On the last Wednesday of each month, just after recess, the Third and Fourth Graders were gathered and settled in rows, cross-legged, on the floor of the gymnasium. A noisy anticipation echoed in the large space as the teachers moved to the sidelines and the School Principal stepped forward to introduce the familiar visitors standing behind him. There was a quick silence and applause as he stepped out of the way and the two ladies, one very tall and thin and one very short and stout, took their places. They were grey-haired, in their sixties. Both wore hats (all ladies wore hats in those days) and print dresses, and the very tall lady had a large accordion slung over her shoulders. Behind them a small table and a felt board on an easel had been set up. The stage was set.

The first full, loud accordion chords filled the space and the children, recognizing the introduction – for they had sung this many times before – began to sing at the top of their lungs, “Tell me the stories of Jesus! I long to hear things I would ask him to tell me if He were near!” The words, of course, were on the felt board and the stout lady used a small wooden pointer to guide the young eyes along and conduct them, but the words had been memorized long ago. There was something comfortable about knowing the words, something secure that could be hung on to and envelope a young mind in this elementary school sea of daily challenges.

The music ended and the story began. It was the lead-up to Easter Week and the felt board served as the stage on which the story of The Passion would play out, narrated by the very tall lady (who had now disposed of her instrument) and assisted by the stout lady moving the printed felt characters around the board and speaking their lines. Toward the end, two crosses were placed on opposite sides of the board leaving a space in the middle.

“Can anyone help us tell the rest of the story?” said the very tall lady.

Hands shot up before the request was finished and a boy at the front was chosen. He was placed in front of the felt board between the two crosses and his arm was raised in the air. The stout lady reached into her bag and brought out a fluffy white lamb. As the tall lady spoke, she stout lady began to place small black squares on the lamb.

“These are the sins of the world”, she said. “These are your sins and God has placed them on the lamb for you”.

With a long piece of yarn the stout lady lashed the lamb on to the boy’s raised arm and began to slowly remove the black squares. The tall lady took up her accordion and began to play as the children sang, “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine. Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine”! The lamb was untied from the boy’s arm and placed in his hand, held high, as he was guided about the gymnasium by the stout lady in resurrected triumph, voices yelling “This is my story, this is my song”, reverberating off the walls and down the halls, a glorious culmination, the finale ultimo, all eyes on the boy, now the Lamb being sung to, entreating the huge supporting cast of children to become a part of the ritual, part of the great drama being played out in their midst.

I was that eight-year-old boy and that was how theatre came into my life.

It is still so vivid on every level – the polished yellow flooring, the climbing ropes just off to the left, the jumbles of clothing colours and me marching through the crowd. I wasn’t just entering objectively into the idea of the story. This was very subjective. Without preparation, without words, I was the center of the ceremony, controlling the ritual. Without truly understanding, it was incredibly ego-centric and self-serving. It was personal validation and oh, so wonderful! To have that kind of attention and being acknowledged as the sole focus filled me with a personal power like nothing ever had before. There was no turning back.

But it wasn’t until years later that I experienced that feeling again. In those days, there were no Drama Clubs, no after-school activities to foster a young creative mind. Cub Scouts was the conduit of our energies. “A-kay-la, we’ll do our best; we’ll dib, dib, dib”. Skits in the living room at home and singing in the Children’s Choir at church were the only outlets and church was where I discovered my voice. Choir Soprano, Bertha Taylor, an imperious, big-bosomed thrush (to quote Dylan Thomas) was my biggest fan. She encouraged me, applauded me and pushed me forward. I sang to please her and myself and a wink from Bertha behind her horn-rimmed glasses, was a wonderful gift. But I left Bertha behind when I started high school, searching to re-capture those feelings of validation and acceptance.

My next foray onto the stage was a lot more “formal”. My recollections are more atmospheric rather than detailed. In the Eighth Grade I was cast (somehow – I don’t remember auditioning) as Bob Cratchit in a production of “A Christmas Carol” at Montreal High School. I recall nothing of the process, performances, the cast or the Director. What I do remember, so clearly, is that the performances were during the first period for the school assembled in the Auditorium (a picture of which is to the left here and was taken in the “old” days, long before the Planetarium was added at the back in the space behind the seats). What I do remember was getting off the St. Catherine Street bus at seven in the morning and trudging up University Street, the city still quiet and dark, hearing my boots crunch on the new snow silently falling, then going through the school’s main doors and into the still dark auditorium. I remember the smell of the wooden seats and the slight aroma of adolescence in the air, and walking down the side aisle, up the stairs into the backstage area and another smell, this time, grease paint, sticks in gold wrapping, Leichner, to be specific, welcoming me into the magic and mystical world which, little did I know at the time, would become my life. The other indelible memory was Bob Cratchit’s costume: a wrinkled linen shirt, waistcoat, top coat and unlined wool pants. Unlined! The sensation is still with me, akin to the cub scouts green scratchy wool sweaters we wore to pack meetings!

There are always basics in the Theatre, elements of production that help to bring together a character, sometimes thought-out, sometimes not. This was one of the “not” times. I guess it was during a time when the actor’s comfort wasn’t really thought about all that much in the Theatre. You wore what was given to you. But it has stuck with me all these years. “A Christmas Carol” became, over a very long period of time, a play that I would return to over and over again in so many incarnations, but always, at the root of the those later experiences, was the memory of the smell of the greasepaint and the feel of those pants.

Okay, I’m not going to go through a microscopic breakdown of all the roles I’ve played, so you can relax … a bit. In thinking this out, I’ve realized that there are some big lessons I learned in those formative years and the next major signpost were the four summers I spent at the Banff School of Fine Arts. Initially, I enrolled in the Singing and Opera Department. I could sing after all and this was a great opportunity to find out if I was really any good. Well, I sort of was, but after two summers of really heavy duty vocal work and appearing in the Choruses of “Tosca” and “Marriage of Figaro”, I thought perhaps there were other options to check out. I had become the youngest member of the Montreal Opera Company in 1963, working “with” Irving Guttman and Zubin Mehta (yeah, some name dropping there – they were the bosses, I was yet again a lowly Chorus member) and appeared in four pretty huge productions. Between the Banff School and the Opera Company I was consumed by singing but this Opera thing was too hard! In hindsight (I was only 19 at the time), perhaps I shouldn’t have given up so easily and that was the lesson.

Discipline is hard! Perseverance is hard. I have nothing but total admiration for and am awed by people who can sing Opera. Maintaining focus and following through is hard, and when it comes easily and one isn’t being challenged, the passion wanes. I admit now that I didn’t have the voice or, more specifically, the stamina for Opera, although I can produce a “legit” sound when needed. In future years I was cast in some small Opera roles, found a niche in the Character Roles in Gilbert and Sullivan, sang on some pretty big stages (Edmonton Opera, Calgary Opera, Manitoba Opera) and was cast in some wonderful non-singing roles (‘Frosch’ in “Fledermaus”, ‘Hortensius’ in “Daughter of the Regiment”).  But fortunately, in my third summer at Banff, the Musical Theatre Department was started and I’ve really never looked back. The accessibility of the music, the naturalism of the stories and characters, the excitement and energy of dancing and singing at the same time got me sold pretty fast.

In the summer of ’66 following Banff, I was cast as part of the Company at the Acadia Summer Playhouse in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Putting on eleven shows in twelve weeks sums up that experience. This was Nirvana, baptism by fire and overwhelming all at the same time. Sadly, there are few venues for young people to experience that kind of intensity these days. We did EVERYTHING, from building the sets to creating the big roadside signs each week advertising the shows. We rehearsed during the day and performed at night. The shows only lasted a week and you were lucky if you were completely off book by closing. It was INTENSE!! But I can remember the sense of Company that set in very quickly. We had to depend on each other, trust each other and care about each other. And what is Theatre without that kind of Community. I devoured those days! They were thick and full and crowded and wonderfully all-encompassing! They were my standard for the years to come. Above are old photos of me as ‘Cable’ in “South Pacific” and ‘Lun Tha’ in “King and I”. That first year (I returned in 1968) I also did ‘Bumble’, ‘Mute’, ‘Tranio’, ‘Jimmy’, ‘Will’ and ‘Enoch’. One never had a week off. If you weren’t in a show, you were still working, either backstage or in the box office. I’m breathless thinking about it.

The following year was very different. I was in my second year in the Theatre Department at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia) and completely immersed in performing. I was cast as ‘Baby Boy’ (left), an aging movie star’s “boy toy” (can you believe that!!) in a new play called “Bird in the Box” by Maxine Fleischman for the Dominion Drama Festival. And this was another “bite” by the bug, one that propelled me into the outside world. Up to now my life had been protected by a Company or school. Now I was in the real world, working with creative people who were making a living doing this. Their passion and energy was working inside me. While I was still at SGW doing everything from “Twelfth Night” to “Oh What A Lovely War”, I was getting closer to a big change. Expo ’67 had set up shop in the middle of the St. Lawrence River and I was working as an On-Site Co-coordinator for the World Festival of Entertainment. This world of Performing Arts was my life blood now. Meeting and talking to famous and not so famous professionals from around the world about their experiences opened up a channel in my head that got bigger and bigger over the six months of that summer.

Back at Sir George I was sent off to Calgary as Quebec representative to an International Theatre Conference for University Students. The Theme of the Conference was “Antonin Artaud and the Theater of Cruelty Movement”.  Heady stuff!! The title of the Conference should have given me an idea about who would be attending, but I wasn’t thinking about that! I had written a paper about the avant-garde Director and presented it along with many other students during the sessions over a long weekend. I can still remember sitting in the hallway of the hotel with all these other kids talking about analysis and cerebral approaches to the “thee-a-tuh” and, over the course of that weekend, decided I didn’t fit in to this mindset. The place to learn theatre was IN the Theatre, I thought. At the end of my third year at SGW, I wrote a letter to my folks and told them I was quitting school.  I don’t think they were too happy with that (I still have a copy of the letter I wrote in one of my diaries) but I desperately had to be IN that world I had been experiencing over the past three years. There was no alternative. This was now all-consuming. I spent another glorious summer in Wolfville, more roles, more singing, more growing and learning the “craft” and more decisions. Returning to Montreal, I wrote an angry-young-man Letter to the Editor of the Montreal Star (the FLQ was putting bombs in mailboxes in Westmount!), packed my bags and took a train to Vancouver (I had met some theatre folks in Wolfville who lived there). I was wide-eyed, fresh-faced and excited to be careening head first into a new and unknown world!

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