From Canadian plays to SpongeBob SquarePants, Expressions Theatre Festival returns in person for 2022
Arts Umbrella students mount full-scale productions at the year-end fest
Tuck Everlasting. Photo by Booklight Media
Arts Umbrella presents Expressions Theatre Festival from April 29 to June 19 at the Jack and Darlene Poole Theatre.
EXPRESSIONS THEATRE FESTIVAL is a momentous event: after a year of training, students in Arts Umbrella’s pre-professional theatre program and year-long intensive program get to bring their newly honed skills to the stage. It’s also a chance for arts fans to catch rising local stars.
Back in person for 2022, the fest features multiple productions, including Tuck Everlasting, a musical adaptation Natalie Babbitt’s popular children’s novel; SpongeBob SquarePants: The Musical, adapted from the iconic Nickelodeon series; and Treehouse, by Alexis Diamond and directed by Paul Moniz de Sá.
Stir caught up with Erika Babins, coordinator for the Robert M. Ledingham School of Theatre, Music & Film at Arts Umbrella—who is also the director and choreographer of Tuck Everlasting—to find out more about the wide-ranging 2022 event.
What feels special to you about this year’s Expressions Theatre Festival?
Our Expressions Theatre Festival is always special as it is the culmination of a year of hard work for our Pre-Professional Theatre Troupe students. This year, it feels extra special because for many students this is their second or third year in a troupe, but it’s their first show, as we did not have live performances in 2020 or 2021. As we begin closing in on our opening nights, with tickets on sale and posters up around the building, the excitement to create beautiful and resonant pieces of theatre is palpable among the students and creative teams.
Was there an overall direction or intention for the shows that were ultimately chosen, especially the two musicals?
While our five productions are all very different, they were all chosen in response to the last two years that we’ve all experienced, what we thought the students might like to explore, and what we thought would resonate with a 2022 audience, many of whom are coming back to the theatre for the first time since the pandemic.
With Tuck Everlasting, we have a musical exploring time: how time passes differently for different people, what it means to have too much of it, and what it means to not have enough of it when you have people you love ripped from your life before you are ready.
SpongeBob SquarePants: the Musical is, on the surface, a fun and bubbly show full of recognizable characters and toe-tapping music written by musicians as prolific as Sara Bareilles, Steven Tyler, Cyndi Lauper, and David Bowie, but it is also a story of being a good citizen by being actively involved in your community and striving to make that community a better place for everyone to live in—a theme that has come to forefront as organizations and individuals have been growing and learning to be better allies to traditionally marginalized communities in our societies.
Treehouse and Kindness are both Canadian plays, and we are thrilled to be able to showcase Canadian playwrights Alexis Diamond and Dennis Foon in our festival this year.
Treehouse explores growing up and choosing your own path despite parental pressure, timeless themes grown ever more poignant after two years of teenagers spending more time at home with their families than ever before. Kindness was written partly in response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and remains relevant today as students grappled with the devastating flooding that affected most of British Columbia in the fall of 2021.
Artificial Purpose was devised and written by the students who are performing it. It’s always fascinating to see what themes these students decide to explore. This year, conversations about the growing reach of technology in these young people’s lives evolved into discussions of lifelike artificial intelligence and the possible ramifications to human society.
Erika Babins
Do any bumps in the road come to mind when reflecting on the preparation for this year’s festival?
As this is the first time we are producing this festival in the Jack and Darlene Poole Theatre, there were many learning curves on how that would be done. We’ve also not produced a festival in three years, and we have new staff on board who weren’t around way back in 2019. And, as with any theatre company producing work this year, we have had to be so prepared to pivot at a moment’s notice. Would we be allowed into schools to tour our productions as we have in the past? Would field trips be allowed so that students could come and watch in-house school matinee performances? Would we be able to fill our audiences to full capacity? We’re so happy that at this point the answer to all of the above is yes, and yet we must always be prepared to shift and adjust, adapt and overcome.
How does it feel to have a full Expressions Theatre Festival returning for the first time since 2019?
Words can truly not describe how full-to-bursting the entire theatre, music, and film team at Arts Umbrella is to know we get to have our first festival since 2019! The first time I walked into the building and saw the promotional videos playing on our lobby screens, my face lit up. It has been a hard time to be a theatre artist—and to have been a teenage theatre artist, on the brink of these big steps in their lives and careers… Well, I can only imagine how challenging this time has been for them. Every next step towards getting in front of an audience has been thrilling. Costume fittings! Set design presentations! Technical rehearsals! It’s all happening, and we’re pinching ourselves that we are so lucky.
What are you most looking forward to about this year’s festival?
Making my first curtain speech in three years and getting to sit in the back of the house watching an enraptured audience witness and engage with these beautiful productions.
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