Arts & Culture

What: Samca
Where: North Property of Black Creek Pioneer Village, 1000 Murray Ross Pkwy.
When: Now, until Sat., Oct. 5
Highlight: The show’s Greek chorus, an octet of forest spirits
Rating: NNNN (out of 5)
Why you should go: Samca lives up to its tantalizing supernatural concept.

THE JOURNEY TO Riot King and Spindle Collective’s immersive horror musical Samca could be a challenge on The Amazing Race Canada. You first travel half an hour north on the TTC’s Line 1, to Highway 407 Station. Then, as cars whiz by, you walk south for 10 minutes until you reach a gate that opens onto a forest clearing. There, beneath slips of yew, a cauldron bubbles with Natalia Bushnik and Kathleen Welch’s potent, fable-like potion of a show.

Directed by Riot King creative director Brendan Kinnon, the 90-minute production generates a thick atmosphere with the plot almost secondary. Still: set in late-19th-century Romania, the show concerns a pair of orphaned sisters, the 15-year-old Miha (Bushnik) and the 21-year-old Prava (Welch). After a sexual assault leaves the wide-eyed Miha pregnant, Prava finds herself stepping into a kind of matriarchal role despite having trauma of her own to sort through.

Witch-related musicals are their own genre at this point: although Wicked’s the obvious pick, a recent entry is Lucy Kirkwood and Dave Malloy’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches, which premiered at the National Theatre in London, England last year. For more, look to the Toronto Fringe skies, where a pair entitled Omen: The Musical and So Mote It Be, played in 2019 and 2022 respectively.

So, it’s refreshing that Bushnik and Welch relegate the show’s witchiness to the realm of subtext. Prava and Miha whisper about someone named Samca, who steals children from their parents, often right from the womb. But this malevolent figure, for the most part, remains an enigmatic off-stage presence. More prominent are the Zâne, an octet of spirits that lurk in the forest, acting as guides to the sisters as well as the show’s Greek chorus.

The Samca design team deftly navigates their unconventional space. Franco Pang’s sanguine lighting and Ciaran Connaire’s rustic wood set are both surprisingly complex, considering the production’s scrappy indie scale. And while the audience sits in one location for most of Samca, the show’s conflagrant climax occurs in the round with standing spectators forming a kind of witch’s circle in the middle of a barren field as lights flash and realism peels away.

No sound designer is credited, likely because the cast performs Welch’s bewitching music without amplification — a welcome choice, even if it means competing with yelping raccoons and speeding trucks. The Zâne supplement this ambience with backing music played on a bevy of stringed instruments, an element that heats up toward Samca’s second half.

The performances are seriously physical. The Zâne can often be spotted on their hands and knees, climbing through grass and dirt. But when the actors do open their mouths, clarity abounds; through whatever distractions, they guide us through the narrative with a confident, forceful hand. There are, if anything, a scattering of moments when the performers push too hard — yet as the run progresses and they settle into the material, I’m sure they’ll find places to sprinkle in a dash more restraint.

Does Samca frighten? I’m not so sure. But its runic aura vibrates with mystery, and its moon-silvered visual world envelops — so I’d say the show more than lives up to its tantalizing supernatural concept.