I snuck back into Winnipeg. I didn’t want to take the chance of someone seeing me so I’d booked a room at the Marlborough Hotel, which, as it turned out, was full of folks from flood torn Reservations just outside the city and very busy. I adjusted quickly to a very small room with windows that wouldn’t open, and waited out the time before making my way via every back street in downtown Winnipeg to the Theatre Center where Doreen Brownstone’s 90th birthday celebration was about to take place. I wanted to arrive somewhat late, and managed to sneak into the Lobby via the side entrance on Rorie Street and melded into the crowd. A few people’s eyes popped when they noticed me, but I put my finger to my mouth requesting they not betray my presence, and that worked … for a while.
The party had been organized by Patricia Hunter, and Teresa, her sister Michele and Heather Paterson had been co-opted to deal with the food and such. Having positioned myself directly in their eyeline, I managed to elicit screams from them as they stood together on the other side of the Lobby and finally noticed me. It was a remarkable moment of group disbelief. Eyes wide, O-shaped mouths and squeals spread through the space as word spread that I was there. After a few hugs and kisses, Pat mustered me, along with Robbie who was also very surprised to see me, to escort Doreen from the limo that had brought her to the Theatre, along the red carpet and into the Lobby. It was like the Oscars for a few minutes as people lined the sidewalk and building entrance taking photos and calling out to us. Doreen was speechless when I took her arm as she got out of the limo. With all the commotion that greeted her she just kept looking at me trying to figure out if I was real or not! It was wonderful! The ladies admonished me for not letting them know I was coming into town and I told them that it wouldn’t have been much of a surprise if I had.
The rest of the evening was filled with speeches and songs and toasts for Doreen, and way too much chatter about how I was liking Victoria and if was doing any shows and when was I coming back to Winnipeg. I learned that word of my impending meeting with Rainbow had already begun to circulate (how that got out I had no idea), so I found myself fending off speculation … at least for a while.
The following morning, I met with Julie Eccles, Rainbow’s “Acting” General Manager, and we spent a couple of hours of in-depth talk about the Company, the Job and the Future. While I’d not had much experience as an Artistic Director, I’d had a LOT of experience with Artistic Directors. The one thing that kept buzzing around my brain (but which I never brought up) was why Rainbow was casting about for an “Artistic Director”? They only did two shows in the Summer and that was it. There had been a short period a while back when they’d added a Winter Show, but that idea bit the dust after three years. An AD usually creates a varied playbill based on a particular theme or through-line and always with a thought toward illuminating or expanding an audience’s perspective. Maybe that was a grand vision, but one that couldn’t really be addressed by a Rainbow “season”. Large Commercial Musicals were what they did and that wasn’t going to change. To me, the job was, and always had been, that of a Producer, and I couldn’t figure out why they were wanting to change now.
The meeting went very well, and I discovered that Julie and I were somewhat on the same page, although she was flying pretty blind when it came to process. This seemed to be why she wanted to meet with me in the first place. She asked a lot of questions and I did my best to answer them – all theoretical, of course, and with nothing set down in stone. Getting an administrative structure in place was, to me, the first order of business and while the Board had a great deal of input into Rainbow’s operation (for better or for worse), Julie needed to get a bead on how a new structure would work. There is a very fine line between a “Producer” and a “General Manager” and now, they wanted to add an “Artistic Director”. It wasn’t making a lot of sense to me and coloured my approach a bit. Julie wrote down just about everything I said. I kept trying to make my responses as generic as possible, but admit to gearing the specifics toward someone who knew the Company’s identity and character very well and who also had extensive knowledge of the community’s resources and involvement. Once done, we agreed to talk some more and I left.
Needless to say, my mind was doing flip-ups as I wandered down into the Waterfront area trying to clear my head and get some air. It was a beautiful fall day and I realized that this part of town was new to me. Over the past few years, it had become highly developed with upscale townhouses and condo complexes along the Red River. I began to speculate on whether I would like to live there, how big the floorplans were, and what they cost. Whoa, Richard! What are you doing? But I couldn’t control it. Maybe I didn’t want to control it. Maybe I was getting way, way ahead of myself … and the circumstances. But the fact that Julie had ended our meeting by asking “Next steps?” had put the prognosis onto another level. Or was that just my mind working overtime again?
Dinner that evening with Robbie and Heather at Teresa’s buzzed with conjecture and predictions. They were excited with the possibility of my return to Winnipeg and this new opportunity. But, always at the core of this for me was a reality that couldn’t be ignored – the meeting had only been a fact-finding mission, no offers had been made and, my base point, Mom. I had to rein myself in and get real about things. Just after arriving back home in Victoria, an e-mail arrived from Julie with a synopsis of the job’s requirements as we had defined it. While her breakdown always referred to “the individual”, her note to me at the start of the post referred to the job starting in November and to her understanding that “physically you (me) may not be able to get here so quickly”. In reading the job description a number of times, I could think of very few people who fit these specific qualifications – “a working relationship of, and exceptional knowledge and contact with the Winnipeg Arts Community, prior knowledge of Rainbow Stage and the workings of an outdoor theatre, a background in directing Musical Theatre productions, open to teaching theatre classes, speaking in public, etc., etc.” – other than myself. A few more days of e-mails back and forth and we set a date for a “formal interview”. With all this in mind, and out of an abundance of caution, I began to set some wheels in motion with regard to a major move. It might have been a case of putting the cart before the horse, but it seemed that the horse wanted to get going, and, like me, was already tugging at the bit.
I managed to find a flight that would get me in and out of Winnipeg on the day of the interview and, filled with trepidation and excitement, I took off. Julie picked me up (it was a jolting minus 13 degrees) and took me to the office. A member of the “Selection Committee”, Judge Joy Cooper, was also in attendance and, with no fanfare at all, we started. They had prepared 20 questions and took turns asking them. They’d ask, look at me for a moment, and then I would talk … and talk … and talk as they put their heads down and wrote and wrote! It went on like that for two and a half hours and I was hoarse by the time we finished. I think I said everything I wanted to say. The questions had been framed in such a way that I could express a lot of things that Julie and I had spoken about six weeks earlier. I felt I was eloquent, intelligent, informed, personable and managed to soften some of the thoughts that I imagined might ruffle a feather or two once I said them out loud – the Board’s historical lack of involvement in particular and their lack of connection to the performing Company. The ladies were like sphinxes, stone-faced, no reactions or responses. We touched on EVERYTHING … position definition, administrative structure, production choices, creative decisions, marketing, fundraising, future vision, dreams, challenges. Toward the end, they asked me if I had any questions. “Only one”, I said. “When does the job start”. They looked at each other. “Yesterday”, they said. They also assured me that the current Board was a lot more involved than just flipping hamburgers at the annual Summer barbeque. That was heartening.
When we were done, Julie asked if I would like to pop out to the Stage to see “the changes” that had happened since I’d left. We were quiet in the car, careful to avoid talking about what had just happened. I’d never been out to Rainbow in the Winter. There was a lot of snow in Assiniboine Park (Rainbow’s Summer home) and it was cold and damp backstage in the theatre. To my eye nothing much had changed. A bathroom had been remodeled and a lot of accumulated scenic junk had been disposed of, but that was about it. Julie said she had a long list of things that needed attention. We had some food at Kelekis’ on the way back to the airport and talked about our lives … again, rather than the interview. I was feeling pretty good about the day. I wished I’d taped the interview. The words I used and how I used them came right from my heart and from a deep understanding of the business in general and of Rainbow in particular. “Passion and Purpose” was the foundation for all that I said, and summed up my feelings about working with the Company.
I didn’t get the job. Two days later, I received a short e-mail from Julie letting me know they’d gone with someone else (from Toronto as it turned out … an affront, as far as I was concerned based on Rainbow’s long-held Manitoba Talent Mandate). After reading that, I put my head down on the edge of my desk, defeated, forlorn, and allowed the growing numbness to envelope me for a while. The days that followed found me nursing a low-grade nausea as I tried to work my way out of an unshakeable sadness. Depression set in as I began thinking about what could have been, and what I was to do now. I worked my way through the logic of it all, rationalizing and accommodating this new pathway, and at times, chastising myself for having built up the potential so much in my head. Trying to figure out what I’d done wrong was an exercise in futility. I was never going to get an answer, and I let that go in short order. Trying to figure out who actually got the job was also pointless. That would be announced in time and I would suffer a little bit once more. The rejection was a huge hump to get over but, as is usually the case, the pain gradually faded.
There were a lot of folks who commiserated and were sympathetic and I appreciated their concern, but there was nothing to be done. I regrouped, recharged and recalculated. Since Mom was now being taken care of at Sunrise, I decided to move, and listed the condo for sale.
The trek to find a new home went on through the Holidays. I still had the Museum Tours to do and concentrated on my Art work just to keep me occupied as visits by potential buyers for my place interrupted my days. I eventually found a townhouse in a large and pleasant complex just outside the downtown area and signed a lease at about the same time the condo sold. Now someone else would have to deal with things that went wrong and while it would be strange going back to renting, it left me with bucks in the bank and a bit more secure financially. But Geez, what a few months that had been!
The Spring that year (2013) was spent organizing my new space, cleaning out the back patio area, creating space for a garden and keeping an eye on Mom who had maintained pretty well at Sunrise during my upheaval. I got involved with “Gotta Get A Gimmick”, a Community Theatre group who did one-nighters of a single Musical Theatre Composer’s work. I’d been asked to be a part of a couple of their previous evenings, but things had conspired to prevent me from participating. This format was new for them, but with those previous shows having been very well received, they’d settled in and, from what I could tell, seemed to know what they were doing. Rehearsals were one night a week for three weeks prior to putting the resulting Cabaret-style performance on its feet. The composer this time around was Jerry Herman. If only to stand out a bit from other concert presentations around town, the music curated for performance was from the composer’s lesser-known repertoire – in other words, in Jerry Herman’s case, there were no big “Hello Dolly” or “Mame” numbers. I was to sing a song called “I’ll Be Here Tomorrow” from a short-lived show called “The Grand Tour”. It was something to look forward to and would get me back on stage … for a night anyway.
Popped down to Portland for a few days to see the opening of a new production of “La Cage Aux Folles” that dear friend Greg Tamblyn had directed … again. He’d ask me a short while ago to be involved in this new mounting, but I’d passed. It wasn’t a hard choice to decide to go down and see what the show looked and sounded like with someone else playing “my” role, ‘Zaza’. It would also be a chance to see my old boss from Portland Civic Theatre, Isabella Chappell, and a few other friends. Greg’s production was great! I sat beside my old co-star, Rick Lewis, during the show, and we kept nudging each other and whispering comments back and forth about the “then” and “now” approaches. It was other-worldly to see it from out front because Greg was using much of the old blocking and choreography from our years-ago production and, even after all this time, it was so familiar. There was still a bit of muscle memory there! Afterwards we spent a bit of time with the guys playing “our” roles. They had been “up-and-comers” on the scene when we’d done it before and were anxious to know if their performances had met with our approval. Nice to be thought of in that way. Touching base with some great folks from those wonderful Portland years was just the boost I needed. Victoria hadn’t resulted in a lot of new friends and this visit down South was a real lift. And I would be back down there for Isabella’s 90th birthday celebration in a few months.
There was a part of me that was a bit apprehensive about doing the Gimmick show. While I’d taken to purposefully singing in the shower every morning, it had been a while since I’d “put myself out there” vocally. My involvement in “The Life Inside” at The Belfry had been in the Ensemble with no responsibility to speak of. Now I was doing a high energy, six-minute solo that required a hell of a lot more eating-the-scenery performing than I was, of late, used to doing. Most of the initial rehearsals were spent on the group numbers in the Herman Cabaret so it was only in a very short once-through session that I got any sense of how difficult this number really was. The song is basically the sung Prelude to “The Grand Tour” and sets up the story of a Jewish Man (originally played by Joel Grey) who is trying to evade the Nazis in 1940’s France. In the song, he tells where he has travelled from and what he has encountered up to this point, and lets us know that he owes his life to always keeping a positive attitude (“I’ll Be Here Tomorrow!”). It was a gang buster number!
Since we met only once a week, by the time we got to the third (and final) week I’d had only one other session with Brad, our musical Director, and was seizing up with fear that I wasn’t going to be prepared enough to carry it off. Our Director (or “coach” as she was called) had been imported from somewhere and had decided that the presentation theme/concept was going to be “a fabulous party” and we were supposed “to get in touch with our fabulous selves.” Well, I thought that was a load of hogwash from the outset, and after one “meeting” with her, she thankfully left me to my own stressed-out devices. Our choreographer had suggested a few good staging ideas but basically, my “fabulous self” put the piece together alone at home. It was hard work! The first time I performed it full-out was for the rest of the cast at the dress rehearsal on the day before the performance. I felt relatively confident that the character was well in hand and that I’d created the tone and energy that would propel me through the number. I happily discovered that I “still had it” and all the work I’d done on my own had paid off. The cast whooped and hollered after it was over and set my mind somewhat at ease for the following evening. Robbie and Heather were to be in town for their daughter’s graduation from UVic and would be at the show. As friends who knew me very well, they were also a source of calm and security. I needn’t have worried. The whole event was a big hit and I managed to enjoy myself as I did my thing. It’s strange how high-stress and heavy-duty moments like this get indelibly imprinted somewhere in one’s head as you’re going through them. To this day, I can still remember the entirety of the song, the words, all the staging, the breathing, my facial expressions, the body language, my constant mental assessment as I went through the three sections of the song, clocking the audience’s reactions and my own confirmations that I’d done what I intended to do on each line. It’s all still there, amazingly, all these years later!
The months into Autumn that followed were fallow. I continued with my art work, enjoyed visits from dear friends-from-away, and spent a lot of time with Mom as she descended further into the maze of dementia. Another trip to Portland for the birthday party was a welcomed diversion, but driving back up the highway to home gave me time to think about the changes that had taken place in my life. My world had become very small, very compact, and while I held out hope for something, anything, to happen, nothing did.
By now, I’d been volunteering at the Museum for almost five years, and, with a change in the Administration and its structure having recently taken place, I was approached by the new Management to find out how I was “feeling” about the state of the Tours Program. I took this as an opportunity to set down some thoughts that had been percolating for a while and sent an e-mail off to my Boss. I also copied the Museum’s newly installed CEO, Jack Lohmann, a very affable gentleman and the highly respected President of the Canadian Museums Association. In my “assessment”, I got pretty detailed about how I thought things were, and how I thought they could be. As well, I set down what I thought would be interesting to pursue as new projects, notably an idea I’d been developing in my head over the past months, my “Museum Alchemy: The Art of Setting The Stage” Tour. It would be a new approach to the public’s view of the facility, and how everything got put together for them to see in the Galleries. I also included the suggestion of initiating Audio Guides for self-directed Tours – something I’d always loved whenever I went to museums elsewhere – and of making the very existence of the Tours Program a lot more obvious to Museum visitors.
Well, did that raise a stink or what!!! My initial post had been sent out on a Friday afternoon and by late Saturday morning, there was an e-mail from Jack Lohman to half the Museum Staff attaching my post and calling for my “sensible and attractive” ideas to be initiated! There was a frenzy in the weeks that followed as the powers-that-were scrambled to address the changes and ideas that I’d presented. The Lobby advertising for the Tours increased and speakers were installed in the Lobby over which the start of a Tour could be announced. It had always baffled me why that element of public engagement had never been implemented. It just seemed like common sense. I made plans to create an Audio Tour sample tape as an example of what I had in mind. It was another watching brief.
Thankfully, the evolution of my garden off the back patio took me into the Spring and, as Morgan lay on the warm patio bricks, I cleared out more ivy up the hill and officially started a hosta garden. Nothing like creating garden to get you out of your head!
Then, out of nowhere, I got offered a production of “Spring Awakening” at the Belfry.