February 17, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Michael Watt and Dayna Lea Hoffmann in Countries Shaped Like Stars, Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Nearly 15 years ago, in the chaotic excitement of reviewing Fringe shows, I found myself in a nondescript church basement in Strathcona: musty church basement smell, sullen lighting, inauspicious wooden church chairs.

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What happened after that was an hour or so of pure theatrical magic, the kind you don’t forget. With only a ladder, water glasses, a whirly-wind, and a couple of lamps, Emily Pearlman and Nicolas Di Gaetano of Ottawa’s Mi Casa told an enchanting musical love story fairy tale. Like all musical love story fairy tales should, it started with ‘Once Upon a Time’….”

The show was Countries Shaped Like Stars. And I remember it as if it were yesterday.

At a time when countries were shaped like stars and “anticipation grew on trees,” Gwendolyn Magnificent and Bartholomew Spectacular, a dragonfruit seller and a purveyor of popsicles, meet every Sunday at the Intercontinental Market of Pivotal Miscellany. And they fall in love. Then they return to their respective neighbouring peninsulas where they “knit allegories into toques, and run “orphanages for words you wish you’d thought of at the time.”

There was just something about it. It was whimsical, in an unforced way; it was wistful; it touched down lightly — with music performed by the characters. And it had such an imaginative way of prying words off their usual prosaic perches. Irresistible. I fell in love with its oddball charm and its heart. Ah, and so did Fringe’s new (at the time) artistic director Murray Utas.

“They made magic happen. And I think that is a testament to the power of storytelling!” Utas says. “There is nothing more celebratory than getting into a room with people and telling them a !!*!ing good story!”

Michael Watt, Dayna Lea Hoffmann in Countries Shaped Like Stars, Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

That love affair with a show is why a new production of Countries Shaped Like Stars, directed by Utas, opens at the Backstage Theatre Friday, in Fringe Theatre’s off-festival season. It stars Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Michael Watt, two of Edmonton’s most sought-after young actors, as Gwendolyn and Bartholomew.

Partly what captivated him, says Utas, is the way Countries Like Stars captures something of the DIY magic that’s close to the heart of Fringe Theatre. “It invites the kind of resourcefulness that went into the original production,” which was at the country’s festivals, and even returned once to Fringe Theatre here in 2016.

“A skeletal crew with not a lot of budget to make it happen,” Utas says with his usual exuberance, on a Fringe Cafe break from rehearsal. “At the Fringe we don’t have the budget for things and stuff, but we do have the budget for people … the beautiful humans who are with me on this ride!”

Ah, the journey. Utas reached out to creators Pearlman and Di Gaetano. They had a script; they even had the music, from a production four or five years ago. And after their joyful Fringe experience here as a bona fide sleeper hit, they were happy to share. Utas assembled other artists who’d fallen in love with Countries Shaped Like Stars too, among them designer Even Gilchrist.

Dayna Lea Hoffmann in Countries Shaped Like Stars, Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

“It’s an embarrassment of riches!,” says Utas, whose conversation typically happens in a volley of exclamation points. Edmonton directors and audiences have discovered the multi-talented Hoffmann and Watt in a striking variety of starring roles. The former, who has an arsenal of circus skills, is a co-creator and co-star of the hit bouffon show Rat Academy, returning in April, this time to the Theatre Network mainstage. And Watt, who shone in dozens of comic roles in The 39 Steps at Teatro Live! this past fall, has a history of original musical creations with creative partner Jacquelin Walters (Let’s Not Turn On Each Other).

Says Utas “we’re about to showcase these two performers with a little something maybe people haven’t seen…. They imbue a story with whimsical magic and emotional depth.”

Michael Watt in Countries Shaped Like Stars, Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Perhaps the trickiest part of Countries Shaped Like Stars, he thinks, is the “delicate balance” between narration and dramatic scenes with the characters. And, as Utas points out, a big part of its charm and impact is its simplicity, its theatrical ingenuity. This time, it happens in a real theatre though, with the resources that implies. Utas says that he’s been at pains not to lose its DIY qualities in theatrical over-production. “But it’s going to have a little bit of zhuzh to it.”

It’s a case of judging “what do I need to tell this story,” and resist over-embellishing with technology. The characters do talk to the audience, and then return to each other, says Utas of the easy, unforced  crowd interactions built into Countries Shaped Like Stars.

“Theatre is hard…. So I want to make sure that we’ve enjoyed he experience of making it as much as the experience of sharing it,” he says. “At the end of the day we all love good stories. And this is a good story!”

PREVIEW

Countries Shaped Like Stars

Theatre: Edmonton Fringe Theatre

Created by: Emily Pearlman and Nicholas Di Gaetano

Directed by: Murray Utas

Starring: Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Michael Watt

Where: Backstage Theatre, Fringe Theatre Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: official opening Friday, through Feb. 28

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.    

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Stewart Lemoine’s first new full-length comedy in seven long years: I Meant What I Said (and he does), at Teatro Live!

Posted on February 15, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Bella King, I Meant What I Said, Teatro Live! Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In I Meant What I Said (formerly called Finally! A New Play By Stewart Lemoine), Stewart Lemoine’s first new full-length comedy in seven years — we meet Dinah, a proofreader and aspiring novelist who’s fast approaching the three-oh birthday milestone.

At the outset she’s thinking about … thinking, and the way “the thoughts you have are the cards you’re dealt.” And she’s having thoughts about the people who unexpectedly pop up in her life — and the way they seem to be getting to know each other, and themselves, and having adventures together, right there onstage, in scenes under Dinah’s personal supervision. “I’m just going to ahead and manifest another person,” she says. “I run a tight ship.”

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In an archive of more than 100 plays of every length I Meant What I Said, premiering Friday in the Teatro Live! season, isn’t the first time Lemoine has written about inspiration itself. Where does it come from? How can it be shaped into characters and stories? Ah, and who’s in charge anyhow?

As he points out, in a post-rehearsal chat last week, his last full-length comedy, A Likely Story in 2019 with its sly double-meaning title, has something in common with this new play premiering Friday in the Teatro Live! season. In A Likely Story, “a story telling itself,” as he describes, the characters are strangers, “travellers, people trying to decide where they are,” which they decide is a train station in Basel, Switzerland. “And when someone makes a decision the story advances….” They are, in effect, in charge of their own narrative fortunes.

Lemoine spent his “pandemic years” digitizing his archive of plays, dating back to the start of Teatro (Teatro La Quindicina) at the first Fringe. Many of them, like Swiss Pajamas and Fall Down Go Boom, existed only on paper. The latter, by the way, last seen 30 years ago, comes to the Varscona March 1 as a reading in the “Farren Presents” (devised by the new Teatro artistic director Farren Timoteo) series accompanying the Teatro season. Written in honour of Canada’s hosting of the World Figure Skating championship in 1996, it is certainly Lemoine’s “only sports comedy,” as billed.

He did write a new 2023 solo show for Rachel Bowron, Love Is For Poor People, a quixotic memoir of a romance- and event-filled life and career before they happen, to get jump on time. And Or You Can Do Nothing, the solo show he wrote specially for Ron Pederson’s talent for conjuring multiple characters (directed by Jackie Maxwell), has dates in Ontario and, he hopes, for Teatro in the future.

And now there’s a new full-length Lemoine, at the theatre whose own origin story is built on his comedies. “The real thing that made me want to do it was the cast of young people,” he says of the new generation of five Teatro stars in the show. Most he’s worked with in the last year, Bella King and Sam Free in the screwball comedy On The Banks of the Nut; Nida Vanderham and Eli Yaschuk in The Noon Witch. And they’re joined by Jayce McKenzie, who was in The Hothouse Prince. He wanted to write “something that would just be their own, not having to worry about how someone did it before them.”

playwright Stewart Lemoine. Photo supplied.

The Lemoine method has always been to create characters and plays with specific actors in mind. “You write to what you know that person can do,” he says. “Or what has that person never done … to surprise the actor a bit. They get the role and they start to feel they’re living life differently.”

Long before he came up with the title — much less the structure and the story, the play, and Dinah — were designed with the comic talents of the engaging Bella King in mind. “The voice of Dinah, her character, her voice, are pretty close to mine,” says Lemoine, “the way I write letters, the way I talk to people.” After a gap of seven years, though, he reports he started the play three separate times, uncharacteristically struggling with how to make the first-person narration work, how the characters and scenes would be introduced.

“It’s better if I don’t filter,” he says of the writing process and the creation of characters who are unusually articulate, a Lemoine signature.. “Because I tend to write in longer sentences for a characters like Dinah, I make sure I can do it in a single breath. Long phrasing is important to me,” as many a Teatro actor has confirmed. “I read it aloud a million times to make things go as they should.”

And having thought after thought doesn’t really count until they’re processed into writing or speech, Lemoine considers. Grad student Alex (Sam Free), who’s possibly Dinah’s boyfriend (he’s not sure if they broke up or not), is doing a PhD in reading, and does exactly that, aloud, from Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. Why Milton? Lemoine got the idea via the Handel setting of the poems. Will Alex make it to Dinah’s final draft?

“Where does creativity come from?” Lemoine pauses to consider. “From real life, and imagining a character and projecting things on them, inventing futures for them….” He thinks of this new play as “showing you how a mind works, what it’s like to create plays. Not how to do it, but how I do it.” He points to works he admires in which the characters collaborate to take charge: the Rossini opera Journey to Rheims, in which a multi-national assortment of characters are just trying to get to a coronation despite every kind of obstacle, and the  Buñuel film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie in which “friends are just trying to get together for a dinner party and it never quite works. But they just keep going.”

“Theatre allows us to travel, to go with the speed of thought — and a good lighting designer — and you’re suddenly somewhere else. ”

Speaking as we are about creativity and its sources in real life, here’s an intersection that amuses Lemoine. In I Meant What I Said, an undergrad in a film studies class suddenly arrives in Alex’s university office with her term paper ‘The Expression of Thought in the Cinema of Cocteau and Fellini’ and delivers a chunk of this weighty oeuvre as a monologue before she gets the hook from Dinah. “Two women both obsessed with thinking? No sir….  It’s from an actual I paper I wrote in 1983 in my university days,” he says, “with footnotes and a whole analysis. I got a 9,” he laughs. “When I started writing about thought, and had an undergrad character I thought ‘why pretend’?

“I could really use a lot of people (onstage),” says the playwright of the thought that resulted in multiple roles (and a lot of quick changes) for Vanderham. She plays The Oddball, who contains Stacy, a server, an usher … seven characters in all.

As in so many Lemoines, music figures prominently. In The Margin of the Sky, for example hearing Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder is a life-changer for an L.A. soap star; in Fever Land, it’s Schubert’s The Erlking. In I Meant What I Said, it’s a trip to the Philharmonic, on a weekday afternoon yet!, (the sign of a livable city according to Dinah). Hearing Saint-Saens’ Organ Symphony has a mesmerizing effect on Helen, a would-be divorcée. And the future Dinah had imagined for Helen changes big-time. When the organ rumbles and shakes the rafters in the symphony finale, as Lemoine points out, “it’s like being in a row boat and realizing a whale is swimming underneath.”

“Thought after thought,” says Lemoine of the experience of writing a comedy about inspiration and translating thinking into characters. “What would I do with that person? You invent a future…. What would be a happier outcome?”

PREVIEW

I Meant What I Said

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written and directed by: Stewart Lemoine

Starring: Bella King, Sam Free, Jayce McKenzie, Nida Vanderham, Eli Yaschuk

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Avenue

Running: Feb. 20 to March 8

Tickets: teatrolive.com

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Edmonton’s on it! For Valentine’s weekend, an evening at the theatre

Posted on February 11, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Tartuffe, U of A Studio Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It is the moment to jettison all residual thoughts of Valentine’s Day as a martyrdom, or more recently a massacre, or an epidemic of Hallmark rhymes. And let’s just not even get into the dismal vision of you yourself, home alone with the chocolates you bought yourself…. It’s Edmonton, for gawd’s sake, so you can apply yourself and yourselves to the happier prospect of a night at the theatre. And you can take your date, your -ex, or yourself — theatre doesn’t judge — to a wide assortment of champagne experiences. 

Alexander Ariate, Nathan Kay, John Ullyatt, Nadien Chu in Death of a Salesman, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography

At the Citadel, you can share with your significant or insignificant other (or hell, just go alone and immerse yourself) a great play. In a fine production of Arthur Miller’s 1949 masterwork Death of a Salesman John Ullyatt stars as Willy Loman, the road-weary travelling salesman who’s one of the most memorable characters of 20th century theatre, lugging cases full of dreams and delusions. Daryl Cloran’s production, beautifully staged, runs through Sunday. And you can read the 12thnight review here. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820.

Susinn McFarlen in Burning Mom, Arts Club Theatre Company. Photo by Moonrider Productions.

Downstairs at the very playhouse, you can the first preview of a show about dreams, and the bravery it takes to step up and make them real. Burning Mom, by the Citadel’s associate artistic director Mieko Oucho, tells the inspiring (and true!) story of her mom Dorothy who, age 63 and suddenly a widow, decides to move forward, in the most amazingly literal way … by driving to Burning Man in a massive RV. Check out 12thnight’s preview interview with Ouchi here. The Arts Club Theatre Company production runs through March 8. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820.

My Testiimonial by Greg MacArthur at Workshop West. Poster image by Dave DeGagné.

At Workshop West, My Testimonial, is an intriguing theatrical experience that’s a cross between a play, a true-crime podcast, and a staged reading. The crime is real, and horrific. A theatre artist (playwright Greg MacArthur himself) is telling story of being hired to coach a witness (Sophie May Healey) in a high-profile criminal trial. The blurry frontier between fact and fiction is where it all happens. It runs through Sunday at the Gateway Theatre. Tickets (all pay-what-you-will) at workshopwest.org. Check out the 12thnight preview with playwright MacArthur here.

Jimmy Hogg and Alex Dallas in ‘Evie and Alfie: A Very British Love Story’. Photo by Vincent McMillen

At the Fringe, on the very night, you can see a sweet rom-com that starts in elderly tranquillity and works backwards, through big moments. Evie and Alfie: A Very British Love Story, a rom-com by and starring Brit-born Fringe stars Alex Dallas and Jimmy Hogg, returns here for one night only. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca. See 12thnight’s preview interview with the pair here.   

The U of A’s Studio Theatre enlists Molière to put the boot into religious hypocrisy (which, as we know, is having a heyday). Kathleen Weiss directs Tartuffe, Moliere’s great 1664 comedy, scandalous and banned twice at the time, about a predatory pious hypocrite who worms his way into a rich family with a maddeningly credulous patriarch. It runs through Saturday at the Timms Centre for the Arts. Tickets: showpass.com.   

You’ve gotta love Grindstone Theatre’s V-Day pizzaz (or possibly their educational zeal). In Love Autopsy, the 11 p.m. Valentine’s Day edition, former couples are  invited onto the stage to explain how they met, how they broke up, and what happened after the break-up. The comedian Leif Oleson-Cormack, “perpetually single” as billed, presides. The guests Saturday are Katie Yoner of Rat Academy fame and Rat Academy director Joseph McManus who dated for five years before they split. Ex-couples get in free, as long as they’re prepared to get up onstage and talk about their ex-relationship. Tickets: showpass.com.

Love, in all its permutations, is getting the comic treatment from the quick-witted improvisers at Rapid Fire Theatre, too, in honour of the big day: Improv All-Stars’ Valentine’s Day edition. Tickets: rapidfiretheatre.com.

Matt Cage, Melissa MacPherson, Rain Matkin-Szilagyi and Andrew McCallister in One Night With Roy Orbison, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

At the Mayfield, you can sip an Only the Lonely (“1 oz. Peach Schnapps, 1 oz. Amaretto, orange juice and 7Up”) and listen to a hit-studded songlist by the man with the sunglasses. A Night With Roy Orbison stars Matt Cage, with an excellent band. It runs through April 5. Have a peek at the 12thnight review here.

In This Is War, a response to Canada’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan by the stellar Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch, four traumatized Canadian soldiers are being questioned by an unseen interviewer about a horrific incident during an op, a possible atrocity. Walterdale, a community theatre that never shies from tough material, revives the 2013 play, directed by Shawn Marshall. It runs through Sunday at the Walterdale Playhouse in Strathcona. Tickets: walterdaletheatre.com.

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A Valentine from two Fringe stars: ‘Evie and Alfie: A Very British Love Story’ at Edmonton Fringe

Posted on February 10, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Alex Dallas and Jimmy Hogg in Evie and Alfie: A Very British Love Story. Photo by Vincent McMillen

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Evie and Alfie, an older retired couple, sit in their house. Nothing happens for some time.”

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That was the inspiration (and the initial stage direction), of Evie and Alfie: A Very British Love Story. The unusual romantic comedy created by, and starring, the Brit-born Toronto-based Fringe faves Alex Dallas (Sensible Footwear, Horseface) and Jimmy Hogg (The Potato King), returns to Edmonton as a theatrical Valentine for a single performance Feb. 14, as part of the Fringe Theatre season,.

It was Hogg who had the idea and wrote that first line. “I really liked the idea of seeing two old people in their house,” he says. “That stillness, that tranquility, that sense that ‘we weren’t always like this, you know’…. You see elderly people — we’re all guilty — and you forget that they’ve had all this, who knows what?, in their lives before.” And Evie and Alfie take us back through the years and that ‘who knows what?’ to their first encounter in a pub and big-M life Moments after that. As Dallas puts it “they take us by the hand and lead us through the story…. We fell in love with the characters before we really had a structure.”

The play returns the characters to the present from time to time. The writing process was a matter of Hogg and Dallas asking “what parts of these people’s lives, what moments, do we want to see?”. They made a list, wrote short scenes, separately and together. And they ended up with three times as much material as they could use.

Jimmy Hogg and Alex Dallas in ‘Evie and Alfie: A Very British Love Story’. Photo by Vincent McMillen

Both best known of late to Canadian audiences as solo performers, Hogg and Dallas are two-decade veteran artists of the Fringe circuit.  The Fringe, says the former, “was the mother of this collaboration,” an origin story with wide currency in Canadian theatre. “I have this idea for a two-hander; do you want to write it with me?” Hogg remembers asking in 2003 at the Victoria Fringe in a brainstorming pitch backstage you could still hear any summer at any Fringe in the country. And the correct and only answer was Dallas’s: “absolutely!” A new show, “set somewhere in the Thatcher Britain of the ‘70s, was born in that exchange,

“We’d known each other for a long time,” says Dallas, originally a Londoner, of her stage partner, who’s from Plymouth. “All our British-ness resonated.” Their working-class backgrounds had their similarities — “to a point,” says Dallas; “with loads of corollaries,” says Hogg. “Where we really aligned,” he adds, “was in our leftist leanings and politics… and massive amounts of kindness and empathy for all kinds of people.”

“We knew quite a bit about each other’s parents and how we were brought up,” says Dallas. “And there’s something very beautiful about that shorthand when you’re improvising or writing…. We don’t have to explain anything to each other. AND we make each other laugh. Actually, it’s very difficult not to be hysterically laughing the whole time.”

What Dallas loves about Evie and Alfie is its “richness,” she says. “It’s so poignant, and with a lot of laughs…. Not just one joke; you get a big range.” What they discovered at their meetings, among stories about their parents, was that “old people are obsessed with bins, with garbage, how much, who’s taking it out, and when,” says Hogg. Dallas laughs that since Ford has privatized recycling in Ontario, it’s an obsession she now officially shares: it’s been three weeks since blue bags have been picked up in Toronto. Where should they go? “Bins have taken over my life,” she says. “That means I’m old.”

Dallas arrived in Canada as part of the hit feminist comedy troupe Sensible Footwear, who emigrated at the time of the Thatcher/John Major arts cuts in the U.K. She and her cohorts weren’t theatre school-type actors. “We were compelled by the ideas, and comedy as the medium for getting those ideas out.… We had a nearly 20-year career in the U.K. and Canada by learning as we went.”

“When you’re young you have this wonderful innocence … never thinking you can’t do something.” At the Edinburgh Fringe “we threw ourselves onto the stage with all these experienced veteran actors and we never thought we shouldn’t be there. We were “oh great, we’ll join in!’.” She’s amused by the memory of such chutzpah.

The Sensible Footwear introduction to Canadian Fringes came first, via the Vancouver Comedy Festival. The Edmonton Fringe had no performance slots left. But they told Brian Paisley, “no problem, we’ll come anyway.” And they did, ensconcing themselves in the Renford Inn on Whyte (free rooms in return for cabaret nights). “We’d march the audience from the Fringe to the hotel, holding a string. And then when they got there, we’d charge them to come in…. That’s the beauty of youth! Let’s just do these crazy mad things.”

And “we fell in love with Canada. We were smitten!”

Hogg arrived in Canada “by accident,” he says. He’d dropped out of school at 16 (“I didn’t like it at all”). There’s a sort of free-association about the chain of events that got him a degree in academic theatre (“no one in my family had ever been to a university; they were all military”). In the summer he studied commedia in France, physical theatre in Spain…. And I became a sort of hard-core physical theatre/ Lecoq-type clown person.”

Completely broke, Hogg visited some university pals in Toronto in 2003. And he never left. His own Fringe debut as a solo performer — not losing money was his obsession of the time he says — came a year later in Minneapolis. “I printed 2,500 fliers. I flier-ed every day all day. I spoke to everyone; I talked non-stop. All day. Every day. Just from fear…. And then I sold out the entire run.” That show, the first of Hogg’s nine solo Fringe shows, was Curriculum Vitae, “about one person’s search for the right job.” And at the Fringe he found his.

So there’s substantial Fringe cred behind the love story that arrives here with Evie and Alfie on Valentine’s Day, before summer engagements that include, so far, Fringes in Toronto, Victoria, and Winnipeg. 

PREVIEW

Evie and Alfie: A Very British Love Story

Theatre: Edmonton Fringe Theatre

Created by and starring: Alex Dallas and Jimmy Hogg

Directed by: James Gangl

Where: Westbury Theatre, Fringe Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: February 14, one night only

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca

 

  

  

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‘Whaaat? You want to go where?!’ Taking the wheel of a grand adventure: Burning Mom at the Citadel

Posted on February 9, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Susinn McFarlen in Burning Mom, photo by Moonrider Productions for the Arts Club Theatre Company. Set design Patrick Rizzotti, costume design Kirsten McGhie, lighting design John Webber, projection design Kim Clegg.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

From destination to itinerary to vehicle, there is nothing usual, or even likely, about the road trip in Mieko Ouchi’s Burning Mom, the solo play that starts previews Saturday at the Citadel.

A grief-shattered 63-year-old widow learns how to drive a 26-foot RV, and drives it to Burning Man, the counter-culture week-long festival in the Nevada desert, the year after her husband dies.   

Everything about this one-woman odyssey is wildly improbable, including this: it’s a true story. And that woman is Ouchi’s mother Dorothy. “Very much a real story,” says the playwright…. Well, 99.9 per cent real.” And as for the .1 per cent she made up, “you will not be right if you guess what it is.”

After listening to sold-out audiences in multiple cities (a rare occurrence in Canadian theatre), Ouchi, the Citadel’s associate artistic director, has concluded that “what has moved people so much is that my mom is, in the best sense of the word, an ‘ordinary’ person. She shops at Costco; she lives in suburban Calgary….” And if an ‘ordinary person’ can be brave enough to have a grand life re-affirming adventure, so can you, and you over there, and you at the back.

The response to Burning Mom, says Ouchi, has been “phenomenal,” first on the 800-seat Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre mainstage in Winnipeg, where, delayed by COVID she directed the premiere in 2023. By the time Burning Mom was at the Arts Club Theatre in Vancouver a year ago, “there was buzz.  And ticket sales just took off; we were held over before we even started, a runaway train.” The production garnered its star Susinn McFarlen a Jessie Award (Vancouver’s Sterlings) for best comedic performance — she plays Dorothy and everyone else, including the playwright and her bros —  along with top honours for designers Patrick Rizzotti and Ana Camacho.

At Victoria’s Belfry Theatre in the fall the entire run sold out. The Arts Club has remounted it for a Lower Mainland tour, and added the Citadel to its tour roster. Last weekend there were less than 75 tickets available for the entire run here.

“It’s not me who’s selling it,” Ouchi laughs. “My plays haven’t been done in Vancouver for a while, and never before in Victoria or Winnipeg…. I really feel the hook is the show,” and its empowering idea.   

The story starts in sudden, shattering loss, as Ouchi recounts. “Tragically my dad passed away very suddenly in 2010.” The chair of the design department at the Alberta University of Arts in Calgary, and a fine artist himself, he was, as his daughter describes, “beloved by his students, an epic person in that world.” He’d been feeling sick at Christmas, and figured he had the flu. The devastating news was that it was stage 4 pancreatic cancer and he had six months to live.” Three weeks later he died, “and we were all in complete shock.”

“My poor mom, she’d married at 18, left her parents’ home with her first serious boyfriend, and had never lived on her own…. The devastation was so profound; it was hard on all of us, but especially her. We were so worried about her,” says Ouchi. “Every couple divides up duties differently. But there were so many things she knew absolutely nothing about…”

At the end of that first year, “the life had been kicked out of her,” says Ouchi. At a family meeting, her mom proposed, to everyone’s enthusiastic approval,“a family vacation. Because we’ve had such a terrible year we just need a break, to gather our thoughts. Great idea mom!…. And I immediately thought ‘Mexican all-inclusive’.”

“I think we should go to Burning Man,” said Dorothy. And Ouchi and her brothers were incredulous. “Whaaat!? What did you just say?”

“She confessed that she’d been learning how to drive the RV that we’d been pushing her to get rid of….” It was new (her dad was a couple of months away from retirement). And it was massive (“it takes multiple people just to park it”). “And that’s where the play starts,” says Ouchi.

“Extraordinary. She had this ember in her that she fanned into a flame,” Ouchi says of her mom. “There’s something about her bravery that people have connected with so emotionally, so personally.” Not least because “she’s such a ‘normal person’.” Ouchi reports that at the show “people come up to me and say’ if your mom can do that, I could do something I’ve wanted to do, too. And I’m ‘go for it! That sounds immensely do-able’.”

Susinn McFarlen in Burning Mom, Arts Club Theatre Company. Photo by Moonrider Productions.

En route to Burning Man, Dorothy encounters the kindness of strangers. “A lot of people help her on the way,” which is another reason, Ouchi thinks, that people find the play so appealing, given the toxic state of the world. “There so much ugliness and anger and divisiveness right now. And this is a true story about kindness. People are hungry for it. They’ve found it so pleasurable to live in that world for a while.”

“It starts in grief but the play doesn’t live there at all,” says Ouchi. “It’s about how do you move on, how do you get yourself out of that state of grief…. My mom was just so determined to do it.”

The showstopper feature of the stage, as you’ll see in the Arts Club production at the Citadel, is Ouchi’s mom’s great big RV, in hyper-realistic detail. “People continually say ‘how did they drive that in here?’” Ouchi laughs. That giant scale is why she turned down an offer from a “brilliant but tiny” theatre after they saw a reading of it at the Arcola Theatre in the east end of London where an initial reading took place as part of an international series. That giant scale is why she turned down an offer from a “brilliant but tiny” theatre in London after they saw a reading of it at the Arcola Theatre in the east end as part of an international series. “I was so grateful, but I really wanted to see if I could find a way to introduce the play at the large scale it was written for.”

And speaking of large, the sight of her mom’s mega-RV onstage has amazed audiences, she reports. She constantly overhears people saying ‘“they must have really big doors back there!”. One of her favourite stage manager show reports ever, came from the Winnipeg run. At first sight of this size-large RV, an impressed high school boy stood up in the balcony and shouted “holy shit, this play is epic!” One for the memoirs.

PREVIEW

Burning Mom

Theatre: Arts Club Theatre at the Citadel

Written by: Mieko Ouchi

Directed by: Mieko Ouchi

Where: Citadel Rice Theatre

Starring Susinn McFarlen

Running: Feb. 14 to March 8

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

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The man with the voice and the songs: One Night With Roy Orbison at the Mayfield, a review

Posted on February 8, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Matt Cage, Melissa MacPherson, Rain Matkin-Szilagyi and Andrew McCallister in One Night With Roy Orbison, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Early in the vintage hit-studded revue currently on the Mayfield stage, the narrator tells us that before his career really took off, an aspiring young Texas singer-songwriter named Roy Orbison pitched an original song to Elvis. And Elvis turned it down.

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Which has got to be on the honour roll of any All-Time Showbiz Regrets compilation (an idea whose time has yet to come, but I’m working on it). That song was Only the Lonely, the show opener of One Night With Roy Orbison, written and compiled by Kevin Dabbs and Christine Bandelow.

What follows is an evening that features the indelible music of an artist who made it on his songs and his voice — and not on a stage persona or showmanship. He was one of the first true singer-songwriters at the time, with a penchant for wistful, melancholy ballads of heartbreak, doubt, love lost and available only in dreams — and a lustrous, deep but unusually multi-octave voice. Fellow musicians, who have covered his songs constantly, were awestruck by that distinctive sound, judging by tributes to which the narrator (Melissa MacPherson) alludes. And by Orbison’s inclusion in the ad hoc super-group The Traveling Wilburys  along with George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne.

You can see the challenges, both musical and theatrical, built into One Night With Roy Orbison. The Mayfield production, directed by co-creator Bandelow, stars Matt Cage, a veteran of numerous appearances as Elvis in assorted revues, including One Night With The King and Million Dollar Quartet, which have both played the Mayfield in their time.

Cage does conjure the signature look of the man, in his prescription sunglasses and black suit — a “stand-up and deliver kind of guy,” unusually still, undemonstrative, and un-ingratiating onstage, with his excellent trio of low-key-back-up singers and their minimalist elbow choreography. And he does evoke, without ever quite capturing, the storied magic of that voice, with its rich timbre and eerie swoops.

So you do get the idea of Orbison. And the stage is fun to look at, thanks to Ivan Siemens’s set, a kind of light-up back-drop image of a radio where Matt Schuurman’s video design plays across the “dial” and Gail Ksionzyk’s neon lighting effects glow in different colours,

In addition to a song list embedded in the collective consciousness and triggered into life by the first chords of every number — Blue Bayou, In Dreams, Crying, It’s Over — Cage has a great asset in the five-piece band, as always top-quality at the Mayfield, along with Jon Lovell’s sound design. Melissa MacPherson’s Emmylou Harris duet That Lovin’ You Feelin’ with Orbison, Rain Matkin-Szilagyi’s powerhouse delivery of Crying, and Oscar Derkx as Tom Petty are highlights.

The narration from MacPherson, which selects and annotates fragments out of Orbison’s career biography, seems a bit hit and miss. It’s not that anyone wants an exhaustive scholarly timeline in a revue (trust me, I’ve seen lots of those). But heightened, over-animated introductions, with a wonderstruck ‘can you believe it?’ air designed I guess to compensate for the legendary gravitas in the star performer, sit rather disjointedly in the show. Just when “happiness was finally within his grasp” (finally? huh?), tragedy struck. Which is not to say Orbison’s life wasn’t full of terrible family tragedies, including the death of his wife in a road accident and his two young sons in a house fire (followed oddly by “it’s over … your baby doesn’t love you any more”). But the script could use a bit of tinkering with some sort of through-line if a story is to emerge.

In Act II for a brief scene Orbison himself, in Cage’s performance, steps out of his immovable stage incarnation, to annotate humorously the impromptu way The Traveling Wilburys came together. Oddly Cage as Orbison is the one onstage who does a fun George Harrison imitation, before he returns to the act, and a medley of familiar songs by that group.   

But then, who goes to an Orbison revue really hoping to learn more about his reserved personality or his career trajectory? It’s the songs that count. And those you will hear, in glorious number, by a performer who delivers with a fine band. And that’s a lot.

REVIEW

One Night With Roy Orbison

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre

Written and compiled by: Kevin Dabbs and Christine Bandelow

Starring: Matt Cage, Oscar Derkx, Melissa MacPherson, Rain Matkin-Szilagyi, Andrew McCallister

Running: through April 5

Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca

 

  

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Greg MacArthur walks the mysterious frontier between fact and fiction: My Testimonial at Workshop West, a preview

Posted on February 6, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

My Testimonial poster image by Dave DeGagné

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Hi, I’m Greg MacArthur. And I’m going to tell you about something that happened to me a while ago….”

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That’s the conversational opener to My Testimonial. And what happens after that, in this latest from Greg MacArthur (yes, that would be the playwright himself onstage), is a boundary-smudging fusion of fact and fiction, life and art, staged reading and true-crime podcast.

“Slippery.” That’s the way MacArthur describes the play that brings him back to Edmonton — he was the U of A’s Lee Playwright In Residence a decade-plus ago and premiered The Missionary Position here. And it reunites him with director Heather Inglis, a theatre colleague of long standing, for the Workshop West premiere this week.

Is truth something that can be built? Rehearsed? Buffed up for performance?

These are disconcerting questions that sneak their way into My Testimonial. Greg MacArthur, the theatre artist onstage, who has indeed been teaching performance at Concordia University in Montreal and the University of Lethbridge — real life! — has been contracted to coach a witness in a high-profile criminal trial. “She’s not trustworthy, not credible, and I’ve been hired to train her to be more authentic, more authentically herself, to help her be more sympathetic to a jury.”

The other actor (Sophie May Healey) is presented as “someone I’ve hired just that day” to assist in telling the story by playing that witness. “What happens in the course of the piece is that the actor gains a kind of autonomy.” As MacArthur points out, “there is reality to it — the murder is sensational, and true — but there’s a fictional story put on top of that.” What is fact? What is fiction? “You don’t know; the boundary is erased.”“That’s the puzzle of it.… The goal is that the audience wonders ‘did this happen? what is truthful?’”

playwright Greg MacArthur. Photo supplied.

My Testimonial is the finale to a MacArthur trilogy steeped in those provocative mysteries. The playwright, whose work has been produced across the country, in Europe, South Africa, Korea, Mexico, and the U.S., points to the characters of A City, four theatre friends from the indie Side Mart Theatrical Grocery in Montreal.  “I took their experience (with the death of a fifth friend after a party) and conflated it with a completely fictional scenario presented as fact.”

A Man Vanishes was created specifically in 2016 for the VideoFag performance space in Toronto (it was the last show there). The seminal queer venue itself figures in the storytelling about a missing Montreal man who might have been murdered: he’d disappeared without a trace; he shows mysteriously months later at VideoFag,  becomes part of the lives of his friends there (artists Jordan Tannahill and William Ellis), and then vanishes again, forever.

With My Testimonial, he says, “I wanted to turn the lens on myself…. It’s kind of about myself and my life (as an artist). There’s reality to it, but a fictional story on top.”

“We take from people’s lives and then we fictionalize them, change them, manipulate them, sculpt them…. That’s what art does,” as MacArthur says. “There are ethical lines…. What does it mean to be using people’s tragedies for one’s art? What are your responsibilities? And yet, how do you make art if you don’t?”

“Artists manipulate people’s emotions…. As writers we take from the world around us. That’s what we do.”

As the witness is coached in acting techniques to make her more herself, as judged by her potential appeal to a jury, My Testimonial is not about the murder per se. “At the heart of it I’m thinking about the nature of artifice in performance of our lives, our selves,” says MacArthur. And in an age when truth is something to be created in social media, or fabricated by A.I. — “America has become a performance” — “what is an authentic performance of grief? You don’t want to be too hysterical; you don’t want to be too cold. We judge: why are you behaving like this if you’ve lost a child?”

MacArthur thinks about things like that. Onstage, being a playwright who teaches acting which is what he actually does, adds another layer to the mix of the “slippery” play. My Testimonial happens in Lethbridge, where MacArthur was writer-in-residence and near where the real crime took place. And it brings the Ontario-born playwright back to his entry point in theatre: he was a child actor who did a lot of television, his first degree was in acting, from Ryerson in Toronto. “For the first seven or eight years that’s what I wanted to be. I did small indie shows in Toronto in the ‘90s,” an era of collaborative creative creations. “Then I wrote my first independent play,” and a playwright was born. “I’m a much better writer than I am an actor,” he laughs. “The world isn’t missing me as an actor…. I’m too lazy to be an actor; I don’t like rehearsing that much.”

MacArthur tested out My Testimonial at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge, for 20 people during COVID, then moved back to Montreal for a few years. “It keeps growing and changing,” he says. “A year ago, there was a small workshop reading in Edmonton. Inglis’s Workshop West production is its official premiere, “my first fully fleshed outing with it.” For the first time, it has a sound and lighting design (Dave Clarke and Ainsley Hillyard respectively). But theatricality is a delicate matter for a play that isn’t a play (“you don’t want to turn it into something it isn’t meant to be”).

“It’ll be an interesting experiment to see how people removed in geography, and from my life in Lethbridge, will respond to it,” says MacArthur. “What’s going on here? Who do we trust?” They’re questions he hopes the audience will be asking as they leave the theatre.

PREVIEW

My Testament

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written by: Greg MacArthur

Directed by: Heather Inglis

Starring: Greg MacArthur and Sophie May Healey

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: Feb. 11 to 15

Tickets: workshopwest.org (all tickets are pay-what-you-will).

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The Citadel announces a new 10-show season: the 2026/27 lineup

Posted on February 3, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

At the centre of the upcoming 10-show 2026-2027 season at the Citadel, announced Monday night by artistic director Daryl Cloran, are two world premiere stage adaptations by notable Canadian playwrights, and an original production of a Canadian hit musical.

The Citadel turns 61 with a $13 million lineup that includes a new stage version of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Jazz Age novel The Great Gatsby, by Canadian playwriting star Erin Shields. And Cloran is collaborating with actor/playwright Jessica B. Hill on a new stage adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Both productions, directed by Cloran, involve partnerships with theatre companies across the country — in the case of the former with two others, not yet announced, the latter with Theatre Calgary.

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“One of the most prolific and exciting playwrights in the country,” as Cloran describes, Shields has made something of a specialty of re-imagining classics for contemporary audiences, through a feminist lens. “It’s one of her super-powers,” says Cloran. And Shields has the archive to prove it: it includes 2022 Citadel premiere of her version of Jane Eyre, and more recently such theatrical challenges as The Iliad and The Odyssey (Ransacking Troy), Shakespeare’s King Lear (Queen Lear), and, perhaps most amazingly, Milton’s Paradise Lost.

“She’s done a beautiful job of it,” says Cloran of the new Shields adaptation of The Great Gatsby (Oct. 31 to Nov. 22). “It leans theatrically into the opulence of the Jazz Age, a live jazz band onstage (at Gatsby’s splashy party).… And at its heart it’s such a great story.”

Cloran says the inspiration for a new version of Sense and Sensibility (Feb. 20 to March 14, 2027) happened at the Stratford Festival last summer, directing an adaptation of Jane Austen’s first novel by the American writer Kate Hamill. In Cloran’s cast as Elinor, the “sensible” one of the Dashwood sisters, was Hill, a notable playwright in her own right (The Dark Lady). And in the course of working on it, “Jessica and I imagined how we would tell it if we had a chance to do it differently….” The result, he says of the new six-actor adaptation, is “an Austen story everyone knows and loves told in a fun, theatrical way…. And it has such a beautiful heart, both the romance of it and the story of the two sisters finding their own autonomy and agency in an age of gossip and society rules.”

Of the three Broadway musicals in the Citadel mainstage season, one is Canadian and tells a real-life Canadian story. Come From Away, by the Toronto husband-and-wife team of Irene Sankoff and David Hein, started small, as a Sheridan College student workshop and has gone on to major Broadway and West End successes and beyond. It’s based on the real-life events of the 9-11 terrorist attacks on New York, when 38 flights were diverted to Gander Newfoundland, and a little town of 9,000 found a way to shelter and feed 7,000 stranded passengers.

Come From Away has come from away to Edmonton before now, in American touring productions. The rights were opened up just this season for regional theatres, as Cloran explains. And the Citadel and the Arts Club Theatre in Vancouver are collaborating on their own production (May 9 to June 6, 2027), directed by the latter’s artistic director Ashlie Corcoran. “Such a great musical,” says Cloran. “And in a time when there are lots of questions about what it means to be Canadian, and standing up (for that), this is 90 minutes of Canadians being … good people.”

The Citadel’s “big family-focused musical” of the season Annie (Jan. 30 to March 7, 2027), the evergreen ‘70s Thomas Meehan/ Charles Strouse musical, is directed and choreographed by Julie Tomaino (Jersey Boys). Cloran points out Edmonton’s unusual wealth of young actors,; stage opportunities at the Citadel have played their part. “You don’t want to program Annie unless you have lots of super-strong young talent!,” Cloran laughs. “Right now because of shows like Frozen and A Christmas Carol, we have a great number of talented young performers. I’m so blown away by what kids are capable of….”

This summer, expect to see a musical that spells c-h-a-r-m (not to mention e-u-d-a-e-m-o-n-i-c), a vindication of nerds and outliers, all motivated differently. That would be The 25th Annual Putnam Country Spelling Bee (“so funny, so charming, with light, kind audience interaction” as Cloran describes). The Citadel’s associate artistic director Mieko Ouchi (whose own play Burning Mom starts previews soon) directs an “all-local team” in the 2005 Tony-winning William Finn/ Rachel Sheinkin musical comedy (July 4 to Aug. 2).

The season opens (Sept. 19 to Oct. 11) with a stage adaptation of the deluxe 1934 Agatha Christie whodunnit Murder on the Orient Express, by the dexterous American playwright Ken Ludwig (Lend Me A Tenor). Set on the luxury train of the title it comes with all the trimmings — lavish period costumes and, yes, the train (designed by Brian Perchaluk) onstage. Ah, and, of course, the fastidious Belgian detective with the waxed moustache and the little grey cells. Cloran compares its mystery/comedy mix to such popular screen offerings as Glass Onion. The Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre/ Citadel co-production, currently running in Winnipeg and starring Alex Poch-Goldin as Hercule Poirot, is directed by RMTC artistic director Kelly Thornton.

The season lineup includes the 2024 Indigenous comedy The Comeback by the Winnipeg-based couple Trish Cooper and Sam Vint and inspired loosely by their own experience — he’s Métis, she’s settler — finds its heart and its laughter at the intersection of two families, and the family chaos triggered by an unexpected pregnancy.

“Every season since I’ve been here, we’ve produced or presented Indigenous work,” says Cloran of the Citadel commitment to “shining a light” on Indigenous creation. The Comeback (March 27 to April 18, 2027), which premiered at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre in 2024, is the Citadel’s first co-production with the National Arts Centre Indigenous Theatre. It’s directed by Eric Coates.

The Highwire Series, alternative shows by indie artists and companies presented at the Citadel, returns with Our Little Secret: A True, New Musical (Oct. 15 to 25 ). A hit at the Toronto Fringe, then in Edinburgh, and most recently at the Segal Centre in Montreal, the solo musical by and starring Noam Tomaschoff is, as Cloran describes, “the playwright’s true story.” The catalyst is his impulse, age 31, to order up a 23&Me DNA ancestry kit — and his discovery that his father isn’t his biological father and that he has 35 siblings around the world. “Funny, charming, and well-written,” says Cloran of the contemporary pop musical (music by Ryan Peters). Building from its Fringe origins (à la Drowsy Chaperone), the production is directed by Adam Pascal, from the original cast of Rent. Safe to say it has upward-and-onward cross-border aspirations.

Mrs. Krishnan’s Party arrives on tour (Jan. 15 to Feb 6, 2027) in the Citadel’s most intimate house, the Rice, from across the world. The show, by the New Zealand company Indian Ink, “lives in the same world as Big Stuff,” says Cloran. “It’s a lovely and heartfelt story about a mother and son. And it encourage the audience to be part of it, but in such a gentle, kind way.”

The Rice, he says, “will feel like the backroom of Mrs. Krishnan’s corner store. And she has members of the audience help her out with the cooking as she sets up her party…. I saw a video of it, and was crying all through it. So joyous and lovely.”     

“In the last couple of seasons we’ve hit our stride with the Highwire Series,” says Cloran of the shows by smaller and indie companies presented at the Citadel. He points to the success of Goblin:Macbeth and Big Stuff, indie alternative shows presented by the Citadel, “shows with a slightly immersive, unique feel to them.”

The season includes the eighth annual return of David van Belle’s adaptation of A Christmas Carol (Nov. 22 to Dec. 24), directed by Lianna Makuch. This past year was our highest sales we’ve ever had,” Cloran reports, even with Vinyl Cafe the Musical and the Bear Grease holiday special running at that time, too ( “we were quite the holiday destination”). “It’s so much part of people’s holiday traditions….”

Cloran’s announcement of the upcoming season, at the 60th anniversary bash Monday night, comes midway through a season in which Vinyl Cafe The Musical, its biggest success at the box office so far, was held over before it even opened. “It more than doubled our projections,” and has dates across Canada at other theatres, yet to be announced. With its numerous co-productions, next season, dubbed ‘From Here to Everywhere’, “will see a lot of our work out there across the country.”

Meanwhile, the 60th anniversary season continues with Death of a Salesman running through Feb. 15, and Burning Mom, The Wizard of Oz, Casey and Diana, and Cyrano de Bergerac still to come.

Looking ahead at the 2026-2027 Citadel season

Mainstage series: Murder on the Orient Express (Sept. 19 to Oct. 11, 2026); The Great Gatsby (Oct. 31 to Nov. 22, 2026); Annie (Jan. 30 to March 7, 2027); Sense and Sensibility (Feb. 20 to March 14, 2027); The Comeback (March 27 to April 18, 2027); Come From Away (May 9 to June 6, 2027).

Summer Musical: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (July 4 to Aug. 2, 2026)

Highwire series: Our Little Secret: A True, New Musical (Oct. 15 to 25, 2026); Mrs. Krishnan’s Party (Jan. 15 to Feb. 6, 2027).

Holiday production: A Christmas Carol (Nov. 22 to Dec. 24, 2026).

Tickets and subscriptions: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1829. Season packages on sale Feb. 2, casual tickets for the summer musical on sale March 18, casual tickets for productions in the 2026-2027 season on sale July 3.

 

 

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Attention must be paid: Death of a Salesman at the Citadel, a review

Posted on January 30, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The first sight we have of the most indelible character in the 20th century theatre is a man alone, trudging wearily towards us in the murk of an empty stage.

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He’s a man with baggage, lugging two heavy sales cases. And, as we discover in Death of a Salesman, they are heavily weighted with dreams, with hopes, with delusions about the world and his place in it.

In this fine Citadel production — which returns to the theatre Arthur Miller’s 1949 classic that was in the company’s very first season 60 seasons ago — Willy Loman, the archetypal travelling salesman, comes to life in a tremendous performance from John Ullyatt. And Daryl Cloran’s unusually stylized production locates the man in a shadowy world where reality, in contained pockets of light, lands on wincing human encounters.

These are infiltrated, more and more, by dreams and ghosts, theoretical propositions and might-have-beens. Beyata Hackborn’s design, where everything happens in front of a  weathered facade of a house, and characters vanish through invisible walls and doorways — the only concrete doorway, moved by the actors, looks like a guillotine — is eloquently tuned to the imaginative abstractions of the production.

A bedroom is just a dislocated bed; the Loman kitchen is a table and a fridge set down in slanted light shafts way off-centre in an empty, lonely stage. Even when  house facade is lifted, to reveal the sales office, a single desk that’s the scene of Willy’s penultimate humiliation — after 34 years on the road he’s summarily fired by a much younger boss — it’s a space disconnected from the rest of the stage. Which speaks volumes about Willy’s life — his porous memory, his increasingly threadbare mantra that all a man needs in life is to be “not just liked, but well-liked” As he says, in many variations, to his sons Biff (Nathan Kay) and Happy (Alexander Ariate), staggering in separate ways under the weight of Willy’s expectations, “the man who creates personal interest is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want.”

Alexander Ariate, Nathan Kay, John Ullyatt, Nadien Chu in Death of a Salesman, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography

The swirl of reality and fantasy is the drama of Bonnie Beecher’s lighting, with its multiple inventive hanging light sources, lanterns, lamps, chandeliers. The past, hinted at behind the house, has a purple glow, but there’s no material dimension, no urban environment, there. It all contributes to the production’s sense of a man who’s gradually lost track of his own world, and of time. The music (by composer/ sound designer Joelysa Pankanea), played live on keyboards and bass by actors who come and go from instruments on either side of the playing space, echoes in a harsh, but strangely ethereal way: dissonant fractured jazz riffs. There’s a poetic kind of cohesiveness about Cloran’s stagecraft.

Like the design, the casting is original. Last time the Citadel staged Death of a Salesman, 15 years ago, Ullyatt played Biff. Now as Willy, Ullyatt, a superb and versatile actor particularly known for the physical energy and invention he brings to performances, fully commits to a character with neither. Willy seems to age, and diminish, before our eyes, rising to flames of anger that flicker out in confusion, struggling to stem a tide of despair under a blanket of hope.

Alexander Ariate, John Ullyatt, Nathan Kay in Death of a Salesman, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography

On the surface Nathan Kay, a newcomer to Citadel stages, wouldn’t be everyone’s idea of Biff, the ex-football star who peaked in high school, and at 34, a drifter crushed under the weight of his father’s fantasies, can’t get anything going. But his performance will surprise, and move you. In one of the most harrowing scenes, in a restaurant with his bro Happy (Ariate as a charming, conciliatory wastrel), Biff in desperation tries, and tries, to break through the fortress of Willy’s delusions with “facts” about his failures in life. “I’m not bringing home any prizes any more,” he says. And Willy, interrupting constantly in an escalating panic of denial, won’t hear of it.

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

“The woods are burning,” he tells his sons, at a critical moment.  Ullyatt’s performance digs in, unearthing layer after layer of a man whose life doesn’t come in his size any more. “I just kinda feel temporary about myself.” At some distance, as the actor conveys, Willy does have a glimmer of a sense, quickly repressed, that what he’s selling — on the road and at home — nobody’s buying.

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

Nobody, that is, except his staunchly loyal wife (and career enabler) Linda, in a fierce, blazing performance by Nadien Chu, who plays her as formidable, a force of nature. “Attention must be paid.” Linda is the family bookkeeper, so she knows, to a penny, the facts behind Willy’s lament that “I’m in a race with the junkyard” when it comes to aging appliances and cars. But what about aging salesmen? She buys into Willy, and therefore into his founding principle that personality counts above all else. She knows, and she doesn’t know, about the damages inflicted by dreams.

Cloran’s strong cast includes Anthony Santiago, excellent as the neighbour, prickly but kindly, who keeps lending Willy money under the table, and Tenaj Williams as Charley’s earnest son Bernard. And Willy’s brother Ben, an imposing sort of ghost who’s the mythology of success on legs — “when I was 17 I walked into the jungle; when I was 21 I walked out and by God I was rich” — is compellingly embodied by Andrew Wheeler.

In the end, in this beautiful 2026 Citadel/ Arts Club Theatre production, Death of a Salesman is a play about a father and his two sons. And beyond the ruthless way capitalism devalues and exhausts the little guy’s labours, there’s the existential question of meaning, inheritance, and love. Near the end, in a heartbreaking scene Willy says something about that. “Nothing’s planted; I don’t have a thing in the ground.” He lives, and dies, in hope.

REVIEW

Death of a Salesman

Theatre: Citadel Theatre/ Arts Club Theatre

Written by: Arthur Miller

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: John Ullyatt, Nadien Chu, Nathan Kay, Alexander Ariate, Anthony Santiago, Tess Degenstein, Jeff Gladstone, Christina Nguyen, Andrew Wheeler, Tenaj Williams, Morgan Yamada

Running: through Feb. 15

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

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John Ullyatt takes up the suitcase and the iconic mantle in Death of a Salesman, at the Citadel

Posted on January 26, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Death of a Salesman: graphic, Citadel Theatre.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Sixty seasons ago, a worn-out travelling salesman feeling his mileage and dispossessed from the “smile and a shoe shine” world he’s always known arrived on the stage of a former Sally Ann citadel in downtown Edmonton.

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From the start — it premiered in 1949 — Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman had struck a chord with America, the tragedy of Willy Loman, an “ordinary” man, a man with an “ordinary” family.

The play was already celebrated (The New York Times reviewer of the day called it “tremendous … a fresh creation in a style of its own”). The Edmonton theatre, christened the Citadel, was new, an audacious experiment — by spirited lawyer-cum-real estate entrepreneur Joe Shoctor and friends — half a continent away from the theatrical strongholds in the east. And Death of a Salesman was part of the Citadel’s inaugural season. After Robert Glenn’s 1966 production, Willy Loman has returned at intervals to the Citadel stage. In 1984, James Whitmore was in Len Cariou’s production. In 2011, Tom Wood was Willy Loman in Bob Baker’s production.

John Ullyatt, star of Death of a Salesman, Citadel Theatre. Photo supplied.

And on Thursday, in in a highly unusual kind of theatrical continuity, John Ullyatt, who played Willy’s troubled underachiever son Biff in that production 15 years ago, will be Willy Loman in the Citadel revival directed by Daryl Cloran.

“I was really nervous about doing it,” says Ullyatt, who’s thoughtful and funny, an inveterate re-thinker, chronically self-critical. Fresh from his fourth run exploring another iconic (the word doesn’t go amiss) character, Ebenezer Scrooge, in the Citadel’s A Christmas Carol, he says of Miller’s delusional salesman “I don’t feel old enough…. And yet I’m almost the right age, pretty close. It’s happening! (note of incredulity about the role). And as we work on it I’m feeling better and better about it almost every day. A great play, lots of twists and turns….   

In the course of his four years with Christmas Carol, “each time out I’ve learned something new about it; I figure that’s my job,” says Ullyatt with a smile in his voice, “and otherwise I’d be bored.” With Death of a Salesman, “it’s an adventure trying to get inside of it as quickly as possible. Every day something else falls into place. It’s coming into focus, a whole portrait is coming in to focus….”

“It never stops being awesome, this job. I really love rehearsing! It’s hard but it’s … fun.” The word fun sounds odd, he thinks, and he reassesses for a second, and goes with it. “We’ve made ourselves a (rehearsal) room where we laugh. A lot. Which is alarming,” he laughs. “Shocking!”

The role has always attracted a range of great and distinctively different actors, Lee J Cobb, George C. Scott, Brian Dennehy, Dustin Hoffman, Philip Seymour Hoffman — and Ullyatt joins that line. And pretty much since it opened the play has been a magnet for cultural commentators who see in Willy Loman’s tragedy the implosion of the American Dream, with its hollow promises that hard work will be rewarded. Ullyatt has reservations about that narrow-casting of the play. “The American Dream is part of it, certainly. But it’s about a lot of things, and at the centre, it’s a story about a family. A father putting all his hopes into his son, and how he’s going to be fantastic, being popular, well-liked. And the kid just isn’t that person, to put it bluntly.”

“To me that’s more important…. I can’t play the American Dream.” He points to a Charlie Rose interview with Arthur Miller in which the playwright said he thought of Salesman as a family story.

From the moment, a year ago, that director Cloran began talking to him about the production, Ullyatt says he was struck by the brain-bending thought that “being Willy is pretty similar to being an actor, actually…. He’s a gig worker, a salesman (without a pension). He’s on his own. And something that resonated with me is that as we get older we become less desirable. We live in a very age-ist world.”

“The world is changing around him, and Willy hasn’t kept up with it.” Ullyatt empathizes, and pauses to reflect. “As I get older these are the things I’m thinking about. More about the future and what’s going to happen next….”

In conversation Ullyatt is always re-assessing. He proposes an unexpected link between playing Ebenezer Scrooge and Willy Loman. “I see both of these characters as immature; they didn’t grow up.” He laughs, “of course that may be coming from me.”

Ullyatt’s striking versatility as an actor has made him equally at home in raucous comedies, cabarets, musicals, way off-centre dark satires, new plays, repertoire classics. His history with the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, in roles ranging from Richard III and Iago to the clown Launce in Two Gentlemen of Verona, is revealing. And so is his extensive Citadel resumé, which includes most recently, a very funny turn as Bottom the stage-struck weaver who throws himself into the play-within-a-play in Cloran’s Midsummer Night’s Dream The 70s Musical.

In a long list of indie credits Ullyatt may be the only actor in history who’s played Coriolanus, an unsavoury boy scout, and a dung beetle (Edmonton Street Performers Festival). “I love playing characters,” says Ullyatt, a Montreal native and McGill grad who moved here in the 1990s to do a theatre degree at the U of A. “I think of myself as a character actor.” He has an aversion to be called a leading man (I’m guilty of this). “Too square. I hate it,” he says flatly.

And he feels he’s learning how to separate the character from himself, much to the relief, as he reports, of his actor/playwright/circus performer wife Annie Dugan. “I’m not leaving Willy here (at the theatre),” he says. “I’m going home with him. But maybe I’m getting better at differentiating myself from the character: a character! this is not me! …. It’s not affecting me the way it has in the past … (laughter) where it was detrimental to my personal life!”

Mind you, “here’s a funny thing,” Ullyatt says. “Willy talks to himself a lot, and goes off into a dream land — not flashbacks, that’s important. I’ve been catching myself talking to myself, especially when Annie’s not around…. I’m making myself laugh,” he says. “I’m OK with talking to myself — as long as not too many people overhear me.”

Meanwhile Ullyatt has been intrigued by the ample selection of articles in which writers wonder “what Willy Loman would have thought of Donald Trump,” and conclude that as a person who feels “marginalized, betrayed, hurt,” he’d be a Trump supporter. “That’s a very interesting portrait of American society now,” says Ullyatt.

Is Willy Loman a tragic figure? Yes, says Ullyatt, who points out that the salesman certainly doesn’t fit the classic definition, “someone on high who’s taken down.” But here’s another thought: “what happens in tragedy is having your dignity taken away from you. He’s hanging on to a veneer, that if a man is impressive and well liked there isn’t anything to worry about. That’s what does him in….” As Willy’s wife Linda (Nadien Chu) says, “I don’t say he’s a great man…. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him.”

Then Ullyatt is back en route to rehearsal. “I feel like I’m painting my picture from the outside, and slowly working my way inside.”

PREVIEW

Death of a Salesman

Theatre: Citadel Theatre

Written by: Arthur Miller

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: John Ullyatt, Nadien Chu, Nathan Kay, Alexander Ariate, Anthony Santiago, Tess Degenstein, Jeff Gladstone, Christina Nguyen, Andrew Wheeler, Tenaj Williams, Morgan Yamada

Running: through Feb. 15

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

  

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