Somewhere along the way, Kayla Gordon (Winnipeg Jewish Theatre) and I decided it might be an idea to approach one of the travel companies in Winnipeg to see if they might be interested in organizing a Theatre Tour to New York hosted by, well, us! They were! The folks at Carlson Travel were hot for the idea. I dashed off to the NYC on some more MSI business and to get the lay of the land for suitable hotels and to plot out a walking tour as one of the group activities. I had also suggested that we approach Heath Lamberts (who was performing as ‘King Sextimus’ in “Once Upon A Mattress” in New York) to talk to the group about working on Broadway. I would try to meet up with him and see what he had to say about the idea.

It had only been a few months since I’d last been there, but a new gaggle of shows had opened and, once again, tickets were at my disposal for a number of them. Bill Irwin was doing “Scapino”, Kiri Te Kanawa was singing in “Marriage of Figaro” at the Met (folks had not forgotten me from all those years ago working for Lincoln Center Tours), Dixie Carter was playing Maria Callas in “Master Class” and, through more connections, I scored a third row seat to “Rent”! They were all spectacular for various reasons, but the most unusual experience was seeing “Rent”. It was a Sunday matinee and albeit loud and energic, it wasn’t the show that astonished me. It was the young people in the audience. The production had been running for almost a year and had developed a rabid cult following. Two hours before a performance, there was a lottery for twenty dollar tickets for the 34 seats in the first two rows of the Orchestra Section and for Standing Room. Groupies had taken to camping out through the night in sleeping bags in front of the theatre for a chance at one of the precious tickets. As I settled into my seat and the lights went down, the two rows in front of me erupted and turned into a double-deep wall of humanity! These kids yelled, they screamed, they sang, they jumped up and down and, for stodgy old me, it was incredibly off-putting. I was caught in the middle of this frenzy and didn’t know how to deal with it. The others way back in standing room doing exactly the same thing. I could barely see what was happening on stage and there were a number of moments when I was sorely tempted to get up and leave. But how many people could say that they’d experienced this phenomenon, so I stayed put, shoulders hunched, and suffered through the whole show. In overheard conversations at intermission, I learned that some kids had seen the show 20 or 25 times! Once was more than enough for me!

            After the show, I dashed the few blocks over to the Broadhurst Theatre to be behind the rope at the Stage Door when Heath came out after his “Mattress” performance. I yelled out his name as he passed by me. His mouth opened wide when he saw me and proceeded to drag me into the theatre and his dressing room where we had a great chat for a few minutes and made a date for lunch a couple of days later. We met at Sardi’s and spent two hours regaling each other with our exploits since last sharing a stage. He said that talking to the tour group sounded like a great plan and I promised to keep him informed.

            Aside from the small workshop in the interim, it had been two years since the genesis of “None Is To Many”. The initial workshops and presentation had been a deeply affecting experience for all of us and now it was being presented by Winnipeg Jewish Theatre at the MTC Warehouse Theatre, fully produced, for a three-week run. I’d worked with almost all of our cast before though not all had been in the original presentation. Nick Rice (“Diary of Anne Frank”) and Les Carlson (“Nicholas Nickleby”) had been added to our number. Teri Cherniak and Harry Nelkin were back. The only new person was Alon Nashman from Toronto who was playing ‘Saul Hayes’ of the Jewish Congress and with whom I (as ‘Frederick Blair’) had a major scene that lasted almost a quarter of the play. Jason (Sherman) was with us again, ready and raring to go with new material that surprised and confused us veterans. The original script had focused on the plight of the Landau Family as they navigated the emotional turmoil of immigrating to Canada. Now the focus had shifted massively to the inner Political dynamics of the “Immigrant Problem”. Our first day of rehearsal was spent deleting old script pages and scenes, replacing them with the new material. It wasn’t until the second day that we got around to doing a read-thru. The difference between the old and new scripts was like night and day. Over the days that followed, new characters would appear fully incorporated into the story only to disappear hours later, never to be seen again. While I had a sentimental attachment to the old script, it was obvious that Jason and Kim (McCaw, our director once again) had chosen the Politics as the emotional fibre of the story rather than splitting it with the Landau Family, as had been the case in the original. The result was riveting, tense and much more provocative.

            The rehearsals were wonderful. It was a great thing to be part of the generosity, energy and humour that filled the hall. For me, it was a case of feeling less like an actor than a collaborator if only because Kim and Jason were initially so open to input and observations. I noted in my Journal at the time that “At one point, Margaret (Brook, our Stage Manager) said to me that I seemed to be so happy. I told her that it was because ‘Blair’ was such a great role and while it was nice to be taken seriously as an actor, it was even nicer to take oneself seriously.” I had a sense of security in my work if only because I had been there at the beginning and had been allowed a hand in creating my character. It turned out to be one of the best experiences I’d ever had in the theatre.

            Once we were into the student previews everything seemed to fall into place. The young people reacted with varying degrees of quiet awe and disbelief. Working opposite Alon was utterly astonishing for me. We were so completely focused and connected to each other, never wavering and always present. He pulled me into his plight, I pulled him into mine, and it was thrilling craft. At one point in a talk-back following a performance, a young girl asked, “Why is Mr. Blair such a poo-poo head?” The question made us all laugh and indicated that even to high-schoolers, the point was coming across.

But we were not without some turmoil during those previews. The daily performing of the play for the kids revealed, for the cast, tiny cracks in continuity as the rewrites kept coming. Those adjustments from one day to the next were sometimes emotionally massive and, in the playing, often hard to justify. As had been the case in the past when working with new and evolving material, I found myself getting very protective of the character I was playing. Developing a road map of the emotional terrain I have to go through is the “behind-the-scenes” work nobody sees or knows about – nor should they. But the amount of internal juggling, psychic repositioning, and labyrinthine-logic maneuvering one has to navigate is exhausting. As one gets more and more comfortable with the geography of a role, sudden external changes are very difficult to deal with. The old admonition to me by Rick McNair many years ago that I “get a performance too fast” always comes back to haunt me. How pliable or amenable should one be the closer one gets to exposing a portrayal to the public? When Jason got dug in about his changes, he was immovable, and there were a few points when I got seriously bent out of shape and told him what wasn’t working for me. Perhaps a wrong move, but despite my chuffing at the changes, Kim and Jason were adamant that it was working “out front” and opening night seemed to bear that out.

During previews, the show had been shortened to an intermission-less hour and twenty minutes, and I would come off stage at the end thinking, ‘Okay, now let’s do Act Two’; but the audience response was incredibly good, and we were off to the races. I had written a card to Jason earlier on opening day apologizing for going off on him as I had, and I let him know how I cherished his genius and generosity. While I was of two minds about giving it to him, I did, and discovered at the party afterward that he had been quite moved by what I’d written. We kissed and made up and sailed into the run.

As the run went on, one thing became apparent very quickly. The Sunday subscription audiences for Winnipeg Jewish Theatre were made up almost entirely of Seniors. As had been the case with that single performance two years earlier at the Synagogue, these folks came out in serious numbers. They knew the story, some of them having experienced it themselves, and those matinee performances were very tense. As the story progressed, we could sense a growing animosity in the air, an aura that seemed to suggest that these folks were really pissed off with what we were doing. They had been wronged all those years ago, and now that long-held resentment was seeping out, permeating the theatre. It affected our performances and even though we knew the anger wasn’t being directed at us personally, we were the messengers, and our message wasn’t a good one. Those feelings on Sundays persisted through the run.

MSI kept getting bigger and bigger. We had added so many projects to our roster, the largest of which at that point was taking over the US Tour of Livent’s “Showboat”. That had been a major coup! John Monaco, a long-established, old-school New York Orchestra Contractor, had been up for the job but Sam had lobbied hard, and the producers had gone with us. Our reputation was spreading – maybe a bit too quickly. I began to see where all this might be headed, and it wouldn’t be pretty. It wasn’t … but that’s a down-the-road story.

After some fee dickering, I finally booked the Toronto Symphony Orchestra contract for six performances of Tovey’s “A Fistful of Guilders” a year down the road, and then reluctantly suffered through an audition for “South Pacific” at Rainbow Stage. That drought continued. But where one door closed a number of others opened. I accepted an offer to do the Manitoba Theatre for Young People’s production of “Jacob Two-Two and the Hooded Fang”, this time as a performer (rather than Director) playing ‘Mr. Fish’ and had signed on with Rorie Runnels (MAP) for an extended workshop of a fledgling musical called “The Wave” written by a local musician I didn’t know, Olaf Pyttlik. The lay of the land was getting very positive.

There are times when things sneak up on you, taking you by surprise when you have no expectations, and which result in some affirmation that perhaps you’ve been doing the right thing all along. Allan McInnis had been AD at Prairie Theatre Exchange for a year and while we’d met and chatted a few times, there had been no opportunity to work with him. However, in late summer, he approached me asking if I would be interested in auditioning for a production of “Jacques Brel”. Presenting musicals was pretty well unheard of for PTE. They had always been issue-focused, Canadian topic oriented and the antithesis of commercial-based theatre. But now, a commercial musical (albeit a small one) was to be mounted on their stage! Smart move if you ask me. Of course, every other singer in town had been asked to audition, but I had some hopes if only because I was very familiar with the material and felt that I might have a bit of a leg up in that department. There were some conflicts that I would have to make go away should I get the job, but I would deal with that later.

Auditions are usually hell for any performer. There is always something subtly demeaning about them. Steeling yourself for this ordeal gives way to the Shaking Knees Syndrome once in the room, and thoughts of rejection hang in the air above you There’s an attempt on the part of the people-behind-the-table to give you the feeling that you’re not being judged, but you are being judged … and in the worst possible way. There is an assault on your soul and spirit when you stand before those folks, some even friends, now devoid of compassion, merely eyes and ears jotting down notes on paper. At the end they smile and say thank you very much and you leave. Your subsequent assessment is based on little signs and signals, possibly imagined, possibly not, and you feel no better now than you did when you’d entered the room.

With the “Brel” auditions, I was fortunate. I’d done the show many times before, both as a director and performer and knew the material inside out. I’d worked up “Jackie” and “Chanson des Vieux Amants”. Entering the room, Allan was most cordial. Greg Lowe, a local guitarist and a friend, was also there in some musical capacity. The only person I didn’t know was the Musical Director, Lisa St. Clair from Toronto. After some banalities, I launched into “Jackie”. Its an up tempo number and I thought I’d done alright. Allan asked that I do it again and suggested that I imagine myself to be alone at the end of a smokey bar singing it to myself. The result was that I put the energy in a different place and opened up a set of new ideas I could play in the moment. It felt great!

I did “Chanson”, a favorite, and it went great as well. Then Allan asked Lisa if she wanted to hear anything else. She said, “Let’s try a little of “Amsterdam”. Oh crap! This song is a gut-buster, intricately wrought and fraught to the nth degree. “Don’t worry”, she said, “we won’t go as far as the “G’s”, the last notes of the song which are repeated and repeated forever. I asked for the words because I needed something physically to hold on to. “Don’t worry about how you sound, just go for the words”, Allan said. Good advice actually, and the same words I would have used with students when I was coaching. I started. We kept going … and going … verse after verse. I got more and more into it and, like a doe caught in headlights, I could see the ‘G’s’ approaching. We weren’t stopping! The singer, once the Narrator, has now become the drunken sailor of whom he sings. He’s become more emboldened, agitated, crazed as he barrels to the end of the song, accusing the city of being the source of all his troubles. And now here came the ‘G’s, overwhelming me with no means of escape, gutturally impaling the room, full throttle at the very top of my range … “In the port of Amsterdam, in the port of Amsterdam, in the port of Amsterda-a-A-A-Am”.

I could see little stars dancing before my eyes and felt light-headed when I finished. Thank God I was sitting down because I would have fallen over otherwise. Everyone seemed pleased, nodding and smiling. “Great, great”, they all said. I got up a bit wobbly, thanked them for their time and asked when some decisions might be made. Allan said it would probably be about a month before everything was settled. That month wait time would cause me some problems as other things were already coming up for consideration, but there was nothing I could do about it. I left feeling that I’d done my best under the circumstances.

he next morning, Allan called and offered me the show! I was amazed after being told the decision would take so long and told him so. He said that everyone in the room thought they weren’t going to hear anyone better and that was it. He’d not cast anyone else, and I resisted the temptation to ask who was being considered. There had been a number of super performers waiting to sing as I left, but I would have to wait. A couple of weeks later we went into the two-week Workshop for “The Wave”.

I’d had a couple of meetings with Olaf at Rorie’s request earlier in the spring. Olaf was an incredibly affable, energetic young man and had invited me out to Concord College where he taught music to listen to the score of the show this show he’d written. The storyline is based on a true incident in which a high school history teacher named Ron Jones had created a “Class” experiment to demonstrate how Nazism grew in Germany in the ‘30s. Olaf’s recording studio at the school was truly impressive; high-tech in every way and geared out with racks and racks professional sound equipment, computer screens, the whole nine yards. He played me all the music he’d completed up to that point. There is no simple way to describe the feelings I had listening to this man’s music. The passion and creative care were obvious in the quality of the recording, but it was the music itself that blew me away. While I had quibbles with some of the lyric writing (Olaf didn’t seem to have any problem with the “pop rhymes” that made the purist in me cringe), I couldn’t deny the musical craftsmanship. Every one of the songs had a purpose and fit into the progression of the story which Olaf told me as we went along. I was emotionally overwhelmed by the end of our session and immediately got in touch with Rorie to say this project had to be workshopped. The sooner, the better!

Over the two weeks, the cast and musicians assembled from Olaf’s friends and music students worked their butts off. These were not theatre folk. There was no ego, no preconceptions, no angst, no tantrums, just pure devotion and commitment to the work and getting the piece ready for two presentations. I found myself falling in love with his collection of young people and we grew to be a Family over the Workshop period. I was “Dad”. Few were familiar with rehearsal process and protocols and I found myself being profoundly patient because of their refreshing innocence and enthusiasm. They would rejoice like little kids when something we did worked. It was a completely uplifting experience.

The talent was phenomenal! Where had these folks been hiding? The voices were so pure, so secure, so professional. I found it hard to believe that most of them weren’t established recording artists. Kevin Aichele’s voice blew me away! Nolan Balzer was stunning! Neil Keep, Shannon Novak, Sharalee Zacharias, all incredible! The kids in the ensemble sounded like they’d been doing this material for forever (actually, they had)! The musicians in the band were with us from the outset and ready to do whatever was necessary to make things work. I was feeling totally blessed to have stumbled into this totally unique experience. We had a mutual admiration society going and the respect for each other only fueled the closeness of the group.

As we got closer to the presentations, Rorie invited all the theatre Directors in town and the kids had invited friends and family as well. The “shows” were to be held in the large Rehearsal Hall at MTC mainly to avoid the craziness that had happened at the Synagogue for the “None Is Too Many” presentation. We had broken up the nights to comfortably accommodate the Directors but hadn’t counted on the kids inviting so many people. We’d set up chairs for about fifty people on the long wall of the hall. The first night found a long line of people stretching down the stairs and out onto the street before we opened the doors. It was all we could do to find seats for the folks who were “supposed” to be there – the theatre Directors. Eventually, the room was packed beyond belief with folks jammed into every nook and cranny, standing against the walls and sitting on tables, the floor. The space had unintentionally turned into theatre-in-the-round and the cast was cocooned by their friends. As the evening progressed, it was obvious that this was a pretty spectacular piece of theatre. Even though I’d constantly reminded everyone (including myself) that there was no pressure, that this was just a presentation and not a production, it was turning out to be something beyond expectation. The response was ecstatic and grew as the evening wore on. At the end it was pandemonium. I’d prepared a small “curtain” call, but the audience just kept yelling and clapping, and I finally had to say, “thank you” and lead the cast out of the playing area.

I didn’t know how they would top that evening’s work, but there was one more to go and then this project would be history.

Well, that’s not quite what happened!

If you want a taste of “The Wave” go to “YouTube”, type “Olaf Pyttlik The Wave” in the Search box and tracks from the CD will come up on screen.