The season on Edmonton stages, highlights part one

Morningside Road, directed by Lana Michelle Hughes at Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

In Life of Pi, which launched the Citadel’s 60th anniversary season, the Indian teenager who finally washes ashore after an ocean-crossing with a Royal Bengal tiger, gets grilled by skeptics about his amazing story of survival. They use the word “impossible.” He uses the word” unexpected.”

Ah, that has a particular eloquence about theatre, the imaginative capture of stories, and theatre-making this past season. In a tough year of frozen grants, dwindling sponsorships, exponentially rising costs, theatre-makers in this theatre town made all of the above a test of ingenuity and persistence. And there were new plays, dance theatre pieces, unusual collaborations, experiments in audience engagement and scale on stages of every size.

Here are half a dozen (in no particular order) highlight productions, among the many I saw, that have stuck with me. Maybe they’ll trigger your own memories of the season.

Tough Guy by Hayley Moorhouse, Persistent Myth Productions at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson.

Tough Guy. This sinewy new play by Haley Moorhouse is perhaps the season’s toughest exploration, and artistic re-assessment, of storytelling in theatre. Its characters are five queer friends struggling to find their footing in the aftermath of a shooting in a gay nightclub that’s claimed the life of one of them. And Moorhouse’s play, which got a thrillingly theatrical premiere production from the indie company Persistent Myth in the Fringe Theatre season — an explosive cast directed by Brett Dahl — is all about how to tell a dimensional queer story, and why, in a harsh and violent world.

Deena Aziz, Troy Felman Davinder Malhi in Life of Pi, Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Life of Pi. In Haysam Kadri’s stunning production at the Citadel, a co-pro with Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, the captivating story of a boy, a tiger, a shipwreck, the bright blue Pacific, culled from the Booker-winning novel, got told in a dazzling way — design, lighting, sound, video, puppets, humans, all at the top of their game.… Richard Parker, tiger par excellence (Puppet Stuff Canada, with Braydon Dowler-Coltman and Troy Feldman at the controls). Pure theatrical magic.

Morningside Road. This new homegrown “Canadian Celtic musical,” which premiered at Shadow Theatre (their first-ever musical) directed by the company’s new artistic director Lana Michelle Hughes, was one of the surprise delights of the season, and one of my favourite shows. By Mhairi Berg (book and music) and Simon Abbott (music), it tells an intricate, romantic, inter-generational story — the stories we inherit and the mysterious ways they’re shaped and coloured by time and memory. Great songs, played live, and the smallness of the cast, three actors, is meaningful to the sense in which the past inhabits the present: what you inherit, what you become, what you imagine.

Scott Shpeley and Andrew Cecon, Cyrano de Bergerac, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Cyrano de Bergerac. One of the most impressive achievements of Jessy Ardern’s sparkling new adaptation of the Belle Époque Edmond Rostand verse romance, a Citadel commission, is that it somehow finds a language, a cadence, and a wild and playful effusion of poetry that is both of the period and contemporary. And it remains as playful and light on its feet as its witty nasally over-endowed hero who skewers hypocrisy and satirizes pomposity in verse, whilst dispatching people with sword in hand. Amanda Goldberg’s production, which looked beautiful onstage in the premiere production at the Citadel (a 3-way co-production with Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre and the Grand Theatre in London, Ont.), in Scott Shpeley found a Cyrano who’s as dexterous with rhyme as he is with sword.

Naomi Snieckus and Matt Baram, Baram and Snieckus at the Citadel Theatre, Photo by Nanc Price.

Big Stuff. It’s a play, yes, heartfelt and funny, about a marriage, about grief and joy, about the weird and wonderful way that homely objects, our stuff, connect us with people (and moments and memories) we’ve lost. But one of the best things about Big Stuff, by and starring the married couple Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus, is the warm and welcoming, unforced way this delightful pair, great improvisers both, make it easy for the audience to want to share their own stories. There’s magic in that, and the more I think about it the more I’m sure it’s about listening, really listening. A loveable show.

Louise Casemore in Lucky Charm, Found Festival 2025. Photo by Brianne Jang

Lucky Charm. This intricate show, by and starring Louise Casemore as the widow of the great escapologist Harry Houdini, is a séance — conducted by someone who, famously, didn’t believe in séances. An intriguingly odd dynamic to begin with, which happened at very close quarters for an audience of 16 gathered around a table in the atmospheric clutter of a basement in a house on a placid residential street in Hazeldean. Gradually, what emerged in the course of Lucky Charm, which was developed at Common Ground’s Found Festival, was not only a backstage look at a fascinating historical character, a New York showgirl who paid a big career price for being a celebrity’s partner, but a group portrait of the lost Jazz Age. Magic, flashing lights, and an alert, quick-witted performer who’s there to undermine your own skepticism.