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Hold those top-10 lists. The theatre year isn’t over! Consider the following possibilities--including Studio Theatre's "Cymbeline" and "Whisper"--for your calendar in the last half of the Edmonton theatre season.
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Performer and writer Mark Leiren-Young reminisces about the Edmonton Fringe Festival, which has launched a thousand careers—including that of iconic Canadian clown duo Mump and Smoot.
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Check out this article about MFA Directing alum Jennifer Tarver, whose latest project is directing students from the National Theatre School in "Everything in the Garden".
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Edmonton's theatre community lost a beloved member of its close-knit family over the weekend with the death of Frank Glenfield.
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VUE Weekly writer Mel Priestley previews U of A Studio Theatre's "Fuddy Meers", written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire and guest directed by Ron Jenkins.
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The heroine of "Fuddy Meers", David Lindsay-Abaire’s play now at Studio Theatre, is an amnesiac, who wakes up as a blank slate every morning, wiped clean of every recollection of the day before. As Claire notes, this puts her at a bit of a disadvantage vis-a-vis the world, and its thuggier denizens, not to mention the people claiming to be her relatives.
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"Yellow Moon" marks the return to the University of Alberta of director Jan Selman, the Drama department's erstwhile chair, a notable theatre activist who's been in Kenya for a year assisting Aga Khan University in fashioning an arts curriculum specifically tailored for East Africa.
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"Yellow Moon" is an ideal show for U of A’s Studio Theatre — challenging and edgy, but ultimately still relateable. “Yellow Moon is a perfect play for a young emerging group of actors because it’s about youth, by youth,” says director Jan Selman.
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The subtitle attached to "Yellow Moon"—"The Ballad of Leila and Lee"—hints at the musical quality of the work, as well as the less than concrete bending of theatrical rules in David Greig's play. He belongs to a "newish wave" of playwrights, director Jan Selman notes, playing with the idea of what theatre is, exactly.
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The Citadel Theatre's high-camp "Rocky Horror Show" is directed by MFA Directing graduate Leigh Rivenbark and stars Drama grads John Ullyatt, Robert Markus and Julien Arnold.
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U of A Drama student Liam Coady, Drama alumnus Colin Matty, and fellow U of A students Mary Pinkoski and Ahmed Ali are "Breath in Poetry", a "poetry slam" team representing Edmonton at the 2011 Canadian Festival of Spoken Word competition. They beat 20 teams from across the country to win the national competition.
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If you missed Wishbone Theatre’s beautiful production of "Bashir Lazhar" the first time around, at the 2009 Fringe, your redemption is at hand. The much-awarded show, directed by U of A Drama professor Piet Defraeye and starring Drama alumnus Michael Peng, is back from its European tour, and starts a run at the Avenue Theatre.
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Greg MacArthur, the playwright-in-residence at the University of Alberta’s Department of Drama, has been named as one of six finalists for Canada’s largest award in theatre, the $100,000 Siminovitch Prize.
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U of A Drama grads Bob Baker and Tom Wood, director and star of the Citadel mainstage production of "Death of a Salesman" opening this week, are profiled in this story.
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Opening Studio Theatre’s new season, "Doubt, A Parable" brings with it all the pervasive ambiguity that has made it both an acclaimed hit and a moral mindbender. A clean finish there is not, as "Doubt" has no intention of giving any easy answers.
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'What do you do when you're not sure?' intones Father Flynn as the very first line of "Doubt, A Parable". The crux of John Patrick Shanley's play is that we're to spend the next hour-and-a-half wondering, gravely, uncertainly, about him. The unanswered question certainly had pull over Leigh Rivenbark, who's chosen the script as his thesis production for the U of A's MFA directing program.
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Alberta actor and University of Alberta Drama alumnus Shaun Johnston, who plays patriarch Grandpa Jack in CBC TV's "Heartland", is this year's recipient of the David Billington Award from AMPIA, an annual prize given to someone who has made a lasting contribution to the province's film/TV industry. In this profile story he talks about his career in TV and how one elective Drama class in university made him switch from pursuing a Law degree to becoming an actor.
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The Edmonton Journal's Liz Nicholls surveys the upcoming season in local theatre and mentions two upcoming U of A Studio Theatre shows as ones to watch: Shakepeare's "Cymbeline", adapted and directed by Drama Chair Kathleen Weiss, and the yet-to-be-titled collaboration by Catalyst Theatre's Jonathan Christenson and Bretta Gerecke which will feature Drama's BFA Acting 2012 class as the inaugural cast.
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