STAGES for the AGES
Louis B. Hobson lists the Top 10 moments in Calgary theatre from the past year
Over the past 12 months, courtesy of the city’s professional theatre companies, I saw 42 plays.
When you factor in the Calgary Fringe Festival, the High-Performance Rodeo, Broadway Across Canada, StoryBook Theatre and some community shows that I was able to catch, that easily pushes the total to more than 70 plays.
I’m not complaining, but rather trying to illustrate how difficult it is to zero in on 10 of those shows for a year-end list.
As you’ll see as you read on, I’m going to cheat a little by mentioning additional shows when I am discussing my top 10.
10 ROCK OF AGES / Stage West
Toronto director Tracey Flye’s production of Broadway’s salute to the glam metal rockers of the 1980s actually opened during the holiday season of 2016, but played long enough into 2017 to qualify; and qualify it does. It sits happily in Stage West’s wheelhouse of big, brassy, musical tribute shows and featured some dynamite performances by actors who know just how far to take those ’80s stereotypes and how to belt out those songs. Kudos to Michael DeRose, who played the musical’s raunchy narrator, Lonny.
9 THE DROWNING GIRLS / Vertigo
When Vertigo’s artistic director, Craig Hall, decided to bring back the brides-in-the-bathtub thriller, The Drowning Girls, he wisely asked the One Yellow Rabbit duo of Blake Brooker and Denise Clarke to stage it. Born as a fringe show in Edmonton, The Drowning Girls had an award-winning Calgary debut in 2008 as part of Alberta Theatre Projects’ Enbridge playRites Festival. That was a hard act to follow, but Brooker and Clarke made their version simultaneously eerie, sensual, poetic and lyrical, easily casting a haunting spell over its audiences.
8 THE SPITFIRE GRILL / Rosebud Theatre
Whether it’s Thornton Wilder’s Our Town or any of W.O. Mitchell’s plays, Rosebud’s artistic director, Morris Ertman, has a knack for making productions of such folksy plays feel like an extension of a little country hamlet. This musical about redemption in a remote country town felt very much at home in Rosebud and it featured strong, committed performances led by Calgary’s own Elinor Holt.
7 GENESIS — THE MARY SHELLEY PLAY / Artists Collective Theatre
What proved so special for me about seeing Amanda Liz Cutting’s production of this 40-yearold drama written for Theatre Calgary’s 1978/79 season was to observe playwright Mary Baldridge’s reaction. She was elated, and understandably so. TC’s production almost 40 years ago was so tepid it said nothing about the sex, drugs and ghost stories that inspired Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein. Cutting, and her first-rate cast, turned the Motel Theatre into a den of, if not iniquity, at least, uninhibited passions and ideas.
6 FLIGHT RISK / Lunchbox Theatre
Through its Suncor Stage One new play development program, Lunchbox Theatre has nurtured more than 100 one-act plays, including Flight Risk — Meg Braem’s warmly nostalgic tribute to aging veterans. In this play, Hank Dunfield is a rather cantankerous airman who served in the Second World War who is about to turn 100. In the skilled hands of Christopher Hunt, Hank turns out to be quite a charmer, or at least his story is. In 2017, Lunchbox also premiered Scott White and Peter Fenton’s sweet musical Newfoundland Mary, about a real larger-than-life Maritimer.
5 9 CIRCLES / Theatre Disponibilite
This powerful antiwar drama by Bill Cain received the royal treatment from director Josephine Christensen, her design crew and her stellar cast. It featured a blisteringly authentic central performance from Caleb Gordon. 9 Circles is an example of what can happen when artists pool their resources and talents to produce a show on their own. I remember stumbling on productions like this in London, New York and Los Angeles in pubs, church basements and community centres that rivalled anything the major theatres had to offer just blocks away.
4 THE URBAN JUNGLE BOOK / StoryBook Theatre and Forte Musical Guild
Joe Slabe and JP Thibodeau, who’ve worked together on shows like Touch Me: Songs for a (dis) Connected Age and the Naughty But Nice! musicals, really struck gold with this show about a young boy struggling to fit into a foster home and a foster community. The way Slabe turns the animal characters from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book into humans is brilliant and innovative; and his songs are as catchy as those you’ll find in a Disney animated musical.
3 JULIUS CAESAR / The Shakespeare Company
I’ve come to expect striking originality from any production that Ron Jenkins helms, especially those at The Shakespeare Company, but his Julius Caesar really took me by surprise. It was a production pulsating with macho intensity and featured fierce, searing performances from Robert Klein, Braden Griffiths, Ryan Luhning and Karl Sine. It was a quite a year for The Shakespeare Company given 2017 also featured Peter Hinton’s sassy reimagining of Shakespeare’s not-so-happily-everafter comedy All’s Well That Ends Well. In that one, Allison Lynch’s strong-willed Helena tricks her Bertram (Brett Dahl) into seducing and marrying her, but she never wins the rotter’s heart.
2 THE LAST WIFE / Alberta Theatre Projects
Kate Hennig’s The Last Wife is a modern-dress version of the troubled romance between King Henry VIII and his sixth wife Catherine Parr. Watching theatre royalty like Lorne Cardinal, Myla Southward and Haysam Kadri sink their teeth into these famous characters and into Hennig’s wonderfully barbed dialogue was a treat. It certainly made me eager to see Hennig’s sequel, The Virgin Trial. In 2017, ATP also gave us a beautifully nuanced version of Joan MacLeod’s Gracie, about a girl growing up in a polygamous cult, and a raucous look at Joe Clark’s short stint as Prime Minister in Michael Healey’s 1979.
1 A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS / Theatre Calgary
True to its name, Ursula Rani Sarma’s stage adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s novel was a splendid evening of theatre. It was as theatrical as it was poignant, and it screamed excellence at every level. This is just one example of how TC strives to bring us the best in theatre by partnering with other companies; in A Thousand Splendid Suns’ case, they joined forces with San Francisco’s prestigious American Conservatory Theater. TC didn’t have to go nearly that far to bring us a high-spirited production of the vintage musical Crazy for You, which was a case of joining hands with Edmonton’s The Citadel Theatre. We also owe Theatre Calgary gratitude for producing Sisters: The Belle Soeurs Musical, sparing neither talent nor money to do this wonderful piece of Canadiana the justice it deserves.