‘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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Why do we keep making war anyhow? The addiction to rage: An Iliad at Shadow Theatre, a review

Posted on January 23, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Every time I sing this song, I hope it’s the last time,” says the man before us, a travelling storyteller with a gift of the gab, who’s arrived on crutches (not a prop, Michael Peng has a broken ankle), carrying a suitcase. Clearly it’s not the Poet’s first rodeo.

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At a climactic moment in An Iliad, the mesmerizing theatrical event onstage at the Varscona, the Poet finds himself trapped in his own endless catalogue of death and destruction. He’s been there through history, first-hand, for all of it — wars you know from school, wars you’ve barely heard of, wars that are now, Syria, Somalia, Kabal, Gaza, Mariupol….

Evidently the 2012 script has been updated (there is no war to end all wars.) What starts as an aside turns, at escalating speed and with the feel of improv, into a rant. Peng’s performance gives us the vibe that that the Poet is adding to his list willy-nilly, impromptu, as he taps into his memory bank. And as the character has reminded us at the outset, the exact causes of wars don’t even matter. The kidnapping of Helen — OK, she’s a looker, sure — is just an excuse: “it’s always something isn’t it….”

If An Iliad were another reiteration of a ‘war is hell’, it would be hard to find a sane objector. If it were “just” a 105-minute condensation of Homer’s 3,000-year-old Trojan War epic, recounted by an impressive single actor onstage, it would be a notably improbable achievement, both in the writing and the telling. And it is. But what makes An Iliad a thrilling experience is the unexpected way it’s theatre.

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

Peng engages the audience masterfully, eye to eye, from the moment he enters — wry and conversational, humorously exasperated with his appointed task. Which is to say the eternal purgatory of telling and re-telling a brutal story that involves heroes and gods, yes, but is all about human nature. “Gods never die,” the Poet argues, with a shrug. “They change, they burrow inside us. They become us, they become our impulses.” The language is occasionally epic, but the cadence mostly idiomatically contemporary, with period check-ins to see if we’re getting it.

Onstage with the Poet is the Muse. In the person of Erik Mortimer, he’s a kind of troubadour at the keyboard. His original score, punctuated by ominous war drum beats, has the ethereal, tinkling magic of the music of the spheres. It’s happening in a bar not a theatre. And Scott Peters’ design pulls parachute-silk dust-covers off the joint, to reveal the bottles, and a pool table. The final sphere is a kind of silken inside-out umbrella, across which the designer’s lighting effects play: a sun at dawn or dusk, or a moon, or a spiderweb that’s as red as a heart.

In John Hudson’s production Peng conjures The Iliad’s star opponents Achilles (and his BFF Patroclus), Hector (and his wife, his baby son, his dad) — i.e.  the great warrior on a short fuse, the decent family man — in vivid imagery. How does an apparently devoted side-kick like Patroclus, for example, become “a killing machine”? How does Hector, “a good guy” as the Poet tells us, make the lethal choice to join the fray and be a violent rampager, under the “honour” banner, and in the process of confronting Achilles destroy everything that’s positive about his life in Troy. The scene in which the Poet describes the arrival of Hector’s father in the Greek camp, to plead with Achilles for the return of his son’s body, left the opening night audience in breath-holding silence.

After 3,000 years the Poet, the war veteran who affects a bemused air that melts off him in the course of his storytelling, is stricken by the insight he’s gained into vast and terrible gore, dismemberment, death. The cause, he argues, is a built-in human capacity for uncontrollable rage, “a trick of the blood.” When Achilles gets mad he gets really mad, a cosmic kind of tantrum. Nothing will stop him; his consuming fury burns everything and everyone around him to ashes. Rage is an agent of transformation, man into murderous beast, and it can bring down whole civilizations. “You know what that looks like,” says the Poet, looking meaningfully at us.

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

The Poet is worldly, an appreciator of irony. And the slippery frontier between irony and despair is where Peng’s performance is pitched. Hence his apparently casual insight that Troy was lost in the chasm between what career warriors like Achilles and Hector might actually be thinking and what they actually say, grand and inflammatory. “Just give her back,” he says wearily of the beauteous Helen, stolen by Hector’s feckless underachiever brother Paris. “It’s what we’re all thinking.”

Killing people may come naturally to us, but violence and mayhem are an absurd waste of human potential, and time, he argues. Nine years into the Trojan War the soldiers, who’ve left their lives on hold in small towns everywhere, have forgotten why they’re fighting. And their wives at home have moved on.

It’s a complex and surprising play, an anti-war piece that appreciates complexity,  performed by a game but shell-shocked veteran observer of war after war, shackled to a story that always ends in tears. Peng’s performance takes it out of theory and messaging, and, in words and his own presence, makes it real and emotional for us. It’s what live theatre is for.

REVIEW

An Iliad

Theatre: Shadow

Created by: Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare

Directed by: John Hudson

Starring: Michael Peng with Erik Mortimer

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Feb. 8

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org

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

Posted on January 20, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PREVIEW

An Iliad

Theatre: Shadow

Created by: Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare

Directed by: John Hudson

Starring: Michael Peng with Erik Mortimer

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Feb. 8

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org

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

Posted on January 19, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

Photo by Donna Christensen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dot, High Performance Rodeo. Photo by Donna Christensen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    

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

Posted on January 14, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REVIEW

Moulin Rouge The Musical

Broadway Across Canada

Book by: John Logan

Directed by: Alex Timbers

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

Where: Jubilee Auditorium

Running: through Sunday

Tickets: ticketmaster.ca

 

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