MacIvor comedy is Shadow opener
The Best Brothers part of four-play lineup
Shadow Theatre has nabbed a bittersweet comedy by Canadian star playwright Daniel MacIvor to open its upcoming “season of selfdiscovery” at the Backstage Theatre.
The Best Brothers: This play premièred at Stratford in 2012 and has been produced since on the West Coast and in Toronto. The production at Victoria’s Belfry Theatre this winter starred John Ullyatt and Ron Pederson as the play’s pair of feuding siblings, an architect and a real estate agent, thrown together to make arrangements following the death of their free-spirited mother. Shadow’s production, Oct. 28 to Nov. 15, features Garett Ross and Andrew MacDonald-Smith.
Mama, incidentally, died in a freak accident at the Pride Parade, when a 300-pound drag queen named Pina Colada fell off a float and crushed her, a demise that nails the concept of tragicomedy rather neatly. There’s a third character, the unruly and destructive canine Enzo, who is a problematic aspect of the brothers’ inheritance. We’ve already met the play’s inspiration. Last time MacIvor was in town, to appear in a production of his This Is What Happens Next at the Citadel, his Italian greyhound, Buddy, was along, impatiently awaiting the attentions of his human servant.
Bravo: Shadow’s artistic director, John Hudson, has been intrigued for a while by Red Deer playwright Blaine Newton’s Bravo; he directed a staged reading at Workshop West’s Springboards in 2012. Set during the Cold War nuclear tests in the Pacific, the play weaves past and present, with characters that include a Japanese fisherman, a politician, and an anthropologist. Glenn Nelson, Liana Shannon, and Aaron Talbot star in Hudson’s production (Jan. 20 to Feb. 7). ❚A Picasso: Next March Hudson revives his awardwinning 2013 Fringe production of Jeffrey Hatcher’s A Picasso, a taut little zinger that pits the great Pablo against a cool-eyed attaché of the German ministry of culture in 1941. Julien Arnold returns as the passionate, opinionated, larger-than-life creator of Guernica. His tricky opponent is Alana Hawley, whose performance this past season in the Citadel’s Venus in Fur garnered her a bestactress Sterling nomination this week. ❚ Ten Times Two — The Eternal Courtship: The season finale (May 4 to 22) is a revival of one of David Belke’s most popular, and widely produced, comedies. Ten Times Two, which premièred at the 1999 Fringe and was remounted by Shadow nine seasons ago, follows a hapless male woo-er trying his luck through seven centuries of courtships that fizzle or flame out. Real-life couple Sheldon Elter and Kristi Hansen star this time, with Dave Clarke as the Host, who may well turn out to be the devil himself.
Sprouts Festival
For 14 springs, Concrete Theatre has planted new plays for kids at its annual Sprouts Festival, and watered them in future seasons. The idea was to enrich the repertoire by tapping an unusual, more diverse ethnic/cultural pool of writing talent. And so it is with the three new 20-minute originals getting staged readings this weekend by a trio of actors (Nadien Chu, April Banigan, Damon Pitcher) at the 2015 edition: A Whole New Wheel by actor/playwright Kristi Hansen; The Magic Brush by playwright/novelist Marty Chan; Onions and Garlic by Edmonton Journal city columnist Paula Simons, with lyrics by her daughter Celia Taylor.
Five questions for the columnist/playwright: Q: What made you decide to write a kids’ play? A: I started taking my daughter, now 18, to children’s theatre when she was three. Over the years I saw really great ones and really bad ones. When they were great I’d think, “Wow, I wish I could do that.” When they were bad I’d think, “Oh, I could do a better job than that!” ... So when (Concrete Theatre’s) Caroline Howarth offered me this commission I thought maybe it was time to find out if that was really true. Q: Why theatre? A: I’m a theatre geek from junior high days, and a sometime theatre critic. ... It’s easy to be in the seats telling yourself, and other people, what the playwright didn’t do properly. It’s a very different thing to be on the other side, and put yourself to that test: to see if you can put your money where your mouth has been. Q: What’s the seed of your Sprout? A: A Yiddish folk tale ... about two siblings, the older brother who’s selfish and mean and got the inheritance, and the younger, here the sister, the dreamer, the good kid who has an adventure. ... The archetype gets mixed with lots of Yiddish jokes and klezmer music and a little hora dancing. ... Were my grandfather still with us, he would kvell (be delighted). Q: How did the mother-daughter team work? A: When I got the commission to write the play, I asked my daughter, who’d just finished her first year at McGill, (major: classics, minor: theatre studies), to help. ... I sent her the first draft and she thought it was pretty good, made a few suggestions, rewrote the ending. “But the songs are not good,” she said. “They have a boring rhyming couplet scheme; it all sounds like Dr. Seuss.” She ended up rewriting all the songs. ... Like a fairy tale she transformed straw into gold.
Sprouts runs Saturday and Sunday at the Westbury Theatre in the ATB Financial Arts Barns. Tickets: 780-409-1910 or at the door. Go to concretetheatre.ca for information and show times.