New winter theatre festival launches

Snow globes are enchanting worlds all unto themselves. Tip them over, shake them up and they create an even more magical tableaux.

Using these miniaturized landscapes as inspiration, Ellen Chorley of Promise Productions is launching the inaugural family-focused Snow Globe Festival of Children’s Theatre Dec. 20 to 24 at Alberta Avenue Theatre.

“There are a lot of Christmas events going on at this time of year, but a lot of them are quite pricey. We wanted do something more affordable for families – something like the Children’s Festival in St. Albert,” says Chorley.

Chorley, who has been gaining a lot of attention in the last four years with her slightly off-the-wall Fringe shows (Not Evil Stepmother, Too Tall Princess and Cinderella the Wizard) is hoping the festival will grow into an Edmonton tradition.

“We’ve had a lot of success at the Fringe and we wanted to extend our season to the winter. We wanted to do different scripts and we wanted to do shows focused on a winter theme.”

Keeping that mandate in mind, Chorley has programmed three family productions.

One is a dramatization of C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

Miss Electricity is a comedy about Violet, a normal fifth grader who gets hit by lightning twice and comes to believe she can control electricity with her thoughts.

“Miss Electricity has a great take on bullying. At first she thinks she can scare the bullies by using electricity. Then she realizes she can’t control anyone else and rises above it.”

Also back by popular demand is Promise Productions 2010 Fringe hit, The Fairy Catcher’s Companion, a tale of two sisters who have been shunted off to their aunt’s drafty manor while their mother goes searching for their missing father in Japan.

“These are two girls on the cusp of becoming teenagers and they’re having to deal with the grief that their father never came home from World War II.”

Each play runs once every night at rotating times. The festival starts at 6:30 p.m.

During an intermission between set changes, Chorley has scheduled Holiday Half-Time Show. About half a dozen singers including St. Albert Children’s Theatre alumna Arielle Ballance and Peter Pan star Luc Tellier are among the entertainers.

Prepare to enjoy an unconventional spin on a mix of songs from Frosty the Snowman and Last Christmas to Once Upon a December and Six White Boomers.

Tellier, who has been collecting snow globes since he was six, will decorate the theatre with his landscapes.

“I was transfixed by them and they became what I wanted them to be. I thought I was the mastermind behind them,” says Tellier who has about 30 in his collection.

Other locally connected artists are former SACT instructors Eric Wigston as Peter in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Andrea Gilborn, choreographer for Miss Electricity. SACT alumnus Brendan Fraser directs The Holiday Half-Time Show.

There’s a heightened buzz circling the festival. As Ballance says, “There’s nothing like it in Edmonton, and it’s such a good way to bring families together. And it’s always nice to do something different.”