Much ado about … something big! Freewill Shakespeare Festival is (finally) back in Hawrelak Park, with two shows

Posted on June 11, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Freewill Shakespeare Festival is back in Hawrelak Park with two shows. Photo from website.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

They’re back! Finally. In the park where they belong….

When Benedick and Beatrice, the witty sparring partners of Much Ado About Nothing, take their “merry war” to the Heritage Amphitheatre in newly re-opened Hawrelak Park Wednesday, it will be a homecoming celebration, long-awaited and hard-won, for the Freewill Shakespeare Festival. It’s much ado about something, something big for a company that’s been buffeted by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

Our beloved summer Shakespeareans have been around — scrambling to make do, open to the elements in assorted city parks (last year Louise McKinney Riverfront Park), community hockey rinks, patios, people’s backyards. Freewill even took a pair of chamber-sized Shakespeares to the Fringe in 2021, and tried a spiegeltent in the Expo Centre parking lot in 2023. The Heritage Amphitheatre, though, under the big top in The Park, is their signature home, from their inaugural production (A Comedy of Errors) in 1989. And it’s a stage that the Freewill players and their illustrious playwright-in-residence haven’t occupied since 2019 (with a pair of the strangest Shakespeares in the canon, The Winter’s Tale and Two Gentlemen of Verona).

In this 37th edition, Edmonton’s summer outdoor Shakespeare, a bona fide civic institution, pairs Shakespeare’s joyful, mirth-filled mid-period romantic comedy (with a tricky thorn at its centre), and a larky contemporary musical comedy, Something Rotten, a 2015 Broadway hit in which Will (this is a festival on a first-name basis with the guy) actually shows up, takes some shtick from a couple of upstarts, and sings.

Long-time company member Ian Leung directs the 10-actor Much Ado About Nothing that runs June 17 through 28. Following that run, Dave Horak, the company’s artistic director, directs a 20-member cast of non-Equity singer/dancer/actors in Something Rotten, opening July 1 on the same set in the park, with a cast of 12 and an orchestra of a dozen.

Call the play and the musical — separate shows which run one after the other, not in rep — step-siblings, with rapport. Set in 1595 when two brothers, Nigel and Nick Bottom, are struggling to write a hit in the shadow of uppity local star playwright Shakespeare, Something Rotten has, says Horak, “a lot of Shakespeare jokes and a lot of musical theatre jokes too…. There’s even a ‘Shakespeare in the park’ joke.” And Much Ado, a funny, knotted comedy with two intertwined love stories, was the play that Freewill had to cancel (along with its rep partner Macbeth) when COVID hit in 2020.

While the three-year Hawrelak Park renos include “a lot of things underground” — electrical, heating, plumbing, dressing rooms that aren’t bigger just nicer — invisible to the audience eye, there are some changes we’ll notice next week when we come to see the sparks between a couple made for each other who resist romance until resistance is futile.

Shakespeare in the Park: Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo supplied.

There are more seats in front, which addresses the gap between the audience and the stage; Freewill won’t need to use the $100,000 stage extension they installed a few summers ago. The wide open entrance passage at the centre, a spacious grass-lined alley heading downward, has been filled in with seats. There’s “more grass seating,” which Horak thinks we’ll find inviting. “It’s tiered; you don’t even necessarily need a chair, just a picnic blanket.” And if you’ve frozen your butt off in the Heritage Amphitheatre washrooms (and who hasn’t?), rejoice: they’re heated, and they look less ugly, he assures. Wine, beer, Freewill popcorn … it’ll all be there, as per our genial summer tradition.    

The pandemic, and then a city-imposed three-YEAR (!) exile from Hawrelak Park for renos there … it’s been a rocky road back home for Freewill. As he said when Freewill launched an urgent fund-raising campaign a year ago (it netted them a third of their $150,000 ask), “we know how to go small if we need to.” But “I wanted to go back (to the park) bigger than we’ve been doing lately…. It was going to be expensive; it was going to be hard to go back, and fill that big space,” the thousand-seat raked venue under the Heritage Amphitheatre canopy. “But I didn’t want to slink back into the park with one show and a reduced cast….”

True, a cast of 10 for Much Ado plus crew is somewhat less than Freewill casts of yore, which have run optimally to 16 plus crew in the past. But Leung’s production, which stars Jesse Gervais and Vanessa Sabourin as Benedick and Beatrice, with Rochelle Laplante and Braydon Dowler-Coltman as Hero and Claudio — is a bigger show than Freewill on the move, and unprotected from the elements, has been able to do in exile.

Dave Horak, artistic director of the Freewill Shakespeare Festival.

And as for the big musical, Horak is experimenting with a different producing model altogether. With Something Rotten “we’re presenting, I’m directing, and two other companies are doing the work,” a first for the festival.

The artistic director of Edmonton Pops Orchestra, Michael Clark, is perhaps best known to Edmonton audiences for musical direction of such Straight Edge Theatre originals as Krampus, Final Girl and Conjoined. Shelley’s Dance Company is a venerable 37-year-old arts group led by Shelley Tookey, whose expertise is especially welcome in a musical that Horak describes as “primarily a tap show.”   

“They’re producing it,” he says of the partner companies, who bring dancers, musicians, and their own funding to the festival. “They’re paying for the rights and lot of the expenses. We’re presenting it, under our festival umbrella…. It was the only way to bring back two shows.”

Originally he’d looked for a Much Ado cast who could handle both the musical and physical demands of a Broadway musical, and do the shows in rep. And indeed, among the top-drawer comic actors of the Shakespeare ensemble are such triple-threats as John Ullyatt, Ron Pederson, and Jesse Gervais. “But funding shortfalls, difficulties with Equity” among other cost factors, have made doing two Equity shows in rep (requiring a longer rehearsal and run), un-workable for Freewill, times (and Heritage Amphitheatre rent) being what they are.

“Doing a musical with a lot of people from the community, with all their skills and resources,” is a venture in expanding the audience demographic, Horak hopes. His Something Rotten cast, age range 20something to 50something, includes a fair complement of recent MacEwan University musical theatre grads, some of Horak’s former students, and an assortment of stage veterans. Many have extensive stage experience, like Martin Galba (now the manager of Workshop West) and Stephen Allred of Straight Edge Theatre.

Revived this season at the Stratford Festival, Something Rotten is “classic musical theatre … with a lot of Shakespeare in it.” Ah, and a lot of tap. “Currently I think people see me as the Shakespeare guy,” Horak laughs. “But I’ve had my hands on a lot of musicals”: 20 years teaching at MacEwan, Sondheim, Fun Home .… “I grew up in a musical theatre family, and I’ve come to love musicals….” Actor/director Leung, he says of his old U of A theatre school class-mate, “has a chance to dig into some of the deeper themes of Much Ado, a very funny comedy with depth, with with a great cast of comic actors…. A lot of former Freewill players reached out  when we were going back to the park.”

Horak admits to festival opening night stress: “I had a choice of being risky or trying to play it safe…. One thing I realized was how much the venue has attached itself to Freewill. A lot of our audience didn’t follow us out of the park. With this media ecosystem it’s really hard. Which is another reason to go back.”

In the end, he embraced the risk. This is the year Freewill goes big AND goes home.

PREVIEW

Freewill Shakespeare Festival

Much Ado About Nothing and Something Rotten

Directed by: Ian Leung, Dave Horak

Where: Heritage Amphitheatre, Hawrelak Park

Running: Much Ado About Nothing June 17 to 28; Something Rotten July 1 to 12

Tickets and performance schedule: freewillshakespeare.com

 

Posted in Previews | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Much ado about … something big! Freewill Shakespeare Festival is (finally) back in Hawrelak Park, with two shows

A Michelin star performance by Andrew MacDonald-Smith in Fully Committed, at Teatro Live!, a review

Posted on June 7, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Andrew MacDonald-Smith in Fully Committed, Teatro Live. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A phone starts ringing before our unemployed actor hero even arrives at his day job for a shift in the underworld — at the reservation desk hidden in the nether regions of the hottest, hippest Manhattan restaurant.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

For the next 80 minutes running, and I do mean running, time, the ringtones (sound designer: Bernardo Pacheco) never stop in Fully Committed, Becky Mode’s clever 1999 tour de force for one harried booking clerk and four phones. And in Farren Timoteo’s Teatro Live! production we have the great fun of watching a virtuoso actor take telephone acting to dizzying comic heights.

As Sam, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, a Teatro leading man (and former Teatro artistic director), negotiates both sides of every conversation. This involves his conjuring, at a frantic tempo and with uncanny precision, a whole gallery of insufferable people: imperious, snobby, truculent, entitled patrons of every age (and posture, accent, and amazingly, size) — from a wizened pensioner with a list of physical complaints, a socialite dragon, a silky-voiced Mobster…. They’re put on hold; they recur, much to the audience’s delight.

The “molecular gastronomy” menu isn’t what the ordinary joe would call actual food. It runs to things like cuttlefish or lavender foam, or infusions of pipe tobacco smoke, and “conceptual” garnishes like edible dirt. Did I hear “chicken in a bubble” right? This isn’t cutting-edge haute cuisine satire in 2026, I guess, but it made me laugh.

Everyone wants, no demands, a table on Friday or Saturday at 7:30 or 8 . In the case of Gwyneth Paltrow’s breezy, self-important personal assistant Bryce, there’s a hilarious list of additional requirements (prefaced by “how ARE you?” and signing off with “thanks a trillion!”): a table for 15, a vegan tasting menu, locally sourced, no rice, no corn, no foam, no proximity to the lighting sconce, no female wait staff at the table….

Andrew MacDonald-Smith in Fully Committed, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Interspersed with these are calls on the red-alert phone with the snarling ego-monster celebrity chef who affects a working-class cadence (he answers the phone “what the hell do you want”), and on the house phone to a gallic divo of a maître d who answers “‘’Allo. Be Brief.” There’s an assortment of cowed kitchen staff, including an adenoidal Brit who couches demands in apology.

And then there’s Sam’s own cellphone. Passive-aggressive calls from his actor ‘friend’, gloating about a callback to Lincoln Center. Calls with his agent brushing off Sam’s questions about his own audition and callback (“you lack a strong sense of personal entitlement”). ”). Guilt calls from his sweet but persistent, recently widowed Midwest dad (“okie dokie, adios amigo”), putting on pressure for a family trip.

Andrew MacDonald-Smith in Fully Committed, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

The last time I saw Fully Committed was in the Citadel’s small Rice house with Sam at a single desk as I recall. Timoteo’s production occupies the much bigger Varscona stage. And MacDonald-Smith, a gifted physical comedian, races through a wide, suitably unglamorous basement exile — Chantel Fortin’s design, lighted by Skye Grinde, has lockers, pipes, a water cooler, half-hearted Christmas decorations, a drab couch, a table or two — scrambling for better cellphone reception. and answering phones separated by distance.

And at the centre of a play that unfolds entirely in phone conversations is Sam himself — and the sly irony that an unemployed actor is being played by an actor so super-employed. (Lucky for us, Lincoln Center is missing a bet). And MacDonald-Smith is fully committed as one might say, to populating a world with vivid, recurring New York characters you recognize instantly, three dozen or more. In Timoteo’s production, the dimensions of the quick and prop-less signature transformations into which MacDonald-Smith bends himself, physically and vocally, are astutely judged. Fully Committed, after all, is about foam, not ham, as Timoteo and MacDonald-Smith know.

Andrew MacDonald-Smith in Fully Committed, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

But without a dimensional Sam, Fully Committed would be a showpiece cadenza, however impressively extended, rather than a play And in this production MacDonald-Smith gives us more, in his Michelin star performance. It’s a glimpse into the life of an underachiever, an actor working his ass off to pay for his theatre passion, auditioning hopefully, withstanding rejection.

And there’s this: Sam’s likeable qualities and remarkably even temper generate a certain natural suspense. Do good humour and manners in this class war zone have a limit? Are there boundaries to being put-upon and condescended to? Can the little guy take charge of his fortunes? I leave you with these questions as an appetizer.

It’s a fun way to spend an evening. And Teatro won’t lose your reservation, or bump you if Helen Mirren shows up and wants your seat (well, OK, maybe her, but you know, really anybody else).

REVIEW

Fully Committed

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written by: Becky Mode

Directed by: Farren Timoteo

Starring: Andrew MacDonald-Smith

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through June 21

Tickets: teatroq.com

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on A Michelin star performance by Andrew MacDonald-Smith in Fully Committed, at Teatro Live!, a review

An ‘industrial puppet symphony’ by the transgender/gender-diverse community: Fantasies in Trash: in eleven movements, at Nextfest. A preview

Posted on June 5, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Fantasies in Trash: in eleven movements, Coarse Arts Collective at Nextfest 2026. Rehearsal photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“It’s not a play it’s a puppet show!” declares Emilia Fox Hillyer, the artist who instigated and “assembled” Fantasies in Trash: in eleven movements. The collectively written “industrial puppet symphony” that opens Saturday at Nextfest is the only show of the festival, and indeed the season, in which dumpster-diving for cardboard is an essential part of the creative process.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

The 13-member ensemble, from the transgender/gender-diverse community, fashioned puppets as “giant cardboard sculptures that we throw around,” as director Fox Hillyer puts it. “All very crude. And  very intentional since it’s the result of the community engagement aspect of the show…. If I were working with a group of fabricators who’d worked in puppetry before, the puppets would have been much more kinetic.”

“A play is very text-based,” says Fox Hillyer, who emigrated across the border to work on a master’s degree in theatre practice at the U of A. “A puppet show exists in this other world where text is part of the world we create, but living sculpture is primary.” And “mediation through the performing object” is how the ensemble connects to the audience. Meaning-making is something to be shared, “important to the enjoyment of the show.”

Is the big foot in the show just … a big foot? In vertical position, toes on top, heel on the bottom, it’s a biggie, at six-and-a-half feet tall. “I’ve had people say to me ‘it’s so obvious that the foot belongs to Bruno’. And I’ve had other people say ‘oh my gawd, I am the foot’. Or ‘the big foot is surveillance culture’…. Eye of the beholder sort of thing: that’s what we’re going for.”

Fox Hillyer, an Emerson College acting grad originally from Massachusetts, learned how to “do giant cardboard things” in two years working with the celebrated Vermont-based activist Bread and Puppet Theatre, celebrated for large-scale pageantry and processions. And she discovered that puppetry, as a frame for performer-created work, was more satisfying than acting gigs in more conventional theatre.

There are a striking number of transgender and gender-diverse people amongst puppeteers, “and there are lot of reasons for that,” Fox Hillyer thinks.” Among them, “puppetry is a way for people who are experiencing discomfort with their appearance and the way they’re perceived can resist, or deflect, the attention of the audience on to a performing object.” And her historical researches uncovered parallel experiences between transgender and gender-diverse people and performing objects.”

Puppetry appeals, too, to that community’s need to “build something, to have control over something” in a world that’s sliding into more repressive societies. “Transgender people,” of which Fox Hillyer is one, “offer dignity to those in our community who are a really low place.”

Fantasies in Trash: in eleven movements. Coarse Arts Collective at Nextfest 2026. Rehearsal photo supplied.

“We’re engaging with ‘rubbish theory’, at the way society values and re-values things. Transgender and gender-diverse people are being pushed forth and further into the proverbial dumpster.” Hence the collective’s use of discarded cardboard is meaningful. And there’s a kind of theatrical activism in that.

When she was applying to grad schools — and being a transgender woman in the U.S. didn’t seem to be a promising scenario — what she had in mind “was some sort of big grand community engagement-devised puppet project. And this is what came out of it … very much what I was expecting and also very much what I was not expecting.”

It takes a village (and time)…. An ensemble of 13 — three musicians, me and eight performers, one technician — is “tough to organize that many people in a community engagement project,” Fox Hillyer says cheerfully. “There was just one rehearsal before tech week when everyone showed up.”

Fantasies in Trash: in eleven movements, Coarse Arts Collective in rehearsal. Nextfest 2026. Photo supplied

Fantasies in Trash was a (school) year in the making. “We spent the first semester generating content and building the ensemble,” says Fox Hillyard. “The ensemble was whoever was in the room, a drop-in rotational sort of thing. Sometimes there were three plus me and the stage manager. Sometimes 40…. Basically if you showed up you had a voice, and you had authorship.”   

“We often used play-making games that included text, or video-editing and recorded text that happened….” Fox Hillyer assembled versions of the script, “and we did a lot of voting on things to make decisions.”

Does a story emerge in the course of the show? “Symphony,” as in ‘industrial puppet symphony’, implies a narrative arc, as she says. “Fantasy,” as in the show title, “means it’s all over the place…. Each movement could be its own performance. But I believe they weave themselves together to create something cohesive.”

Fantasies in Trash: in eleven movements, Coarse Arts Collective, Nextfest 2026. Rehearsal photo supplied

The arc has to do with the Fascist character, who has a large blue mask on which someone is constantly drawing in pink marker, and wings. “At the end the Fascist undergoes emancipatory self-mutilation, the loss of wings,” in parallel to the way transgender women “have to shed male privilege when they go into this whole new world of feminine expression.”

It turned out to be easy to acquire a transgender/gender-diverse cast from the community, which says something about need here. “I posted on Instagram and was buried by interest!” And in the end, making the show “created a space where we could all be ‘normal’, and also a space where young transgender people in their 20s could experiment, in a non-judgmental (environment), with being the gender they know themselves to be.”

“To have a community and see transgender people over 30 living happy lives….” Beyond everything else, in a darkening world for transgender and gender-diverse people, that has made it all worthwhile.

Fantasies in Trash: in eleven movements runs at Nextfest Saturday and Sunday plus June 10 and 14 on the Lorne Cardinal Stage at the Roxy. Tickets and times: theatrenetwork.ca.

Posted in Features, Previews | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on An ‘industrial puppet symphony’ by the transgender/gender-diverse community: Fantasies in Trash: in eleven movements, at Nextfest. A preview

Where the human and animal worlds meet: The Bin, at Nextfest. Meet playwright Lexi House

Posted on June 4, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

The Bin by Lexi House, Nextfest 2026. Photo by Grace Daly.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I’ve never written a play before,” says Lexi House. It’s a declaration of artistic intent that weaves itself through the fabric of Nextfest like a golden thread.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

Innovative (by very definition), Edmonton’s multi-disciplinary festival of emerging artists returns Thursday to the Roxy. And with it, one of five feature productions on the mainstage, is House’s The Bin, a first play by an actor-turned playwright.

It’s on a scale of complexity, as House describes. For one thing The Bin takes six characters into a classic horror location, an Athabasca cabin in the woods where Goose, a nursing student, joins her university friends. And when things turn dark and scary — “there’s a distinct heavy shift in tone in scene five” — animal spirits enter the play. “I’ve made five custom-made paper mâché animal masks,” she says. “The whole process has been really fun.”

The continuity of the human and animal worlds speaks to House, an Indigenous artist of Mi’kmaq heritage who grew up in Fort McMurray (her family history is part of “the Newfie diaspora,” she laughs). Edmonton, where she moved for university was “the Big City to me. So glamorous, so exciting, so cosmopolitan, it was New York to me.”

She’s graduating this very month with a Native Studies degree from the U of A, and starts on a master’s degree in Indigenous Governance at the University of Victoria in the fall.

‘Governance’, she explains, resonates in her new play, as “the process of people working together to achieve a common goal — in a way where you prioritize your relationships with the community, with others, and also with more than the human world.” All germane to the unspooling of The Bin.

House’s biggest theatrical inspiration is a play she saw at the 2025 Nextfest: Mika Boutin’s Televangelists, a play with a raucous punk scene setting, a lyrical sense of childhood, and a dark, violent, explosively Jacobean, sense of horror. “I saw it three times, and I cried every time!”. Horror, thinks House, has a particular appeal for young audiences, “especially in this unpredictable political and economic climate…. And personally I find myself drawn to writing horror; in a weird paradoxical way I can express things that are disgusting and scary. I have more trouble capturing beautiful, serendipitous moments in the way I experience them.”

“What I want people to walk away from The Bin feeling is a sense of gratitude for family and relationships.”

It was while House was finishing her Native Studies degree that the theatre found its way into her life. A writing course with playwright and U of A drama prof Kenneth T. Williams, then roles at Walterdale and the St. Albert Dinner Theatre…. She jokes that the idea of a captive audience appealed to her as a writer: “you can’t turn it off; if you’re bored, you’re stuck there….”

House has found her characters, versions and amalgams of them that is, in “the people I knew growing up in Fort McMurray. Everyone I know there is a weird character, myself included,” she says cheerfully. For Nextfest director Ellen Chorley, one of the appeals of The Bin, which got its start in her annual My First Play workshop in the fall, is the way House has captured that dimensional quality, “how organic the dialogue is. Her characters seem real-life to me, so compelling.”

The cast of The Bin by Lexi House, Nextfest 2026. Photo by Grace Daly.

That was one of House’s goals when she ended up directing the play herself (with her childhood friend Calypso Haine). She told the actors “I don’t care if you paraphrase, or say things in the wrong order as long as it sounds like you are saying it, and it comes out natural, as realistic and in your own voice as possible….” The Bin comes with an dramatic list of content warnings, including blood and death, and rehearsals included fight and intimacy calls. She reassured the cast “if there are any lines you’re not comfortable saying, we can change them.”

She’s tried to avoid “the top-down power dynamic” in rehearsals with “a ‘de-colonial directing method’ if that doesn’t sound pretentious … to make sure everybody is heard. More ‘relational’ than hierarchical.”

“It’s been a very collaborative process. And that’s what’s made it so special and fun.”

The Bin opens Friday on the Lorne Cardinal stage at the Roxy, and has performances June 10, 13 and 14. Nextfest tickets: theatrenetwork.ca.

.

Posted in Features, Previews | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Where the human and animal worlds meet: The Bin, at Nextfest. Meet playwright Lexi House

A June week on E-town stages: two festivals, a multi-character solo show, a drag queen extravaganza, a Pride party …

Posted on June 3, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Andrew MacDonald-Smith in Fully Committed, Teatro Live! Poster image supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A June week in Edmonton theatre: for starters, two festivals, a virtuoso solo show in which one extremely agile actor plays 40 (!) characters, an evening with local drag royalty, a big Pride block party.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

•The supple actor with the lunatic multi-character assignment is lanky Andrew MacDonald-Smith. Fully Committed is a Teatro Live! production. And at that artist-run company MacDonald-Smith is a leading man, and a former artistic director. In Becky Mode’s comedy, opening Friday on the Varscona stage, he’s directed by the current Teatro artistic director Farren Timoteo, who’s a dexterous actor/ playwright and knows how to pull off these multi-character tours de force himself (Made In Italy). In Fully Committed MacDonald-Smith plays a harried out-of-work actor whose paid gig is at the reservation desk of the hottest Manhattan restaurant, juggling non-stop calls from the desperate, the demanding, the entitled, all wanting a prime-time table. Sam’s other gig is … his complicated life, and his thesp career, both of which seem to be on hold. So, the guy is, you know, crazy busy. It runs Friday through June 21. Tickets: teatrolive.com.    

Nextfest 2026. Poster image supplied.

Nextfest is back at Theatre Network, starting Thursday, for 11 days and nights of multi-disciplinary creations, experiments, inspirations from the new generation of emerging artists (500-plus of them in 40-plus shows and events and experiences). Check out the 12thnight survey of the 31st annual edition (hey, I got to talk to fest director Ellen Chorley) here. Tickets, show descriptions, a full colour-coded schedule: theatrenetwork.ca.

The  Citadel’s Collider Festival, devoted to developing new plays for Size Large stages here, across the country, and beyond, is back this weekend, Friday through Sunday. Five new plays get read, some in whole some in part. And there’s even a new musical-in-progress from Mhairi Berg (Morningside Road) and Steven Greenfield inspired by a quintessentially Canadian true crime story: The Great Maple Syrup Heist: the great Canadian musical. 12night surveys the lineup (with Citadel associate artistic director Mieko Ouchi) here. Play readings are free. Tickets and a full schedule: citadeltheatre.com.

Drag queen Pepper. Photo supplied.

•Workshop West collaborates with Guys in Disguise in a big, starry drag fund-raiser bash Friday at the Gateway Theatre (8529 Gateway Blvd.). Darrin Hagen hosts a line-up of drag artistes, including local legends Pepper, Twiggy, and Vanity Fair. And there’s a meet-the-queens Q&A afterward, too. Tickets (all pay-what-you-will, as usual at Workshop West) are at workshopwest.org.

•Grindstone Theatre invades 81 Ave. in Strathcona (i.e. their front yard) 11 a..m. to 11 p.,m. Saturday for Fruit Loops’ annual Pride Block Party, in support of Rainbow Refuge. The Drag Brunch, Drag Story Time, and non-stop action after that: live music, DJs, performances, food vendors, drinks, artisans. All-ages, and it’s free (but feel free to tip the entertainers).

Posted in News/Views, Previews | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A June week on E-town stages: two festivals, a multi-character solo show, a drag queen extravaganza, a Pride party …

Thinking big: the Citadel’s Collider Festival is back with new plays for Size Large stages

Posted on June 2, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Think big or go … wait. There’s a mantra not often heard in Canadian theatre, where “size matters,” another multi-purpose catchphrase, almost always really means “think smaller.”

Thinking big is the agenda of Collider, the festival that returns to the Citadel Friday for a sixth annual weekend edition. Named for the collision of artists, art forms, inspirations on a scale, potential producers, Collider is all about developing new plays that will resonate on Size Large performance mainstages — like the Citadel’s own pair of 700-seat theatre siblings the Maclab and the Shoctor — across the country and beyond. In an age when small and indie companies are shrinking further, that’s a niche ready for occupation.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

And Collider can already claim its successes — the Citadel premieres of  Jessy Ardern’s Cyrano de Bergerac, the Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman/ Hawksley Workman musical Almost A Full Moon, Erin Shields’ adaptation of Jane Eyre, Holly Lewis’s original ultra-farce The Fiancée among them.

Five new scripts, poised for productions on big stages, get readings in this year’s Collider lineup: a new musical about a quintessentially Canadian true crime, a dark comedy/satire, a period adaptation, a high-style mystery comedy farce, a bi-country bilingual multi-character solo show. Four have been in progress in the Citadel’s Playwrights Lab; the fifth, Darcy & Wickham by Belinda Cornish, is a new Citadel commission.

The Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist: The Great Canadian Musical, by the team of Mhairi Berg (book) and Steven Greenfield (music), is inspired by a bizarre, (very) Canadian, true crime story, the theft in 2012 of 3,330 tons of maple syrup, $18 million worth, from the Québec Maple Syrup Producers warehouse.

Edmonton audiences know playwright/actor/improviser Berg’s work most recently from her Celtic-flavoured musical Morningside Road (with Simon Abbott) that premiered at Shadow Theatre this season. This new musical, similarly intricate and with an amalgam of Québecois folk, pop and Broadway-esque music, “weaves a beautiful, personal family story” into the narrative of the crime caper, as Citadel associate artistic director and Collider curator Mieko Ouchi describes. Friday night’s reading of Act I (a cast of eight directed by Dave Horak), will include three songs from the new piece.

With Come Hell Or High Water, an “apocalyptic comedy” as billed (“impending doom but with a Disney theme”), Nicole Moeller ventures farther into left-field comedy than her usual artistic turf. It’s set at a kids’ birthday party, “and isn’t there a special place in hell for birthday parties?” laughs Ouchi. Seven parents, who have nothing in common except having kids, are trapped there, and it’s the end of the world. Tracy Carroll directs a seven-actor cast — six adults and “a child playing a child” (the accomplished young Aubrey Malacad). Ouchi describes the new Moeller play as “sharp, biting satire,” and cites God of Carnage and Clybourne Park as points of reference.

An Agatha Christie Mystery A Comedy, which Ouchi describes admiringly as “really playful and fun, really silly, a great big ol’ farce,” is by Col Cseke, the artistic director of Calgary’s Inside Out Theatre, purveyors of much weightier, issue-freighted, often verbatim, fare. Cseke’s play is inspired by the true story of the never-explained 11-day disappearance of the queen of mystery writing in 1926. A kooky series of Christie caricatures — nosey neighbours, amateur sleuths, addled witnesses — arrives at her door, guarded by a hapless detective. Karen Johnson-Diamond directs.

Darcy & Wickham, by the playwright/actor/director improviser Belinda Cornish, is based on the novel Follies Past by Edmonton writer Melanie Kerr, an Austen devoté of long-standing. A prequel of sorts to Pride and Prejudice, it’s spun from the backstory of the mysterious Mr. Darcy and his sister Georgiana, whose childhood friend Mr. Wickham will play such a dramatic role in the Jane Austen novel. And, says Ouchi, it taps the appeal of living, for a while in the theatre, in that Regency world. Brian Deedrick directs a nine-actor cast in the Collider reading.

The line-up includes a music-infused solo play, Alexandra Lainfiesta’s Chula — à la Made in Italy and Burning Mom, says Ouchi. Set in Edmonton in 2008, spooling back in time to the 1990s and Guatemala in the ‘80s, where the protagonist aspires to be a professional singer. Performed in both English and Spanish, it’s a blend of music and multi-character storytelling. The reading directed by the Chilean-Canadian artist Mariló Núñez, stars Daniela Fernandez.

Nick Green (Casey and Diana, The Last Timbit) leads a Saturday workshop on musical theatre book-writing. And on Sunday, director Núñez explores the very specialized playwriting method of the Cuban writer Maria Irene Fornes.

Collider runs Friday through Sunday at the Citadel. For the full schedule of readings (all free) and workshops, and workshop registration, see citadeltheatre.com.

Posted in News/Views, Previews | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Thinking big: the Citadel’s Collider Festival is back with new plays for Size Large stages

All grown up at 31, and forever young: Nextfest, the festival of emerging artists, is back this week

Posted on June 1, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Nextfest 2026. Poster image supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

All grown up, and forever young. That’s Nextfest, the 11-day multi-disciplinary festival of emerging artists that’s been asking “what’s next?” ever since it got dreamed up at Theatre Network in 1996.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

It’s back Thursday at the Roxy with a 31st annual edition, to celebrate and showcase the ideas, inspirations and experiments of the next generation of artists, on the brink of professional careers. For 11 days at the free-wheeling, cross-pollinating festival founded by Theatre Network’s Bradley Moss, we get to experience the innovations of 500-plus emerging artists, collaborating in theatre, dance, music, comedy, visual arts, film and video, and unclassifiable amalgams of all of the above. By now, it’s hard to find artists in this theatre town whose careers haven’t been touched by Nextfest.

Nextfest director Ellen Chorley in front of The Roxy. Photo supplied.

As usual Nextfest is a veritable Roxy invasion: performances and showcases on both the main and alternative stages plus the rehearsal hall, visual art on every available wall on the three levels of exhibition spaces, and (a perennial Nextfest draw) themed ‘performance nite clubs’ that rove and pop up everywhere in the theatre, including the lobbies, the roof, the elevator. And Nextfest musicians burst out of the Roxy and onto 124th St. for happy hours at Delavoye Chocolate and Three Vikings, and a free outdoor concert paired with the 124th St. Grand Market in Helen Nolan Park on June 11.

As festival director Ellen Chorley explains, theatre happens in a continuum, and at every stage of development at Nextfest, from play readings to “progress showings” to the five mainstage premieres. In the wide spectrum of submissions, Chorley detects a certain lean into the horror genre and dark themes generally this year, assisted of course by the scary state of the world.

Deaf Heart by IBIPOC Deaf Ensemble of DHTC, Nextfest 2026. Poster image supplied

In a first for Nextfest, much to Chorley’s delight, is a collective performance piece devised by the IBPOC Deaf Ensemble of DHTC. Deaf Heart, as she describes is “all in sign language, with visuals that include movement and clowning, creative expression beyond language. The project is captained by producer Connor Yuzwenko-Martin, and co-directors Thurga Kanagasekarampillai and Crystal Wolfe. Says Chorley, who’s learning ASL herself (“an incredibly expressive language”), “we really hope that it attracts a mixed Deaf and hearing audience; it’s for everybody!”

There are eight Deaf artists onstage in the show. And the 25-member cast list in the Nextfest program includes mentorship from such well-known Edmonton hearing artists as Christine Lesiak and Ainsley Hillyard, clowning and dance/choreography specialists respectively.

Fantasies in Trash: in eleven movements by Coarse Arts Collective, Nextfest 2026. Poster image supplied.

“Puppets! I love puppets!” says Chorley, Nextfest director since 2017, whose own history as a theatre artist goes back to high school, and the possibilities unlocked for her multi-faceted theatre career by the festival. Where else is an adventurous theatre-goer going to find an “industrial puppet symphony”? She’s talking about “Fantasies in Trash: in eleven movements,” the creation of the Coarse Arts Collective. “Assembled” and directed by Emilia Fox Hillyer (look for an upcoming 12thnight interview), it’s the collective work of Edmonton’s transgender/gender-diverse community. And, as billed, the cast is joined by a live four-piece band, and armed with some 33 assorted content warnings, the festival program’s longest and most intriguingly diverse.

The Bin by Lexi House, Nextfest 2026. Poster image supplied.

Lexi House’s The Bin comes to the mainstage via Nextfest’s annual six-week fall “My First Play” program designed, designed to mentor first-time playwrights on “how to take an idea from your brain onto the page” and then the stage, as Chorley describes. The story, set in an Athabasca cabin, is imbued “with scary horror elements,” with both human and animal spirit characters. Chorley was particularly impressed with “how organic Lexi’s dialogue is. The characters seem so compellingly real-life….” Stay tuned for an upcoming 12thnight interview with the playwright.

There are two offerings in the 30-seat  (newly christened) Bradley Moss Rehearsal Hall upstairs at the Roxy, “an exciting way to have an intimate experience in theatre,” as Chorley puts it. One is Lily Davies’ Splattered, which touches on “professional jealousy in arts careers and pursuing adult relationships,” as she describes. Spenser Kells directs the Fourth House production. The other, Hunny Moon in “Instructions Unclear,” has drag elements, but ultimately, Chorley says, it’s “an intimate one-person monologue about pain, vulnerability.”

Splattered by Lily Davies, Nextfest 2026. Poster image supplied

The “Progress Showing,” is Näcken, by and directed by Liz Janzen. The 17th century German setting and title (literally, ‘the back of the neck’) hint at hair-raising. “Horror, witchy, gory, magic, sickness, blood,” says Chorley by way of summary.

The lineup of eight new plays getting a reading, either full first drafts or excerpts, are a glimpse into what’s on the minds of the new generation of artists. The variety is,  to say the least, striking. Moemen Gaafar’s Shams By Rumi, for example, which follows an Egyptian artist duo on a production-related trip to Cairo, is a modern take on the Persian poet Rumi and the mystic Shams. Bunny Guts, by Mika Boutin (whose Televangelists was a Nextfest hit last year), follows a group of cousins as they negotiate an inherited small-town ritual. At the centre of Em Smith’s Hagar is a mother/daughter estrangement set at a critical moment of transition into long-term care.

The late-night Nite Clubs, which occupy every nook and cranny of the Roxy, are a tangible demo of the Nextfest mantra “come for the art, stay for the party.” The first of this year’s two is Weird Planet (June 6), “our Pride nite club” says Chorley, featuring all queer artists, presented by Party Queen and curated by Helluva Thing. The second, Underground ’99 (June 13), is this year’s edition of the annual Nextfest “Smut Nite,” curated by Mika Boutin and Tori Kibblewhite of Dog Bite Theatre Collective. The theme is 1999, in all its punk and grunge splendour; Chorley, who was in Grade 9 at the time, is already planning her outfit.

The festival’s three “Showcases” are cross-disciplinary Nextfest partnerships with community groups: iHuman, Cherry Pit, and ABoyActually.

Check out the event-crammed colour-coded schedule, including the roster of free artist workshops — everything from vocal improv to on-camera acting to theatre producing — at nextfest.ca. Tickets and passes: theatrenetwork.ca.

Posted in News/Views, Previews | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on All grown up at 31, and forever young: Nextfest, the festival of emerging artists, is back this week

Suddenly, amazingly, it’s starting: Edmonton’s summer festival season

Posted on May 26, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Postal Prophets by D’orjay Jackson, RISER 2026, Common Ground Arts. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Edmonton’s magic box, the season of summer (and summer-ish) festivals, opens this very week on stages here. And that’s just the start (think Pandora).

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

Common Ground Arts’ RISER New Works Festival, designed to support, profile, and mentor indie theatre artists and companies along their oft-arduous path, returns Friday for a second annual edition. It’s a two-year Common Ground Arts modification of a visionary national initiative by Toronto’s Why Not Theatre in 2014. In 2022, Edmonton was the first RISER location in a cross-country diaspora, and Common Ground Arts, home to such innovative indie projects as the annual Found Fest, and very well-connected in indie circles, was a natural host company.

At the 2026 edition of the festivities, audiences will see three shows at the Backstage Theatre that return for more developed productions — as per RISER’s two-year format — at festivals in 2027. POCBS, an offering last year’s RISER, for example, will be at this summer’s Fringe.

The Light of Other Skies by Liam Monoghan, RISER New Play Festival. Photo supplied.

Memory Box Theatre’s production of The Light of Other Skies, a work-in-progress by playwright/producer/director Liam Monaghan, tells a little-known Canadian love story: the star architect Arthur Erickson and his interior designer partner Francisco Kripacz. Part archival and documentary, the story is told in a theatrical way that enlists projections and music, through the eyes of a young Queer writer looking to connect with this country’s hidden Queer history. It’ll be at Theatre Outré’s Quaint, Quirky and QUEER Cabaret & Festival in 2027.

Postal Prophets, by singer/songwriter-turned-playwright D’orjay Jackson, which had an initial outing at last year’s RISER New Works Festival, is a hugely ambitious new musical set in a dystopian future that’s “governed by an AI system on a dying planet” with its own resistance fighters. A battle between humanoids and artifical intelligence ensues.

be(Longing) by Philip Hackborn, RISER New Works Festival 2026. Photo supplied.

Be(Longing), a solo piece created and performed by Philip Hackborn, explores the experience of being multi-racial east-Asian, through formative cultural influences like folktales. As billed it’s the foundation of what’s is designed to performed next year by a larger-scale ensemble piece in which Hackborn will be joined by other east-Asian artists.

Tickets, show descriptions, and a full schedule of performances Friday through Sunday, are at commongroundarts.ca.

More about this later, but the Common Ground Arts season includes a fascinating six-encounter 2026 lineup for Found Fest July 9 to 12 in locations where artists meet audiences in unexpected site-specific locations. Tickets are on sale in June. And post-summer, look for the return of Common Ground Arts’ Prairie MainStage Series, returning with Tiny Bear Jaws’ production of I Don’t Even Miss You and Gillian Patterson’s i am your spaniel; or, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare from Winnipeg’s We Quit Theatre. I’ve seen earlier iterations of the former, which is terrific. And I saw a sneak preview of the latter at the Common Ground season launch last month, and it’s irresistibly bonkers. Tickets go on sale later this summer.

Big news from Common Ground: The 2026 season is the last for indefatigable managing producer Mac Brock, who’s exiting after five years, along with Found Fest director Whittyn Jason. Common Ground’s new managing producer is Rainier Pearl-Styles. And three new Common Ground producer/curators, all artists with Common Ground on their resumés will produce RISER (Sarah Emslie), Found Festival (Salem Zurch), and the next CG season (Hayley Moorhouse).

Goupil et Kosmao, International Children’s Festival of the Arts. Promotion photo.

•The arrival of a full crop of dandelions is a signal, and a tip-off, and it has been for 45-plus springs. It’s time for the International Children’s Festival of the Arts, that venerable spring institution, to return to the banks of the mighty Sturgeon in St. Albert.

Six ticketed feature performances, from across the country, the U.S., Australia and France, happen Friday through Sunday. Puppets, music, dance, and unclassifiable combos of all of those. There’s physical comedy from a virtuoso circus juggler who can balance a samurai sword on a stick he holds in his mouth (no kidding): Yuki the Juggler. There’s a classic comedy duo inspired by Tex Avery and Pixar: magician Kosmao and his assistant Goupil. Plus a musical with catchy songs: Disney’s Finding Nemo, Jr. from the St. Albert Children’s Theatre. And the festival includes lots of immersive free activities and experiences, too. The Kids Fest runs Friday through Sunday in assorted St. Albert venues. The schedule, show descriptions, and tickets are all available at stalbert.ca/exp/childfest/tickets/.

Siegfried, Edmonton Opera. Photo by Nanc Price. Set and video by Andy Moro, costumes by Jessica Oostergo

•And, hey, there’s an opera this week, too. Siegfried is not a festival in itself, true, but consider the context (and think big): it’s the third instalment of Wagner’s monumental Ring Cycle. The Edmonton Opera production of Jonathan Dove’s chamber version of  Siegfried happens through Sunday on the Citadel’s thrust stage, the Maclab, at 685 seats an intriguingly intimate, up-close space for such large-scale storytelling.

Edmonton Opera has already staged the first two Ring chapters, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, in previous seasons. And they’ve announced they will complete the Ring Cycle, their first, with part four, Gotterdammerung, to come. Siegfried is the Canadian debut for the innovative Greek-born London-based director Radula Gaitanou, known for reimagining classical works for contemporary audiences. Simon Rivard conducts. Samuel Levine stars as Siegfried, the peripatetic innocent who wanders through the world, and wakes up the warrior Brünnhilde from her slumbers behind a wall of fire. Now there’s a challenge for the deluxe designer Andy Moros, who’s returned for this third Ring opera.

Siegfried runs Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday on the Citadel’s Maclab stage. Tickets: tickets.edmontonopera.com

Continuing:

L’UIniThéâtre’s season-ending production of buanderie/boulangerie is onstage at La Cité francophone through Sunday. Steve Jodoin directs the new Canadian rom-com by Sophie Gareau-Brennan. Tickets: lunitheatre.ca.

At the Mayfield, Kate Ryan’s production of the musical Footloose continues to kick off its Sunday shoes through June 14. See the 12thnight review here. Tickets: lunitheatre.ca.

  

Posted in News/Views, Previews | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Suddenly, amazingly, it’s starting: Edmonton’s summer festival season

Meet Concrete Theatre’s new artistic director Brett Dahl

Posted on May 25, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Incoming Concrete Theatre artistic director Brett Dahl. Photo by James MacLean

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Concrete Theatre, the award-winning 39-year-old Edmonton company devoted to making theatre for young audiences, has found a new artistic director.

The multi-faceted theatre artist Brett Dahl inherits the Concrete artistic directorship from Jenna Rodgers (who’s moving to the artistic directorship of Theatre Network).

Dahl, a Queer Métis artist who has a BFA in acting and a master’s degree in directing from the U of A , brings to this new job a startlingly diverse skill set — director/ actor/ playwright/ choreogapher/ producer/ drag artist, and artistic director of their own company, Lethbridge-based Theatre Outré. Theirs is a career that spans both indie and mainline theatre, and a resumé that leans into developing new work, and reimagining texts through a contemporary Queer lens. Witness the season just past in which Edmonton audiences have seen Dahl’s directing work at the Citadel (a Young Companies premiere of Project Andromeda) and the Persistent Myth premiere of Tough Guy (in the Fringe Theatre season). This month he’s assistant director for the Freewill Shakespeare Festival production of the musical comedy Something Rotten.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

They have a history with TYA (theatre for young audiences); “it’s always been part of my career,” Dahl says. As a graduate actor just out of U of A theatre school, “I cut my teeth doing TYA tours; it’s in my theatre DNA.” At Evergreen Theatre in Calgary, where they grew up, the actors were guest artists at high schools. “Kids would teach us their science curriculum, and we’d do a play about whatever they were studying — photosynthesis, aviation, polar bears….” During the pandemic, Dahl the playwright started writing a TYA musical, in association with Bad Hat in Toronto and Carousel in Vancouver. And this past month they authored one of three new 10-minute scripts for this year’s edition of Concrete’s annual Sprouts Festival.

“Kids are the most pure audience,” they say. “They’ll tell you right away whether something’s working or not. And they’re also ready to go on an imaginative adventure…. That’s what attracted me to Concrete.”

They talk from first-hand experience about the crazy challenges and camaraderie of multi-show days of TYA touring. At the Shakespeare Company in Calgary, for example, Dahl would be one of four actors playing all  the characters in a Shakespeare play, and setting up and taking down the show too. “You’d endure the craziness,” they laugh. “A fire alarm going off during a show. Or forgetting a set piece in the van when we were already onstage,” a test of resourcefulness not to mention improv skills, as generations of actors have discovered. “If you can survive TYA you can really work anywhere and do anything!”

And the lessons in problem-solving will be valuable at Concrete in many ways. Take  “a play with 10 characters but only four actors,” for example. “Is it going to be puppets? voice-overs? quick costume changes?” They note the theatre truism that “limited resources inspire creativity and restrictions (inspire) ingenuity. No pyrotechnics required!”

Alberta government restrictions on schools — what books can’t be read, what social issues can’t be discussed — create another kind of challenge for Concrete, a theatre that from the start has been dedicated in its creative work to supporting diversity, in both its artists and its young audiences. “Concrete has always been at the forefront of supporting equity-seeking groups, the underdogs…. I really want to ensure we are sharing all kinds of stories. What stories haven’t we been sharing? As someone from a Métis heritage, creating more Indigenous work would be a huge thing for me….”

Rochelle Laplante in Spread Your Wings, Sprouts Festival 2026, Concrete Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang

The ability of kids to understand larger concepts, presented imaginatively, shouldn’t be under-estimated, Dahl thinks. Spread Your Wings, their Sprouts playlet, develops an appealing metaphor for denying gender identity: “a butterfly hatches and the first person they meet is a snail who says ‘no, you’re still a caterpillar’.”

School touring has long been a mainstay of programming at the theatre founded in the 1980s by Mieko Ouchi, Caroline Howarth, Kazimea Sokil, Jan Selman, Elinor Holt. And times being what they are, “shows they could do 10 years ago they couldn’t do any more,” as Dahl says of school censorship. “I want to make sure we’re telling stories that are important for young audiences. … So we have to be more strategic about how we tell them and where we tell them.” They’re thinking about “public presentations,” and other kinds of community partnerships” in addition to school settings. After all, its name notwithstanding Concrete is not a bricks-and-mortar operation.

“I’m not naive to the (problems)…. But we we need someone to advocate so these stories will still happen. Queer advocacy has been a big part of my work. It’s a challenge, but I want to fight for these stories to still be heard, to share them for our next generation. Because I didn’t have them.”

Concrete initiatives, a mix of submissions and commissions, in expanding the TYA repertoire of Canadian plays from a diversity of artistic sources — including emerging writers and writers from outside the theatre world — will continue in a Dahl-led Concrete, they say. “New work is very important to me.”

Even in high school in Calgary, they were part of an Alberta Theatre Projects program, as a young actor participating in new play readings at the PlayRites Festival at the time. During their time at U of A theatre school, Dahl and class-mates “spent three years inside a new play development process” when Greg MacArthur, “a mentor and a hero for me,” was the Lee Playwright In Residence. That time, they say, with its inspiring “peek into the new-play process in an intimate way, really shaped me as an artist.”

New play development, they think, “allows actors to have a new kind of agency in storytelling — the stories you’re telling and how you’re telling them…. When I transitioned into playwriting it opened up new paths — teaching, directing, producing — that I didn’t always have access to.”

The upcoming Concrete season, chosen by outgoing artistic director Rodgers, has already been announced. It includes touring The Monkey and the Turtle by actor-turned-playwright Alexander Ariate in the spring of 2027, and “change-makers” and anti-racism workshops with high school kids.  Meanwhile Dahl is concentrating on the challenges of 2027. Stay tuned.

Posted in News/Views | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Meet Concrete Theatre’s new artistic director Brett Dahl

A new Canadian rom-com is the season finale at L’UniThéâtre (and other theatre too this weekend)

Posted on May 22, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The grand finale of L’UniThéâtre’s all-Canadian season is a premiere: a new rom-com by an Edmonton theatre artist, set in a small Franco-Albertan village.

Sophie Gareau-Brennan’s bouanderie/boulangerie — doesn’t laundry/bakery sound so much better in French? — is named for the two side-by-side businesses in a francophone village where a quartet of characters find themselves in an intricate geometry of friendship and love, separation, reunion and discovery. It’s set in motion when Louise returns to her roots in the little community, takes over her grandmother’s laundromat, and reunites with her childhood bestie Maxime.

Steve Jodoin’s production — in French with English surtitles — runs through May 31 at L’UniThéâtre’s home stage at La Cité francophone (8627-91 St.). Tickets: lunitheatre.ca.

At the Citadel, a premiere too, commissioned specially for the theatre’s Young Companies in performance and production. Project Andromeda, four years in the making, is by Mac Brock, playwright/ director/ producer (and Common Ground Arts’ indefatigably creative managing producer). In the new play Andy’s mother has disappeared, without explanation. And the story follows her quest for answers in a vast, mysterious cosmos. Brett Dahl directs a cast of 13 young actors, who’ve been rehearsing since last September, supported by Young Company Production mentees, in three performances, Friday through Sunday in the Citadel’s Rice Theatre. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com.

CONTINUING (but just still Sunday):

Cyrano de Bergerac, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

•On the Citadel mainstage, Jessy Ardern’s marvellous verse adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac runs through Sunday, on jet streams of exuberant poetry and theatrical pizzaz. It’s directed with flair by Amanda Goldberg and it stars Scott Shpeley as the man with the dazzling dexterity in swordplay and rhyme, and oh yes, that epic nose. 12thnight had a chance to talk to playwright Ardern for a preview here. And the review is here. I loved it.

Karen Johnson Diamond and Cathy Derkach in Autumn, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

•At Shadow Theatre, Autumn by the Brit playwright Peter Quilter, runs on the Varscona stage through Sunday. Lana Michelle Hughes’ production stars Cathy Derkach and Karen Johnson Diamond in valiant performances as estranged sisters who come together to plan a shotgun wedding (and trade one-liners). The 12thnight review is here. Tickets: shadowtheatre.org.

 

David Madawo, Christina Nguyen, Sebastian Ley in Everyone Is Doing Fine, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

At Workshop West, the premiere production of James Odin Wade’s smart, thorny, provocatively dark (and timely) comedy Everyone Is Doing Fine continues through Sunday at the Gateway Theatre (8529 Gateway Blvd). Heather Inglis’s cast — David Madawo, Christina Nguyen, and Sebastian Ley — really tuck into the corner where art, morality and commerce are mixing it up. Read the 12thnight interview with the playwright here, and the review here. Tickets: (all pay-what-you-will) workshopwest.org.

 •From Cradle to Stage, Walterdale Theatre‘s new play reading weekend, a venerable tradition, continues through Sunday. It’s your first chance to catch a first glimpse of nine (!) new  plays by local playwrights. Tickets: showpass.com.

Posted in Features, Previews | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on A new Canadian rom-com is the season finale at L’UniThéâtre (and other theatre too this weekend)