Snow Globe Festival’s Birdie on the Wrong Bus is a love letter to Edmonton
When Birdie takes the wrong bus, Edmonton’s crannies come to light
Ellen Chorley has never written anything quite like Birdie On The Wrong Bus.
For one thing, there’s a big perfumey whiff of fairy tale about most of her plays for kids. The reigning queen of once-upon-a-times in these parts is the author of Cinderella The Wizard, The Too Tall Princess, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, and The Not Evil Stepmother, among others. Her comic muse delights in subverting princes named Charming, foiling magic spells and break-dancing princesses in party dresses, and revisiting happily-everafter career goals.
Chorley’s latest play, premièring at the second annual Snow Globe Festival of Children’s Theatre next week, isn’t like any of the above. Birdie On The Wrong Bus is set here, in Edmonton, now. And its title heroine is a fourth grader with a specific contemporary problem: Birdie does indeed make an error in her public transportation choice. The theatrical result, according to Chorley, is “a love letter to Edmonton … celebrating the little-known places in Edmonton, the places that aren’t West Edmonton Mall.”
Birdie finds herself inadvertently propelled into Edmonton’s obscure nooks and crannies. “Does anyone else love that big Western boot in the west end?” wonders Chorley, musing on the distinctive sign for a local western-wear shop.
“Do you know ‘the end of the world’?” This, it transpires, is not the Leduc exit on the QE2, or the bleak chunk of Jasper Avenue between 100th and 101st Streets. It’s in Belgravia, a secret overgrown place that has to do with a road that mysteriously crumbled into the river, and simply ends. These are pleasing discoveries, and mitigate against Birdie’s occasional suspicions that there might be a vampire on the bus.
In Andrew Ritchie’s production, Mari Chartier stars as Birdie, with Lana Michelle Hughes and Benjamin Stevens having the fun of “playing everyone else,” as the playwright says. “The ETS even lent us uniforms.” Ritchie, a young up-andcomer among directors, took his cast on a nocturnal field trip through Birdie’s route.
In addition to Birdie’s real-life journey, in the only show of the season that mentions Fort Road, this year’s Snow Globe shakes down two other theatrical adventures. One is a highspeed four-actor version of Robin Hood, adapted by American playwright Kathryn Schultz Miller and directed by Taylor Chadwick. Chorley, whose theatre company Promise Productions launched the festival last year, grows wistful.
“That’s the one I wish I could be in,” she sighs. “The fights look so fun, and funny. … It’s The Three Stooges Do Robin Hood, lots of slapstick, a big chase scene. Outrageous!”
The festival’s largest offering — 20 performers onstage and another 12 in the band and the crew — is a version of the Victor Herbert musical Babes in Toyland. The current vogue for fairytale reinventions has its source in this contagiously tuneful 1903 classic, the mother of all fairy-tale musicals. Characters includes Little Miss Muffet, Little Bo-Peep, Little Boy Blue, Jack and Jill; the list goes on. Derrique DeGagne’s production is a mentorship collaboration with Victoria School for the Arts: a dozen grown-ups are involved; the rest are kids.
The Snow Globe festivities don’t have dead air. The Holiday Half Time Show — playlets for kids — happens in the lobby of C103 (formerly Catalyst) during what bigger, duller people call
intermission.