One of the highlights of my theatre season is attending Alberta Theatre Project’s Holiday presentation. I have fond memories of the puppets of Pinocchio, the fantasy world of Peter Pan, and the orphans of Oliver Twist, especially as these shows are the ones I often take my “nieces” to see each year. This year I am very excited to take them to Sherwood Forest for The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood running until December 28th.
The show features an all-star cast, including Ryan Luhning as Robin Hood, Rebecca Northan as Maid Marion, and Tyler Rive as Little John. Haysam Kadri, whose performance last year as the villainous Fagin was a show stealer once again, as he shows his bad guy side as The Sheriff of Nottingham.
Jeffrey Pitcher, who wrote 2006’s Peter Pan, has reworked this age-old story into a new script. It is the classic tale of an acrobatic champion of the oppressed, who robs from the rich to give to the poor. I remember seeing the Disney cartoon and the Kevin Costner version as a child, and while the heart of the story remains the same, each variation is unique.
One of the often forgotten things in theatre is the set, and ATP has had some spectacular sets in its history, from the overwhelming to the subtle. We caught up with set designer Roger Schultz to inquire as to how he transformed the Martha Cohen theatre so effectively into Sherwood Forest.
“We have a big show on stage, it is a brand new script we are working with and the playwright has written some major locations into it – the throne room of a castle, to the dungeon, to several locations in Sherwood Forest. The challenge was how to tell an epic adventure story like Robin Hood and give that sense of grandeur and adventure and still make it manageable for the company to produce it. Part of the challenge is because we go from castle interiors to the forest - to find some sort of unifying element that would suggest those different locations. So I have come up with a bit of a way to present the forest as a constant, with an enormous background with castle elements that are shown through it.”
Another challenge is the “thrust” configuration of the stage, which juts out into the theatre with the audience on three sides.
“Sightlines are always a big problem with thrust, and they are multiplied in the Martha Cohen because it has a lot of difficult sightlines to deal with. Generally for a thrust arrangement a great deal of the scenery is kept upstage and what is presented downstage is quite sparse. The downstage area is kept nice and clear and the director is able to use that for blocking.”
Schultz designed the costumes for Oliver Twist and spoke of the appeal of working on a family oriented performance.

”With this kind of show, what is fun about it is you get to push the envelope in terms of style. Being a family show and something that is geared towards children it is fun to play with colour a bit more, you can go a little more extreme with costuming and styles and the way you dress people than with a more dramatic, subtly written piece.”
Schultz has been doing theatre design “since the beginning of time” and spoke fondly of Alberta Theatre Projects.
“They are just good people. That has been my experience around them, this is my third show with them. Even after the first show I was welcomed here very warmly and felt a nice community and family feeling. It is a company that has their heart in the right place. I don’t think they are doing theatre for self-serving purposes but because they want to put a good product on stage.”
Schultz takes a great deal of pride in seeing his work come to life. While it is often the actors that get the praise, set design is such a vital aspect of theatre.
“My work on the stage is visual images that I present up there. A design and the acting on stage, ideally you want that to meld and homogenize into one event. It should appear as a unified whole, and it is ideal if I as a designer sort of disappear. Design is an ever-present influence on that stage and never goes away. It becomes a subconscious influence that hopefully is telling the story and affecting the atmosphere and world of the play. It is the ultimate to have that happen - it is quite a feeling of satisfaction. It is not from accolades but from seeing a piece work on stage, [and evolve] from the original ideas that were floating in my head much earlier. It is really satisfying to see that come to life and see it working the way it was envisioned in the first place.”
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood
November 26th – December 28th, 2008
Alberta Theatre Projects
www.atplive.com