THEATRE REVIEW

SEPTEMBER 2024 | Volume 243

 

United Players opens its season with an early, silly-sweet work from one of my favourite local writers, Lucia Frangione. Set on an Alberta farm in the 1980s, Chickens imagines an anthropomorphic barnyard with two roosters and two hens whose lives in some ways resemble those of farmer Pal (Joel Garner) and his wife, Liza (Jennifer Suratos). Somewhere in its evolution Chickens has become a musical with songs, dances, and a three-piece onstage band (Tim Howe, Casey Por, Carlina Dykstra).

Though Pal and Liza are barely hanging onto the family farm, Pal indulges in raising exotic, expensive chickens, much to Liza’s frustration. At times he seems to care more for his chickens than for his wife. The birds have their own dramas. Butter Ball (Cassie Unger), the prize winning beauty hen, courts neurotic rooster His Nibs (David Johnston); tough factory farm escapee hen Stewer (Aunye Jayde) hooks up with cocky cock Alphonso (Dustin Freeland).

The chickens are entertaining, but there’s not much plot other than Pal’s attempts to monetize them and Liza’s desire to turn them into chicken soup. One of the funniest bits has Pal training Alphonso to cluck to a Beethoven tune in preparation for the county fair, where all four chickens will have to excel or end up in a pot.

Director Christopher King has gotten his chicken actors to move and sound pretty realistically fowlish on Emily Dotson’s handsome slatted-wood set. Frangione’s cute, clever lyrics (“rooster” rhymes with “they usedter”) and Royal Sproule’s tuneful music make for some delightful songs, with Unger and Suratos the standout vocalists. Though no choreographer is credited in the program, the energetic dancing is impressively tight.

Behind all the silliness, Frangione gestures towards her usual concern with connecting the physical and spiritual. “Someday in heaven chickens will fly” goes one of the show’s best songs, and all the conflicts will resolve in the end because all you need is love.There are a lot worse ways to kick off the new theatrical year.

 

 

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