The Great Gatsby, Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre/ Grand Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
You can’t be thinking about staying home, not this weekend. Edmonton, you have a stellar array of choices for nights out at the theatre this weekend.
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A much anticipated new stage adaptation of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s glittering 1925 Jazz Age novel, commissioned by the Citadel, premieres there this week, in a three-way collaboration with the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre and the Grand Theatre in London Ont.
This American masterwork is reimagined for the theatre by Erin Shields, the prolific Canadian playwright who has made something of a specialty of adapting classics (including, amazingly, Paradise Lost) for the theatre through a contemporary, feminist lens. Citadel audiences saw her spare, smart version of Jane Eyre in 2022.
Daryl Cloran’s production of The Great Gatsby, designed for a cast of 12, assembled from across the country, is led by Duncan Cox as the enigmatic Jay Gatsby. It includes Tess Benger as Gatsby’s dream woman Daisy Buchanan, Timothy Dowler-Coltman as Tom Buchanan, Richard Lee Hsi as narrator Nick Carraway. And since it’s party time at Gatsby’s place, the actors are joined onstage by a live four-piece jazz band.
This premiere production runs through November 22. Tickets: 780-425-1820 or citadeltheatre.com.
Frank Moher in Boy Player at Western Edge Theatre, and the season-opener at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo from website.
•Opening the Workshop West Playwrights Theatre season is a tragicomic memoir by — and starring! — one of the country’s premier veteran playwrights. In Boy Player Edmonton-born Frank Moher, who has a long and distinguished history with Workshop West, tells the remarkable true cross-border story of his boyhood self, a prairie kid orphaned at 12 and abruptly transplanted to New York City. And it’s intertwined with a real-life love story (and the startlingly similar experience of a young woman named Diana). Plus young Frank’s discovery of … musical theatre. So, yes, there’s music.
The production, from Western Edge Theatre, a company started by Moher himself in 2002, is directed by its artistic director Jonathan Greenway. A homecoming for Moher, it runs at the Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd. through Nov. 15. Have a peek at ’s preview interview with Moher here. Tickets (all pay-what-you-will) : workshopwesttheatre.org.
Patricia Darbasie and Linda Grass in Iron Matron, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, bb collective photography
•Continuing at Northern Light, but only through Saturday night, is a new Trevor Schmidt comedy with a richly comic visual (and aural) premise. In Iron Matron, a 60something woman — mid-divorce, forced into moving in with her son and his wife — fights back against the humiliations of time and aging, and undertakes a defiant act of self-reinvention. She contacts her old college roommate, long-estranged, to start a heavy metal garage band. What could possibly go … ah yes, they advertise for a drummer who turns out to be a professional musician.
NLT newcomer Pamela Shmunk stars as the disaffected Alice, joined onstage (and in the garage) in Schmidt’s premiere production by Linda Grass and Patricia Darbasie. Check out the PREVIEW here. Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com.
The cast of Persuasion by Katherine Koller, Concordia University of Edmonton. Rehearsal shot by Mat Simpson
•Another unveiling happens at Concordia University, where a new stage adaptation of Jane Austen’s last novel Persuasion, by Edmonton playwright Katherine Koller, happens this weekend through Sunday. In Persuasion, published posthumously in 1817 and widely regarded as her most mature novel, our heroine, who’d succumbed to social pressure to break off her engagement with a man of slender means, encounters him again seven years later. Will love get a second chance?
CUE professor Caroline Howard department, directs the student production. Tickets: eventbrite.ca.
Omote (面), at Mile Zero Dance. Shion Skye Carter and Miya Turnbull. Photo from MZD website.
•On the Mile Zero Dance mainstage Friday and Saturday is a fascinating collaboration between two artists from opposite ends of the country, Vancouver dancer Shion Skye Carter and Halifax mask-maker Miya Turnbull. Their co-creation Omote ((面) explores layers of personality and identity by using papier-mâché masks in its choreography. Tickets: milezerodance.com.
•In one of their kookiest, most intriguing ideas ever (which is setting the barre high with these guys), Rapid Fire Theatre, Edmonton’s deluxe improv company, goes all out surreal and unleashes a new David Lynch-style entertainment. Grin Peaks runs Friday and Saturday, with a different opening act each night. Tickets: showpass.com.