Category: Performing Arts
Performing Arts
The Soul Collector
Directed, written and scored by Jonathan Christenson
Design by Bretta Gerecke
A Catalyst Theatre production,
ATB Financial ArtsBarns, to May 12, 2013
matinees Saturday and Sunday, May 11 and 12.
Tickets $17 to $42, online at Tix on the Square
Review by Graham Hicks, Hicksbiz.com blog
For Jonathan Christenson fans, there’s an irresistible pull every time the brilliant writer, composer and director teams up with designer Bretta Gerecke for another Catalyst Theatre world premiere.
The Soul Collector, at the ATB Financial Arts Barns through May 12, 2013, is truly a world premiere, as are all Christenson and Gerecke (CG for short) Catalyst productions. Catalyst has rock-band-like legions of international fans. Its shows tour for years, across North America, Europe and Australia. As far as made-in-Edmonton cultural exports go, Catalyst is up there with Tommy Banks, kd lang and Corb Lund.
The pull, the must-attend factor, is the unique style of any C/G production. For wan ...
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Review by Graham Hicks
Monty Python’s Spamalot
A Citadel Theatre Production,
Citadel Theatre, Edmonton, Alberta Canada – Shoctor stage
Until May 19, 2013
www.citadeltheatre.com
It’s as much fun as Grease, back in 2003.
It’s as zany as Rocky Horror Show in 2011.
And it’s as silly as The Drowsy Chaperone in 2009.
In other words, The Citadel Theatre’s own production of Monty Python’s Spamalot is as funny a show as has ever graced the Citadel’s main stage.
You do know what you’re getting – given Spamalot is a loose stage adaptation of Monty Python’s Search for the Holy Grail movie, and the show itself was one of Broadway’s biggest hits of the past decade. Who doesn’t know The French Taunter’s “I fart in your general direction” or the Black Knight’s “tis only a flesh wound“ as King Arthur hilariously lops off his arm?
As was the case with the Citadel’s renditio ...
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Theatre review by Graham Hicks
The Kite Runner, adapted by Matthew Spangler, based on the novel by Khaled Hosseini
At the Citadel Theatre (Shoctor Stage) in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
March 9 to 31, 2013
Ensemble cast
Tickets and information:
Thank you Citadel Theatre, for once again presenting a theatrical masterpiece, a contemporary masterpiece in a least expected setting.
The Kite Runner is epic, spanning an emotional/ethical arc of friendship, betrayal, weakness, saintliness, rigidity, hypocrisy, lost innocence, twisted brutality.
These qualities of the soul are fit within a panoramic psycho-geographic landscape that echoes the interior conflicts and passions - an idyllic Afghanistan, tumultuous Afghanistan, wretched Afghanistan and San Francisco, USA, through the eyes of a refugee Afghan community.
There is the masterpiece of the writing, shared between the author of the original novel, Khaled Hosseini, and the craftsmanship of stage-adapter Matthew Spangler. That so ma ...
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Theatre review by Graham Hicks
Private Lives, by Noel Coward
At the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton, Canada until Feb. 24, 2013
Directed by Bob Baker
Starring John Ullyatt and Diana Donnelly
There’s a reason Noel Coward’s Private Lives is alive and kicking and powerfully relevant, 82 years after the drama premiered with Coward in the lead role.
It’s more than the marvelous English wit and command of the language, the dancing in the dragon’s jaws, the suspension of normalcy, the physical hilarity and the superb construction of the famous British socialite/playwright’s plays.
It’s about his surgical dissection, in Private Lives, of the paradox of human love: Of societal norms suggesting a man and a woman (or combinations thereof) ought to meet, fall in love, marry, answer all of each other’s emotional, spiritual and physical needs, raise a family in harmony and wisdom, grow old together, and never fight.
Nothing should ever go wrong. Neither husband nor wife will ...
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A Christmas Carol - through Dec. 23, 2012
Citadel Theatre, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
As adapted by Tom Wood, Directed by Bob Baker and Geoffrey Brumuk
Ticket information at Citadel Theatre
Nothing is quite such a Christmas classic as Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
And in Edmonton, nothing has become more of a Christmas classic than Tom Wood’s stage adaptation of A Christmas Carol for the Citadel Theatre.
A Christmas Carol premiered 13 years ago. The initial year was an herculean effort that darned near killed everybody. the huge production was mounted in six short weeks, as technically complicated and as artistically vast as theatre can get and all done for the first time. No matter. A Christmas Carol was an artistic and box-office triumph from opening night on.
A Christmas Carol was designed to be an annual event – it had to run for a few years if only to recover its production costs – but nobody expected it’d be so popular as to continue, non-stop, for 13 Christmas ...
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Review of Next to Normal, at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton, Canada, through November 11, 2013
By Graham Hicks
A successful twisting of the dramatic dial always arouses great interest, and, given the intelligence level of the audience it attracts, great expectations.
Thematically, the musical Next to Normal, that opened on the Citadel Theatre's Shoctor Stage last Thursday (Oct. 25, 2012) for an 18 day run, is not all that unusual.
The pathos and humour within dysfunctional contemporary North American families has been a familiar backyard for American playwrights since Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. This time around, the emotional rawness is given believable depth by genuine mental illness on momma’s part.
Technically, Next to Normal is darn fascinating – leaving the safety of conventional musical theatre to edge much closer to opera, pushing much closer to Stephen Sondheim than to Rodgers and Hammerstein but delivering the whole show in an over-drive tempo that ...
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Review of A Few Good Men
Citadel Theatre, Shoctor Stage,
Until Oct. 7, 2012
Tickets at www.citadeltheatre.com
By Graham Hicks
You won’t find a more satisfying evening of theatre than the Citadel’s A Few Good Men.
Don’t let the fact it was made into a Hollywood blockbuster film with a troika of stars (Jack Nicholson, Tom Cruise, Demi Moore) put you off. The film was based on a most complete theatre script, a classic American courtroom drama.
That script has been explored and exploited to its fullest by Citadel director and Artistic Associate James MacDonald, who has his large cast firing on all cylinders. They manoeuver through the technical intricacies of set changes built into the show as effortlessly as fish moving through water.
A Few Good Men is loosely based on a real-life story of Marines at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba (pre-Iraq) taking justice into their own hands to discipline a less-than-committed Marine in their midst.
“Hazing” is one o ...
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Graham Hicks’ review of Midsummer Night’s Dream Citadel Theatre, through April 29, 2012. There’s a great charm to Tom Wood’s 2012 take on Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s not only about the oh-so-talented young actors from the Citadel /Banff training program, with whom (Pride and Prejudice, As You Like It, Three Musketeers, Little Women) we are becoming quite familiar at this time of the year. As always, the program actors work their own magic, being so thoroughly professional, but so vital and enthusiastic and joyous. And they are a true ensemble, having been through an intensive six-week educational exercise far more binding than your usual rehearsal period. The charm is on top of this masterpiece of the English-speaking theatre, Shakespeare’s enormous talent turned to love, with three shows in one that continually interact, one with the other, of those inhabiting the supernatural world, the Athenian aristocracy and its working classes. Directo ...
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“Transformative” is already one of the most over-used descriptives of the 21st Century.
But “transformative” is the only way I can accurately describe the "new" Citadel Theatre that will debut for its 2012/13 season.
At first blush, it appears a game of cutting losses - The smaller “edgier” plays of the Rice Stage season are gone. Gone too is the Children’s Series, other than Christmas Carol.
Only six shows will be produced on the Shoctor and Maclab stages, three of them co-productions with the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre or Theatre Calgary.
Added is “Beyond the Stage,” a series of one-time cabarets in the Rice Theatre featuring leading Citadel performers, musicians and conversations (informal talks) with well-known contributors to the 2012/13 season who can command an audience.
The Citadel will also enthusiastically endorse and welcome other theatre companies to use its multiple-stage facilities. Touring shows, T ...
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