THEATRE GOES GOBLIN MODE
THEATRE PREVIEW
Pointy-eared actors to stage Shakespeare tragedy
A gleeful genre mashup, Goblin:Macbeth swaps out human actors for a different kind of thespian. (Tim Nguyen photo)
THEATRE PREVIEW
GOBLIN:MACBETH
Tom Hendry Warehouse
Opens Thursday, runs to Nov. 8
Tickets $23-$54 at royalmtc.ca
ALTHOUGH they star in an upcoming local production of the Scottish Play, goblin thespians Wug, Kragva and Moog left it to director Rebecca Northan to handle publicity and interviews.
Were they also scared to utter the real title — saying “Macbeth” inside a theatre is believed to be bad luck — aloud?
“The goblins don’t know anything about our superstitions,” says Northan, an actor-writer-improv artist who last season performed and directed Murder-on-the-Lake, an immersive murder-mystery, for the Shaw Festival.
Northan, who co-created Goblin:Macbeth with Bruce Horak and Ellis Lalonde, can’t speak for her folkloric co-workers, but says the Halloweenish trio were inspired to mount the show after being impressed by Shakespeare’s firm grasp on the realm of fantasy.
Northan started at Calgary’s Loose Moose Theatre, studying under artistic director Keith Johnstone, who in 1967 founded the Time Machine, Britain’s first improvisational troupe, according to biographer Theresa Robbins Dudeck, who was made Johnstone’s literary executor in 2012, moving his archives to Stanford University after his death in 2023 at age 90.
Director Rebecca Northan is handling publicity on behalf of her interview-shy cast. (Supplied)
Though Johnstone didn’t live to catch the Goblins on tour — which has included stops at the Stratford Festival — he saw a comedic production of Macbeth that Northan had produced at the Loose Moose in the mid-1990s.
“He loved it, and at the same time said, ‘This is exactly how Shakespeare should be done for young people,’” recalls Northan of the late improv innovator.
“We still use that edited version of Macbeth for the goblins,” she says, adding that it was from Johnstone, a favourite professor at the University of Calgary, that she learned “to take care of the audience as though they are your best house guests.”
The result for the touring company Spontaneous Productions has been that Goblin:Macbeth plays as a gleeful genre mashup, and an adoring send-up, of the complete works of two British-born polymaths — Shakespeare and Johnstone, who hailed from Devon, not Avon.
The idea for the goblins started with the mask, Northan says.
Impressed by the creative output of Baton Rouge, La.-based mask fabrication firm Composite Effects, Northan showed Spontaneous Theatre co-founder Bruce Horak some work by the Louisiana firm, which makes more than 100 masks they categorize as “undead.”
Those ones were the stuff of reasonable nightmares, but the silicone goblin masks — devious, horrible, but still flexible enough to convey the pitfalls and glory of dramatic human emotion — caught their eyes.
“I turned to Bruce, and it just popped out of my mouth: ‘Don’t you think this mask does Shakespeare?’ and Bruce looked at the picture and he went, ‘Well, yeah, obviously,’” says Northan.
Soon after uncovering the masks, Northan and Horak saw their price tag, and — hoping to develop a stage version of Hamlet starring goblins — they applied for, but didn’t receive, funding from the Canada Council for the Arts for the production.
In 2022, Calgary’s the Shakespeare Company needed a last-minute replacement for a two-person production of Macbeth that was sidelined in Quebec by COVID-19 diagnoses.
“And then my phone rang, and (the company was) like, ‘What have you got?’” Northan says.
The masks and the creatures beneath them take the stage at the Tom Hendry Warehouse Wednesday through Nov. 8, dressed in costumes designed by Philip Edwards.
After retiring from a career in IT consulting in 2019, Edwards moved to Stratford, Ont., where Northan took note of her neighbour’s impeccable tailoring.
“He made his own dress shirts and blue jeans,” says Northan, who knocked on his door to offer him his first professional costume design gig on the strength of his sketches.
According to his obituary, published after Edwards died by choice in May 2024, his “most recent accomplishment was to design and produce costumes for the Stratford production of Goblin:Macbeth.”
Asked to disclose the behind-the-mask names of the performers Wug, Kragva and Moog, Northan declined, stating the hidden-identity intent of their Goblin universe, which includes Goblin: Oedipus and will soon include Goblin: Christmas Carol.
“The original dream for us is we want to be the Daft Punk of classical theatre,” says Northan. Something seriously silly this way comes.
ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com
The improv community locally has been flourishing, says Sim, with a healthy appetite for improv training by performers and enthusiasts who practice the art form in order to enrich their lives and build teamwork and confidence in their onstage skill sets.
The Improv Company, co-founded by Sim and Curtis, now welcomes more than 100 students each week to its multi-level training programs. In May, the company, which produces the festival, moved into a new dedicated improv studio in the South Osborne XChange building (421 Mulvey Ave. E).
“Our first round of fall classes just began,” says Sim, who calls the studio the city’s first dedicated improv education space.
And, after a pandemic pause, the festival has once again begun to resemble a lively petri dish of cross-species, cross-border experimentation.
The ability to mix and match comedic communities and voices is what activates each festival’s unique trajectory: visiting artists not only perform with seasoned local artists on stage, but frequently offer expert workshops for improv acolytes who are earlier in their careers, less developed in their stagecraft, or simply interested in witnessing the lightning-in-a-bottle act of collaborative creation.
This year’s improv festival, which begins tonight, draws guest performers from the United Kingdom (Chris Mead and Katy Schutte), Montreal (Kristina Guevarra and Mason Persaud) and Alberta (Red Deer’s Jenna Goldade).
Goldade, an improviser with the company Bullskit, will direct the first act of Friday’s Halloween show, Spooky Scary Skeletons.
Guevarra, a Winnipegger who now runs the English-language improv program at Montreal’s Théâtre Sainte Catherine, will host a free improv workshop on Sunday afternoon for BIPOC community members. The Ecole Kelvin High School-trained improviser belongs to the Montreal troupe Grease Trap, which won best local troupe at this year’s Montreal Sketchfest.
Persaud is a member of the Montreal sketch troupe Tandem Jump, which toured North America this past summer.
Also expected to perform in the ensemble are local improvisers Kevin Ramberran, Kristen Einarson, Jesse Bergen, Kerri Wolosyn, Cuinn Joseph and Mo Gauthier. Musician Mike Turner — a frequent performer with Winnipeg’s Impressions Jazz Group — will provide the tracks behind the laughs.
Barring interstellar turbulence, one more visitor will join the festival while on leave from Starfleet.
Known for playing Sam Kirk — James T.’s younger brother — on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, actor Dan Jeannotte, in Winnipeg on a film shoot, was a late addition to the lineup.
Jeannotte met Sim years ago at the Winnipeg fringe while performing as a touring artist with Montreal troupe Uncalled For, an act that has won multiple Just For Laughs awards.
The actor — who also appeared in TV series such as The Bold Type and The Good Witch — will take the stage Saturday night as part of the Winnipeg Improv Festival’s Grand Finale Show, a two-act program that begins with newly created work by the festival ensemble and closes with Schutte and Mead’s Project2, a live-improvised science-fiction theatre production.