Thinking big: the Citadel’s Collider Festival is back with new plays for Size Large stages

Think big or go … wait. There’s a mantra not often heard in Canadian theatre, where “size matters,” another multi-purpose catchphrase, almost always really means “think smaller.”

Thinking big is the agenda of Collider, the festival that returns to the Citadel Friday for a sixth annual weekend edition. Named for the collision of artists, art forms, inspirations on a scale, potential producers, Collider is all about developing new plays that will resonate on Size Large performance mainstages — like the Citadel’s own pair of 700-seat theatre siblings the Maclab and the Shoctor — across the country and beyond. In an age when small and indie companies are shrinking further, that’s a niche ready for occupation.

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And Collider can already claim its successes — the Citadel premieres of  Jessy Ardern’s Cyrano de Bergerac, the Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman/ Hawksley Workman musical Almost A Full Moon, Erin Shields’ adaptation of Jane Eyre, Holly Lewis’s original ultra-farce The Fiancée among them.

Five new scripts, poised for productions on big stages, get readings in this year’s Collider lineup: a new musical about a quintessentially Canadian true crime, a dark comedy/satire, a period adaptation, a high-style mystery comedy farce, a bi-country bilingual multi-character solo show. Four have been in progress in the Citadel’s Playwrights Lab; the fifth, Darcy & Wickham by Belinda Cornish, is a new Citadel commission.

The Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist: The Great Canadian Musical, by the team of Mhairi Berg (book) and Steven Greenfield (music), is inspired by a bizarre, (very) Canadian, true crime story, the theft in 2012 of 3,330 tons of maple syrup, $18 million worth, from the Québec Maple Syrup Producers warehouse.

Edmonton audiences know playwright/actor/improviser Berg’s work most recently from her Celtic-flavoured musical Morningside Road (with Simon Abbott) that premiered at Shadow Theatre this season. This new musical, similarly intricate and with an amalgam of Québecois folk, pop and Broadway-esque music, “weaves a beautiful, personal family story” into the narrative of the crime caper, as Citadel associate artistic director and Collider curator Mieko Ouchi describes. Friday night’s reading of Act I (a cast of eight directed by Dave Horak), will include three songs from the new piece.

With Come Hell Or High Water, an “apocalyptic comedy” as billed (“impending doom but with a Disney theme”), Nicole Moeller ventures farther into left-field comedy than her usual artistic turf. It’s set at a kids’ birthday party, “and isn’t there a special place in hell for birthday parties?” laughs Ouchi. Seven parents, who have nothing in common except having kids, are trapped there, and it’s the end of the world. Tracy Carroll directs a seven-actor cast — six adults and “a child playing a child” (the accomplished young Aubrey Malacad). Ouchi describes the new Moeller play as “sharp, biting satire,” and cites God of Carnage and Clybourne Park as points of reference.

An Agatha Christie Mystery A Comedy, which Ouchi describes admiringly as “really playful and fun, really silly, a great big ol’ farce,” is by Col Cseke, the artistic director of Calgary’s Inside Out Theatre, purveyors of much weightier, issue-freighted, often verbatim, fare. Cseke’s play is inspired by the true story of the never-explained 11-day disappearance of the queen of mystery writing in 1926. A kooky series of Christie caricatures — nosey neighbours, amateur sleuths, addled witnesses — arrives at her door, guarded by a hapless detective. Karen Johnson-Diamond directs.

Darcy & Wickham, by the playwright/actor/director improviser Belinda Cornish, is based on the novel Follies Past by Edmonton writer Melanie Kerr, an Austen devoté of long-standing. A prequel of sorts to Pride and Prejudice, it’s spun from the backstory of the mysterious Mr. Darcy and his sister Georgiana, whose childhood friend Mr. Wickham will play such a dramatic role in the Jane Austen novel. And, says Ouchi, it taps the appeal of living, for a while in the theatre, in that Regency world. Brian Deedrick directs a nine-actor cast in the Collider reading.

The line-up includes a music-infused solo play, Alexandra Lainfiesta’s Chula — à la Made in Italy and Burning Mom, says Ouchi. Set in Edmonton in 2008, spooling back in time to the 1990s and Guatemala in the ‘80s, where the protagonist aspires to be a professional singer. Performed in both English and Spanish, it’s a blend of music and multi-character storytelling. The reading directed by the Chilean-Canadian artist Mariló Núñez, stars Daniela Fernandez.

Nick Green (Casey and Diana, The Last Timbit) leads a Saturday workshop on musical theatre book-writing. And on Sunday, director Núñez explores the very specialized playwriting method of the Cuban writer Maria Irene Fornes.

Collider runs Friday through Sunday at the Citadel. For the full schedule of readings (all free) and workshops, and workshop registration, see citadeltheatre.com.