Fifteen years ago, Ralph Troschke drew up a bucket list.

He’d been acting since 1989, but had started placing himself into the director’s chair. From that perspective, he wrote down the shows he’d love to bring to the stage.

“I came up with about 16 plays in my life that I wanted to do,” he reflects.

Now, he’s in rehearsal for play number 10 on his list: Sinners. Written by Canadian playwright Norm Foster, and being presented as the final course in the St. Albert Dinner Theatre season, Sinners is a madcap murder mystery comedy: a man’s affair with a priest’s wife leads to snowballing lies and revelations as more people find themselves entangled in the situation.

Troschke first saw Sinners back in 1991: he recognized a rollicking good time when he saw it, and now, decades on, he’ll take his own crack at Foster’s script.

“This is perfect for dinner theatre,” he notes. It's absolutely funny. It's got a few twists in it that you don't see coming. It's a very nice, lovely piece.”

“[Foster’s] written about 70 titles,” Troschke notes. “This was his first play. I love his work, and I'm always drawn back to this, 'cause this is the one that made him famous. It's just zany.”

Troschke’s own stage career has unfolded all over the world, from interior British Columbia to Abu Dhabi. Now a VP at The King’s University, he’s spent the past few years focused on working with students. This marks his first time working with St Albert Dinner Theatre.

“They're a nicely organized group,” he says. “This is the first time as a director that I only have to worry about directing. I've actually got people worrying about marketing and getting props and getting costumes and the sets, and I don't have to do any of that. It's a very well-run group.”

As far as his shift from being on stage to directing the action goes, Troschke notes that the organizational side of directing suits him just as well as being onstage does.

“Directing is not for everybody,” he says. “You do have to have a bit of a vision, you do have to obviously have a bit of crowd control or classroom management skills. And that all just worked for me.”

“Sometimes I consider myself a bit of a walking Gantt chart,” he continues. “There is a business to directing—it's project management. And that also works with who I am, and I enjoy it. It's fun.”

Article Written by: Paul Blinov

 Sinners runs from March 27th to April 12th. Ticket and more information available at stalberttheatre.com.

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