The Summer of ’82 was like a movie. Long, warm days coupled with the Eastern Oregon landscape lulled me into a mellow state of mind with nothing negative inserting itself into the flow. Work on the new Season back in Winnipeg was to begin in mid-August, but in the meantime and for the most part I was enveloped by Love and Languor.

There were delightful interruptions however. I had some Symphony commitments to take care of. Three Irving Berlin Concerts in Denver jolted me back to the energy of big city life, and the whirlwind of rehearsals and performances with Norman (Leyden) serviced my soul in the late spring. A few weeks later, it was off to Milwaukee for more of the same. One of the most interesting things about doing the Berlin concerts had always been an Orchestra’s initial reaction to the material. Berlin’s music is incredibly familiar, easy and very accessible. It ain’t Mahler by any stretch of the imagination, but Norman’s arrangements challenged the players in ways they didn’t always expect. With Norman’s arrangements, it wasn’t a case of playing through static chord progressions but rather of navigating complex and interesting charts that never took the musicians for granted. His arrangement for “Isn’t It A Lovely Day” began with a huge “William Tell Overture”-like orchestral storm that eventually settled into the song. Another Berlin song, “The Piccolino” had been arranged in the style of classical composer Gioachino Rossini. Norman introduced it as “Piccolino a la Rossini – doesn’t that sound delicious?” Some orchestras bought into it, others maybe not so much – at first. POPS Concerts, while being bread and butter for a lot of Symphonies in the US and Canada, were lesser relatives to concerts of the “real” music they normally played. However, because of Norman’s obvious love for and mastery of the genre, we usually won the musicians over in short order. To sing with 60 professionals playing beautifully with you is like nothing else on earth. All of the symphony concerts I ever did over the years (and there were a LOT of them) were a gift from heaven. I loved doing them!

Two other assignments took up some more time that summer. Portland is called “The City of Roses” and each June is consumed, on every conceivable level, by the Portland Rose Festival. Dozens of events are spread over a ten-day period and KBPS Radio decided that since I was back in town I would be the perfect radio host to do “colour commentary” for three events – The Rose Queen Coronation, The Starlight Parade and The Grand Floral Parade – as part of “The Seeing Sound” programming. I’m pretty good at holding my own in an off-the-cuff spewing of words as I’d done any number of times during the annual Pledge Weeks at the Radio Station. Getting people to send in money and support a good cause is one thing. But this was something else! Try describing the same thing over and over and over again to a blind person and make it sound interesting.

The Coronation event wasn’t so bad because we had direct feed from the announcers on stage introducing the various Princesses representing the city’s schools. Describing the gowns was pretty much extent of our responsibility. I was teamed up with a former Rose Queen – thank God! – to provide some the finer details. However, the Parades were another thing altogether!

The Starlight Parade was, of course, held at night. Kevin, the station’s chief engineer and co-commentator, and I were stationed on the second floor of a parking structure overlooking the parade route. Fortunately, this event was being taped for later broadcast so the pressure didn’t seem quite so great. The irony of all this was the fact that the only illumination came from the lights strung on the various floats that passed by and we had about twenty seconds to try to convey to our listeners what we were seeing and the excitement of the watchers on the street below. Once the floats had passed, we were plunged into complete darkness until another would come along. We were as blind as our listeners. I never did hear how the tape turned out.

On Grand Floral Parade day it was cold. And it rained! And rained! Bundled up (and this was June!) and huddled under our umbrellas at our table just outside the Coliseum’s big exit doors we were at the mercy of the organizers. And we were “live on air”. These things never start on time and to banter for what seemed ages before the first float came out of the arena doors was torture. Out of the dry warmth inside the Coliseum, each float, band and dance group would slowly pass through the doors into what seemed like the start of a car wash. Within seconds, everything and everybody was soaked … and they still had two hours of marching and playing and waving to go! I felt sorry for them and said so any number of times on air, but we carried on, describing the colour and shape and size of the floats, and letting the bands fade in and out as they passed our table. At least the rain kept the flower-encrusted floats fresh and bright.

I managed to do some more work for the radio station up-dating a number of the radio series I’d done years before and creating a new 16-part series called “The Tale Spinner”. And that was the last time I worked at KBPS. It’s wistful to think of the hours and hours spent in the studios there. Radio doesn’t seem to have any meaning these days. It’s mostly background noise and, with the exception of Public Radio from time to time, there is little to service the mind and elevate the heart. I hate to say it, and will probably say it again, but “Ah, the old days!”

The summer wound down and I (actually, happily, “we”) returned to Winnipeg for the new Season. Rehearsals started early that year and were extended by a couple of weeks as the opening production of “Nicholas Nickleby” was a new adaptation by Ouzounian and was massive on every level. The Royal Shakespeare Company had presented their version which took two days to perform (!) but ours was somewhat pared down. I said “somewhat”.

“Nick-Nick”, as we ended up calling it, was a sprawling tale by Charles Dickens which, as most Dickens novels do, spanned many years in many places with many, MANY characters. Fortunately for me, I was cast as ‘Newman Noggs’, the elderly retainer of the Nickleby Family, who has an important track throughout the story. As such, I didn’t have to play other characters. Others were not so “lucky”. Some folks had five or six parts to deal with and this often lead to some hilarious confusion in accents, locales, make-up, hair and costume changes. After weeks of intense rehearsals we landed at our first non-stop run-through of the play. It lasted five hours!! (No wonder the RSC played it over two nights!) Needless to say, a five hour performance wasn’t going to work for the Winnipeg Audiences. The next day the cutting began.

One major segment of the story had to do with Nicholas’s and Newman’s time spent with the poor Kenwig Family, which, while a very touching diversion in the story, added little to the advancement of the plot. In one sad stroke of the artistic knife, they were amputated from the show and, from then on, any character that was axed had “gone to Kenwig Heaven”.  The cutting was merciless but needed. The cast came in each morning never knowing what Richard had decided overnight and whether they would be “alive” at the end of the day. This went on for a long time until things were in acceptable shape and the running time had become a manageable three hours. However, that was just the performer side of things. There was also the set!

Big shows call for big concepts. Richard always liked to move the art form forward, to take a difference approach, to mix things up a bit. SO, it was decided that computers would be used to control all the movement of the set pieces on stage! Um … computers? Remember, this was 1982! What could possibly go wrong? The set consisted of two immense, moveable, monolithic, three-level towers which would trundle from side to side to create new locations or as people carriers, and two large “cookies” or floating floors set into the stage on which furniture and other set pieces could be placed and then motored into the correct position from either side of the stage. At least that was the idea.

There is something to say for the heroism of any tech crew working a show. They have to deal with the unexpected, constantly at hand, unnoticed, to fix any number of errors, always mindful of the fact that they too are a part of the audience’s suspension of disbelief. The “Nick-Nick” crew was incredible … and then some! The precision of the towers and cookies worked incredibly well – for the most part. There were points in stage rehearsals and previews when techies would be slithering about under the stage floor physically moving a cookie inch by inch to get it into the proper position for us to play a scene. Kinks were constantly being worked out and the controls were fine tuned, but not before the inevitable (and obvious) “errors” occurred.

For the final celebratory Dining Room Scene at the end of the play, the cookies are preset off stage with two tables, one on each of the cookies, pushed together to create one long table covered with a table cloth and a dinner setting for eight including crystal and candelabras. (You can see the set-up in the photo above.) The twinned cookies elegantly float on like magic and the scene played out. During one preview the grandly set table moved into position as we entered from upstage to join it. We did the scene culminating in glasses raised in a toast as the lights begin to slowly fade. For some reason that night, the computer decided to skip a cue and the cookies slowly started off carrying us and the setting …  in opposite directions! We were all standing in a freeze as this happened. I can still see the eight of us physically tense up and our eyes grow wider as a chasm began to grow between us … AND the tables!!

There was a precise moment when we all realized what was happening as we slowly drifted away from each other. As if it had been rehearsed, the eight of us, while still holding our glasses, deftly – and I do mean deftly – each grabbed plates, silverware, the candelabras and some crystal along with most of the other pieces that made up the setting on the now completely stretched out table cloth as the lights went out. There were a few crashes in the dark as some of the things we couldn’t reach in time fell as one half of the table cloth sank to the floor. It wasn’t as bad as it might have been had we not still been on stage! We shared our incredulity off-stage!

On opening night, Richard told me that he had got down on his knees in his kitchen after dinner and prayed to God that the set work properly. It did and, for most of the run too. Jamie Portman, national critic for the Southam News wrote “Canada has never before seen a stage event which quite matches the scope and boldness of Manitoba Theatre Center’s new version of “Nicholas Nickelby”. Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company has been winning international headlines for managing to reduce this mammoth 1,000-page novel to nine hours playing time, spread over two evenings. But MTC artistic director Richard Ouzounian has done what the RSC declared to be impossible”. The Company rested on that laurel for quite a while!

Work didn’t stop with opening. After the opening weekend we were into rehearsals for “The Fifth of July”, and in constant Company fencing classes for the down-the-road productions of “The Three Musketeers” and “Richard III”.  Rehearsing a 1977 “hard-ass” character in a contemporary drama (“Fifth of July”) during the day and playing an 1837 “noble eccentric” in a Victorian melodrama in the evening required a fast mental and attitudinal adjustment, but it all felt so right, comfortable. I also had to steal moments when I could to learn lines and to work on the music for the up-coming “The Man Who Came To Dinner” in which I had to sing and play the piano as ‘Beverly Carlton’. As I had always dreamed, I was now eating, breathing and sleeping theatre. It was all-consuming to the exclusion of everything else and just a bit overwhelming. There is usually no half way with me. When I’m in it, I’m really in it with, from time to time, some ironic and unhappy results.

‘Beverly Carlton’ was modeled after the legendary Noel Coward, a friend of playwrights Kaufmann and Hart. Coward was a larger-than-life character in the English theatre and social circles in the 30’s and 40’s. At the helm of this production was Broadway Director/Choreographer Danny Siretta, who had worked with Coward many years previous and gave me a crash course on Sir Noel’s physical characteristics. To get this kind of personal insight from a Director is rare. Usually, everyone is flying blind with only the Director’s interpretation of the piece as the course of action. As actors, we buy into that (for the most part), putting our trust in a Director’s vision. In this case, our Director had a real-world connection with my character and I luxuriated in the truth that Danny gently and so graciously imparted to me. It filled out one aspect of ‘Beverly’s’ personality and gave it depth and dimension. He showed me how Coward would smoke a cigarette and demonstrated a physical quirk of Coward’s … that his whole body moving as if his head started at his waist! Dan made me relax into the character. ‘Beverly’ appears only in the second Act and does a kind of “star turn”, accompanies himself on the piano and tells jokes, being quite grand and making everyone laugh. Along with a few other roles I’ve played over the years, I remember this one with great joy and fondness!

After the holiday, we returned to work. I was honoured to find myself as the Cover Boy for the Theatre’s Fundraising brochure that year (a photo from “Sondheim”). The season continued in full force with Shakespeare’s “Richard III” and an adaptation of Dumas’ “The Three Musketeers”. It was in “Richard III” rehearsals that my hand had a run-in with a broadsword and I bare the scar on my right thumb to this day. In “Musketeers” I played ‘Rochefort’ complete with eye patch (see-through thankfully), the consummate villain, who, as the local critic put it, was “a determined brawler so ineffectual we cannot understand how he has lived so long”. I was never sure if that was a critique of the character or my performance.

And then.

I wrote above about the all-encompassing nature of the way I threw myself into my work. While being singularly focused and looking one way, something was happening in another direction about which I was completely unaware. Sometimes, one thinks everything is going along just fine and it’s really not. The “We have to talk” conversation came out of the blue for me and in short order the “We” of my life once again became “I”. I felt incredibly guilty and stupid and sad that I had missed the markers, those little signs which, in hindsight, were clues to problems brewing. But I was consumed with “me” and, obviously, that wasn’t working for “we”. We separated, but not too far apart because, as fate would have it, we had been cast as lovers in the next production!!

“Cloud Nine” by Caryl Churchill is a challenging and, for want of a better word, “weird” little play. The first Act is set in British Colonial Africa in the Victorian era, the second in London in 1979. Even though the Acts are a hundred years apart, the characters have only aged 25 years between Acts I and II. In the play, some men play women at times and some women play men. Some play the same character in different acts, some don’t. Get all that? The play creates an obscure parallel between colonial and sexual repression and delivers a message about accepting people for who they are and not forcing them into limiting social roles. Whew! It was directed by one of our own, Lorne Kennedy. I won’t go into the plot – you can Google it – but even as we rehearsed it, it was confusing and daunting. Our challenge, one which we faced every night of the run, was in making it all clear and understandable for the audiences. As a result, our portrayals had to be based in honesty, specific intentions and truth in the relationships. In the past, I had occasionally used performance as a means of escape, to relinquish stress and turmoil in my life and live as someone else for a couple of hours. Not this time!

In Act I, I played ‘Clive’, a colonial administrator consumed with keeping order in family upheaval. It’s a rollicking, tumbling, absurd romp of manners and cross-over relationships. That was easy. In Act II I was ‘Gerry’, a gay man and lover to ‘Edward’, played by … well, guess who. This Act does a one-eighty in tone and mood, and the glibness and humour of Act I is replaced by a serious examination of sexual attitudes and their implications. This was hard. As my real-life relationship disintegrated, our on-stage lives were based in a deep love, the desire to get married and spend the rest of our lives together. There were moments in rehearsal that became very difficult for both of us. We found ourselves speaking as the characters but knowing that we had said variations these words to each other in real life. We were watched by the rest of the cast, all of whom knew what we were going through. If nothing else, we added a measure of reality to our scenes together. While this juxtaposition produced deep, dimentionalized portrayals it was, nonetheless, painful, awkward at times, and hammered away at us night after night. Neither before nor since have I had that kind of experience on stage … and I know I never want to have it again.

The season ended and quietly, calmly, and we walked away from each other in different directions. Our eyes wouldn’t meet again for 18 years.