(I preface this by letting you know that what follows is the beginning of a series of postings recounting a two-plus year saga that involves the theatre, the court system, skullduggery, revenge, criminality, politics and a cast of characters of which Damon Runyon would have been proud. There! Did that perk your interest? Read on!)

It began simply enough. There are seemingly disparate events in one’s life which, when viewed only through the lens of time, are revealed to have converged, conspiring to lead one down a surprising and unexpected path. One never knows what is actually happening when one is in the middle of that which is actually happening. My life had been a series of consecutive threads which moved me forward, one taking over when another ended; but in hindsight it seemed that apparently unrelated threads were, in fact, intersecting, intertwining and weaving together, slowly creating a new fabric. Little did I know that a casual conversation with Leslee Silverman, Artistic Director of Actor’s Showcase (which would soon morph into the Manitoba Theatre for Young People), would turn out to be the first of those threads.

As an actor, singer and Director, I had always considered myself to be an “Interpretive Artist”. My work in those disciplines was dictated by what others had written or composed. Parameters were defined by the words or musical notes or stories that someone else had set down. I considered it my responsibility to bring them “to life” using technique, craft and discipline. I had never considered myself to a “Creative Artist”. In our conversation, for a reason I still can’t quite fathom, Leslee asked if I would be interesting in “writing a show” for her theatre.

Her question took me by totally surprise as I had never indicated to anyone in Winnipeg that I had any abilities beyond those I was using to make a living in the theatre – i.e. singing and acting. Oh, I had written little songs and parodies here and there that folks had sung for fun and I could give the impression that I “played” the piano; I had, coincidentally, just entered a song in a contest for the Calgary ’88 Olympics Theme Song – “Feel The Spirit” – which would become the most played song on Canadian radio stations during the summer of ’88 … NOT! That was the fantasy! The reality was that I got a “thank you” letter and a certificate saying that I’d entered the contest. But I digress! There was nothing in my recent history in Winnipeg that would lead anyone to think that I could remotely be called a writer or composer. That dismal attempt at writing “Great Expo’tations” “back in the day” at University had been left far, far behind.

            “What?” My interest was perked. “What kind of show?

            “Oh, I don’t know” she replied.

            “I don’t think I’m really into writing a show for kids.”

            “I was thinking for late teens on the verge of adulthood”

            “A show about what?”

            “I don’t know; maybe about things that are issues in their lives, things that concern them, things they care about”.

            “A Musical?”

            “Maybe with music. Maybe “an entertainment. I don’t know. Think about it”.

It was all those “I don’t knows” that were getting me going. It meant the field was wide open. My buttons were now completely pushed.

            Over the weeks that followed, I could think about nothing else! There is a part of me that is sometimes obsessive, like a dog with a bone. This is why I’d never really considered myself a “Creative” Artist. The prospect of facing a empty piece of paper was overwhelmingly daunting, uncomfortable, intimidating. I avoided anything that would require me to formally produce an imposed result. Those little songs I referred to were just for fun and had no consequence. This was potentially something with serious overtones … at least in my head.

Because Leslee had not defined any subject matter my mind went wild, coming up with a topic, working it through, rejecting it, then coming back at it, pushing it a bit more, rejecting it again and doing the same thing over again. I guess this is what could be called “process”, but it was all going on in my head and was exhausting and frustrating at the same time. But I persevered, begrudgingly compartmentalizing and trying to establish points of reference. It was that blank- page syndrome that kept holding me back, where there ARE no points of reference creating a chaos that had to be brought to order!

Then I remembered that Leslee had actually given me some points of reference. She had talked about “older teenagers” and “life issues” and that became, at least for the moment, a take- off point. Rather than just flail about in my head, I decided to sit at my keyboards and computer and see what would happen. I’d “noodle” on the keys for hours on end, playing about with melodies and rhythms trying to focus myself and recording stuff that appealed to me. It wasn’t hugely productive but a couple of ideas seem to percolate up from somewhere forcing me to define them.

Conceptually, I took another clue from the conversation and decided that maybe musical revue might be a route to go – a series of songs loosely tied together thematically. It was now a few months since the initial approach and I was ready for another talk. Leslee and I met again and I explained what I’d been going through. Of course, this didn’t surprise her as she’d experienced this many times before with other writers. She pushed me get a foundation and to start writing things down so objective eyes could “see” where my thoughts were going and I could gain some clarity for myself.

With this encouragement, ideas seemed to bubble to the surface. The show would be built on people calling in to a radio Talk Show, responding to other callers or to a subject that the Talk Show host brought up. It was all about communicating and that was the first song I wrote – “Communicate” and it became the signature song for the show. “Aerobics” (a rage of the day) was next followed by “The Touch”, a song about spousal abuse. These pieces hung in a limbo as there was no framework yet on which to hang them. However, I took the lyrics, some sample tapes and the embryonic theme back to Leslee. She loved the concept and, much to my amazement, she officially commissioned me to write the show (tentatively called “Now You’re Talkin’”)! I had six months to come up with a “First Draft”. We eventually drew up a formal contract, applied for the Arts Council Grants ($1,000.00 for the First Draft and $800.00 for each subsequent Draft) and the die was cast!

There is a lot of “ugly” that accompanies “creating”. I don’t like that. Or at least I didn’t to start. For me, admitting that something isn’t “perfect” right out of the gate is hard. I wanted it, whatever “it” was, to be full-blown and exactly right. And this was, perhaps, the most difficult of all, giving in to the “work” it takes to make something out of nothing; and now there was the added pressure of the obligation to create contributing to my frustration and anxiety and I found my emotions very close to the surface. Those frustrations were built on not being able to get a rhyme or a chord pattern to work or just because of my own inadequacies. My ground zero examples were always in my head; the perfection of Lorenz Hart’s lyric from his song (with Richard Rodgers) “Mountain Greenery” – “Beans could get no keener reception in a beanery, bless our mountain greenery home” – and the absolute frustrated sense of Sondheim’s lyric from “Forum” – “I pine, I blush, I squeak, I squawk, today I woke too weak to walk” – taunted me relentlessly. I think I had set my bar pretty high. Stephen Sondheim was my idol! His work had always thrilled me, not just conceptually, but technically and mechanically. The specificity of construction and clarity of intent made his shows luxurious to perform and listen to. I had heard him talk about how he worked – lying down on a couch and falling asleep when nothing would come – and while I didn’t go that far, I took some solace in knowing this. But what happens when the inspiration doesn’t come? There were a lot of times when, no matter what I did to cajole it, the Muse refused to appear. I would go off on tangents writing church music which served no purpose at all but would allow me to “rest” for a bit. I needed a jolt. And then, the second thread appeared; my Dad died.

It was something of a reckoning. My Father and I had very little in common. I couldn’t talk about golf and sports and he couldn’t talk about the Theatre and Opera. But there had always been a tacit acknowledgement of our disconnects and we related in other ways that sustained the relationship, mainly, surprisingly, baseball. I have a vivid memory of sitting in his lap on our apartment balcony in Montreal in the darkening Spring evening when I was very little, listening to a baseball game on the radio as we sipped bottled Coke through collapsing paper straws. That was our bond for a long time. He loved that I sang. And I loved that he did too – he had a great Sinatra-style sound with a beautiful vibrato. It wasn’t much of a basis for a father and son relationship, but it was ours, and it gave me the emotional foundation for another element of the show.

Along with the callers, the Host, now called ‘Don’ is dealing with some crises himself. The parallel plot line was the fraught relationship with his son (‘Matt’), a wild kid who is constantly getting into trouble. As the show opens, Don is on a private line talking to his wife (‘Elaine’) who can’t find Matt. Don is about to go on air and doesn’t have time for this continuing drama and leaves it with Elaine to figure out. Matt calls his Father a number of times to try to talk but is angrily rebuffed by Don for calling him at work. We learn later that Matt is arrested for dealing drugs and, from jail, uses his one phone call to talk to his Father the only way he can get through … on air!

This new foundation took me into territory of my own that I’d not considered – the fact that what once was is not always what now is. Things change. Sometimes people don’t. Time changes us. Sometimes getting stuck in the comfort of the past can blind us to those changes and lead to resentments and acrimony. I found that recalling old memories and conflicts can lead to some painful admissions and, while it wasn’t easy to let those private thoughts out, I forced myself to do it. While not a similar story line in my own life, these memories provided me a basis on which to set the characters and their journeys. It was now a case of letting go and putting it down on paper.

During this process “life” kept interfering with my creative through-line. Commercials, radio productions, concert touring, an opera, two more stage shows, moving homes and other general ‘stuff’ would divert and redirect my energies. But “NYT” was always there, if only to think about. Stolen hours in the early morning were producing some interesting musical results. Writing songs is hard, very hard. Songs happen when people can’t speak anymore, when the feelings and emotions they are experiencing get so intense that only music can express them. With songs there are confinements to deal with, technical practicalities like key signatures, tempos, notes, rhymes, duration, all of which dictate the parameters in which you’re working. There is a precision required, almost academic on one level, which forced me to focus the intents and objectives being played out in the time the song lasts. Is this the right note for this word? Does the accent fall on the right syllable? Is this the correct rhyme? Does this advance the story or expand our understanding of the character? Each answer creates another choice and another and another. Taking all these elements into consideration in order to create something that lasts only four or five minutes is incredibly complicated and doesn’t always work; but when it does it’s incredibly satisfying! Writing dialogue is much harder!

Up to this point, the songs I’d written were being sung by the callers and were “stand alone” moments that came and went. I had been making demo tapes of the music with the help of three wonderful singers, Andrew Stellmack, Nancy Drake and Andorlie Hillstrom, and was pleased with the results. But those songs had little relationship to the ‘Don’/’Matt’/’Elaine’ storyline that was now beginning to take focus. Making the spoken exchanges between these characters sound true and natural was becoming a sticking point for me. What were they really trying to say to each other? Was there something that wasn’t being said but only alluded to? Were these the right words? At what point did they stop speaking and start to sing? How do I make those transitions honest? Oh, God! I was lost! And there was that deadline looming over me!

I had to keep reminding myself that this was a draft. A draft, Richard! This effort wasn’t, contrary to my mindset, the end product. It was to be a stepping stone, something that Leslee could look at and say what did or, heaven forbid, didn’t work. I ploughed through writing down what I was hearing in my head as I went through the story, including notes to indicate the progression or exchanges I hadn’t yet defined for myself.  Typing up the “script” in a proper format made it seem somewhat less disorganized (as it still was in my head) and, with a great deal of trepidation, I dropped it off at Leslee’s office and arranged to meet her a few days later.

Those were fraught days! My own inadequacies kept me on edge and I would lay in bed second guessing the choices I’ve made, that perhaps I was not the person to be doing this, that I was being too careful, not letting myself go enough with the music or the dialogue I’d created.  We met at my apartment. Andorlie and Andrew had joined us to help me read and sing through the existing material. Leslee loved it! She was enthralled by the musical numbers and said that the script need some beefing up.

Then she told me that she didn’t think it was right for her Theatre.

Surprisingly, my reaction was relief more than anything else. As I worked it had become clear that the material I was producing was not for teenagers. It was for Adults. One of the imposed initial confines had been the length of the piece. Kid’s shows were usually about an hour long. Leslee was suggesting that with the Host’s conflicts the concept could be expanded and improved. More characters and maybe another storyline to follow would give me more opportunity to build upon. The wonderful thing about this moment was that Leslee said it was worth pursuing and to that end she was willing to help “flog” the script to other Producers, like Kim McCaw at Prairie Theatre Exchange and Craig Wall at Agassiz Theatre; even, gasp, MTC.  She would also support further grant applications. I couldn’t have asked for anything more.

And then another thread joined the others.

Rick McNair was a big, jovial, gregarious man. If you look him up on Wikipedia, he is listed, bewilderingly, as a “Canadian Basketball Player”! He was, at least to my way of thinking, the antithesis of a basketball player (although he had coached a college team at one point). We called him “Rick McBear”. He was imposing and would stand very close when talking to you. I don’t know if that was to intimidate or feel connected to you, but it was always unnerving. Because he was such a nice guy one dealt with it or overlooked it as a quirk. He had been appointed to the AD position at MTC a year earlier and had just finished his first season at the theatre’s helm. He was in the market for the new playbill and Leslee and I were on him like fleas on a dog. Well, maybe that’s a bit extreme. It was I who was on him, relentlessly, and perhaps to a fault. At one meeting, he told me that he and I were very much alike – “pushy with charm” as he put it. I guessed it was a connection I could use.  (I will admit to also pestering him for roles in the season’s playbill. That just confirmed his assessment of me.) I discovered rather quickly that he was also a procrastinator. I’d had an inkling of that during “Christmas Carol” when making Artistic Director on-the-spot decisions during a crisis appeared to not be one of his strong strong points. Within days of Leslee’s and my last meeting Rick had a script and tape on his desk and I had a promise from him that he would read it. Yeah, well.

At about this time, Jack Timlock, with whom I had worked at MTC and Stage West, had started to talk about opening a Dinner Theatre of his own after Stage West’s demise. Jack had left MTC as the Production Manager following the acrimony surrounding the previous AD’s edict that no could moonlight for other theatre companies in the city. I had presented the script to him and, after reading it, he suggested that Rainbow Stage should probably look at it with an eye to at least do a Workshop with some Canada Council funding. Rainbow had always produced big ol’ American musicals and, as such, was rarely considered for Council funding. This shunning drove Producer Jack Shapira wild! Perhaps my “Canadian” script might be an “in” for him. I would consider it.

With no deadlines facing me, there was scant pressure to “produce”. Expanding on what I had already written and using Leslee’s suggestions, creating once again seemed to be luxurious. I took time to refine rhymes and to make intentions clearer and more concise. The characters started to “speak” to me and I could give them more specific things to say. But there were nagging doubts about how “true” they sounded when they were talking to each other. I let that go for the time being and focused on how to expand the piece and creating more conflict to beef it up. I printed out a revised script and dropped it off at the various theatres around town.

My days were now spent networking (also called “nagging”) various engagers. I would do a circuit downtown mainly to drop off contracts or pick up commercial cheques at the ACTRA office and would end up popping in at the Opera offices, the Symphony offices, MTC, CBC offices, Showcase offices, just to keep my finger in all the work-possibility pots or to sign contracts that had already been set. Looking back at it now, dropping in without an appointment was pretty brash of me, but there was no other way to do it. Out of sight, out of mind was my approach, so I kept putting myself in everyone’s sights. Maybe that’s why various companies started adding keypad doors to the offices just off the reception areas!

But the script languished. Nothing was happening. No one would bite. There were no meetings, no consultations. And I was getting depressed about that. So I went out and rented a shitload of high-end recording equipment, wrote some new arrangements of the music just to keep it all in my head and to keep me interested, and had my singers come in and record with the new arrangements. That settled me down for a while because “Real Life” was about to intrude.

NEXT: ANOTHER THREAD … AND THEN THE SHIT HITS THE FAN!