PREVIEW
When God Comes for Breakfast, You Don’t Burn the Toast and A Mad Breakfast
St. Albert Dinner Theatre
April 26 to 28, May 3 to 5 and 10 to 12
Kinsmen Banquet Hall
47 Riel Dr.
Tickets: Regular $55, students/seniors $50 Call 780-222-0102 or visit www.stalbert.greatwest.ca
St. Albert Dinner Theatre closes its three-part season with food for laughter.
Tomorrow night the company opens with a double bill: Gary Apple’s When God Comes for Breakfast, You Don’t Burn the Toast and Isabel McReynold’s A Mad Breakfast.
The only thing theses one-act comedies have in common is a dining experience. A Mad Breakfast, with 10 cast members, is your classic one-act farce from Vaudeville Days set in a boarding house. Practical jokers Mr. Jones and Miss Brown inform their guests that a wealthy visitor, Mr. Long, is curious about their hobbies.
Mr. Long is actually interested in studying inmates, and Jones tells the scientist that his boarding house is a lunatic asylum. Chaos and confusion become the buzzwords as the madness ends in a séance.
When God Comes for Breakfast, You Don’t Burn the Toast instead revs into high gear when Harry (Kelly Aisenstat) forgets to tell his wife, Beatrice, (Tracy Aisenstat) that God (Liz Allchin) is stopping by for a casual breakfast the next morning.
Instead of casting a male in the traditional role of God, director Emily Pole gave the role to a woman.
“Liz is fantastic. She has grace and confidence and she has this wonderful accent. Liz is just a beautiful human being and you can see her being God,” said Pole, a 2016 theatre performance graduate from Red Deer College.
Theatre is Pole’s passion and in between volunteering as director, she splits her time working at Citadel Theatre and rehearsing for The Balance due to open May 4.
Directing two diverse plays – one with a three-member cast and the other a 10-actor ensemble – has diverse challenges.
“I find it very manageable. Although we have different casts, we have one goal. With a small cast it’s very intimate. With the big cast, we work as an ensemble to tell the story, and certainly you can do more.”
Since the two plays occur in two different eras – Mad Breakfast in the 1930s and God Comes for Breakfast in the 1980s – technical director Donna Beeston has created a revolving set for flexible quick changes.
Pole closes by saying, “If you like to sit back and watch actors having a good time playing these insane characters, come down. It’s all-around family fun and a really good time.”
