My days were jam-packed with Show Business! From sun up to sun down and beyond I was consumed with the workings of Rainbow Stage. We were in pre-production for “Oliver”, the first of that summer’s shows. (A reminder sidebar at this point: Rainbow Stage is a twenty-six hundred seat domed outdoor theatre located in Winnipeg’s North End in beautiful Kildonan Park, about twenty minutes from the city’s core area. The Company had been producing Musicals non-stop for, at that point, thirty-two years, and is still one of the Province’s major summer tourist attractions. It is owned by the City of Winnipeg and, after massive renovations to the backstage area in 1986 enlarging the physical plant, the performance space had been brought up to modern standards and was now a wonderful place at which to work.) This would be the first summer without Shapira at the helm and the mood was one of exhilaration and anticipation. However, with all the negative publicity over the previous months, conjecture in certain quarters was that the Company would fail miserably and belly-up. Needless to say, most of us thought that idea was ridiculous, but the notion was yet to be tested.

            The morning hours of my days were filled with administrative duties as Timlock’s assistant – filing and photocopying, making lists and calls, attending meetings and taking notes, coordinating with suppliers and services and being a general factotum where and when needed. Additionally, I was setting up the final preparations for the Summer Workshops Program which were to start once “Oliver” opened; finalizing teachers, sending out requested enrolment forms, making sure everything was ready out at “the stage” for the myriad of classes that had been scheduled. It was an exciting line-up, everything from tap and jazz to music theory classes, scene study sessions to auditioning workshops, performance technique to private vocal coaching. We had even designed a workshop designed specifically for the “Oliver Boys” Ensemble as well as a Stagecraft program. I was in my element and couldn’t wait to get to work each day.

            Rehearsals were called in mid-afternoon and went through the evening hours, and,  when not required, I was usually at the rehearsal space making pitches for the classes to the Company or out talking up the program to interested groups at schools and colleges around town. This was all new to Rainbow and Timlock’s initiatives had caught the interest of the Manitoba Arts Council. This work-experience approach had resulted in a major grant to fund the project. The classes were free to everyone and the teachers were paid an hourly rate. It was win-win all ‘round!

            “Oliver” is a slightly smarmy melodrama with some great songs and characters but has a story that is very old-fashioned and creaky. It relies on performance clarity and an agreed-upon tone and style. While some of the accent work left me cringing at times (some interpretations of a Cockney accent were so bad that what was being said was utterly unintelligible) there was an undeniable sense of unity and freshness that lifted our rehearsals out of the let’s-get-this-show-on-the-boards and into the “special” category. We considered it a “test” in light of the negativity that had been swirling around the Company. Fortunately, Timlock’s experience as a Production Manager made him a very hands-on Producer. As a result, he was constantly at rehearsals paying attention to what was actually going on with the production and was at hand to deal with a problem or questions. His ease “in the room” brought us all closer together. He was affable and very involved. He got his hands dirty when necessary, not shying away from assisting in a scene change in the rehearsal hall or making coffee when the pot was empty. People noticed this and it made a difference.

Alan’s (Lund) work continued to amaze me. His effortless approach to staging was inspiring to watch. It was as if he had memorized the picture on the jigsaw puzzle box and was now putting all the pieces together without referring back to the picture. He simple KNEW where everything was supposed to go AND, in the process, made you understand how important you were to the total picture! His years of doing this were obvious to everyone and, to this day, I try to emulate his process when I get to direct. The combination of Alan’s care and Timlock’s attentiveness made the time in the rehearsal hall and out at the Stage a great pleasure … and fun to boot!

Opening was pretty spectacular … as was the show. Granted, the Opening Night house was filled with a lot of comps, but this was the first time there had been no Shapira lurking about and the naysayers had come to see us fail. They were disappointed!  There was an effervescence that filled the dressing rooms and Green Room. We all “owned” this production. A sense of “family” seemed to tie us all together. As the run went on, the lofty anticipation from some quarters of a lesser product because Shapira wasn’t at the helm continued to prove groundless. Even a rather odd “Bring Back Jack” campaign quickly, and thankfully, fizzled. The community at large “voted” with their feet and filled the house night after night, eventually selling out the week in advance of our closing. It was reassuring and gratifying to say the least. The other great thing was that a large number of the “Oliver” cast was going on to do “Charity”. Our level of comfort with each other played itself out as the run went on.

Once again, a revolve was the centerpiece of the set. My experiences with revolves had always been challenging at best. Once again, I found myself caught in scene changes that required me to wait inside the revolve structure as it spun and spewed me out at the rear of the set. During early tech rehearsals, the set baffling had not yet been added behind the revolve so it was simply a case of walking out of the structure onto the open deck and into the wings, all in plain sight. But as time went on more and more walls were added to cover our exits from the audience’s view. With blackouts added at the end of a scene, navigating the pathways in the dark became confusing. Combined with being slightly dizzy from the spinning revolve I needed help getting my bearings. Some folks, specifically Liane Marshall (playing ‘Nancy’) and Janet McEwan (playing ‘Bet’) were waiting just off the revolve in the dark for their entrances and would grab my arm and give me a push in the right direction in order to get off stage. As time went on, for some unknown reason this “assistance” became more complex, evolving into eerily silent production numbers thanks to Liane and, eventually, MOST OF THE CAST! My exits became a “thing”.

Because we had to be silent backstage, verbal exit directions weren’t an option. So Liane, in her wisdom, decided that visual instructions would be best. It started, simply, with a string of bagel pieces being laid out on the floor for me to follow into the wings. Another night she had two of the chorus guys dressed as London bobbies place me under arrest, complete with a warrant, and with their hands under my arms, drag me off to jail – my dressing room. Each evening, a small group would gather at a distance along with the techies up in the fly gallery, waiting to see what silliness had been invented to get me off stage! It got more and more elaborate: being blindfolded and guided by a rope to a plate of liver offstage with a note reading “Meat, Sir. Meat”, a reference to a line in the play; getting “married” to the Widow Corney complete with a priest and then being hauled off by my ear to the dressing room; two of the chorus ladies naked from the waist up with arrows painted across their breasts “pointing” the way off stage; and, on the closing night, a costumed and choreographed production number with sparklers, bare-assed chorus boys, chorus ladies in lingerie and sex-kitten leather marching me off to the dressing room … all performed in complete silence!!! With the exception of the workhouse boys who were on stage, the entire cast, including our Producer, stood silently in the dark watching this final spectacle. It was eerily bizarre and magical at the same time! Only in the Theatre!

While the Opening Night parties were usually catered for hundreds of people, closing night food was a bit less elaborate, but still brought in. This closing was different. For most of the day, Timlock and some helpers had been out shopping and spent the whole of the evening in the scene shop (where the party was always held) chopping vegetables and slicing cheeses, preparing salads and cold cut platters, plating desserts and filling washing tubs with ice and soft drinks. This party was for “us” and another way for him to be part of that “us”. At the start of the festivities, one of the cast members gave a wonderful speech praising Timlock’s efforts to make the Company a Family, citing the initiation of the Workshop Program and fostering a more professional attitude toward the whole experience. He was placed on a stool, dressed in some costume pieces including a tiara and then, when he’d been embarrassed enough, was presented with a Producer’s Chair, complete with his name on the back. He was close to tears and it touched us all. It was the ultimate accolade and just another indication of the new-found solidarity in the Company.

During “Oliver” the Workshop Program had run with incredible success. Most of the Ensemble was taking classes and folks from the Community had joined in as well (by the end of the summer more than 250 people had taken part in 17 classes). I felt in my element once again, like the Portland days, and the response spurred people to register for the next session even before the first one was done. It was exhausting to say the least. Working in the office, doing afternoon rehearsals for “Charity”, teaching and then performing in the evenings left little time for anything else (see the photo!) But once “Oliver” came down, up went “Charity”.

Shapira’s cloud still hung over Rainbow if only through snippets of gossip and headlines that would pop up every now and then. The Company’s GM told me that Shapira had called (he could call out of prison but no one could call in to him) to find out how he could get in touch with the court artist to get a copy of the rendering that had been done of him during his trial so he could use it in next year’s program! I’ve not know anyone who has spent time in prison but I can only imagine what must go through a person’s head during those empty hours. Does one think about the past with regret? Or does one think about getting out and plotting revenge? There was an effort by an “unnamed advocate” to release Shapira and send him home due on his medical conditions. That request was rejected by the prison’s administration citing the fact that “he’s managing well and has a part-time occupation of light work duties (in the prison) in something he has an interest in”. There were contentions presented by the City (read City Councilor Al Golden) that Rainbow should return to the city’s coffers all the money that Shapira had stolen over the years. That idea was rejected by the City Council itself and Rainbow actually received a partial operating grant once again. The intrigue kept Rainbow’s name in the headlines, and despite what Mr. Golden had averred (that no one was going to the theatre) box office revenue, while down slightly, managed to maintain very well despite the adverse publicity.

Earlier in the summer, Timlock had informed me that there would be no New Musical Workshop. That had disappointed me. He’d said that time was against us and there was really no one to take charge of the large project. Since I was heavily involved with the school and had also submitted a piece for consideration, it couldn’t be me. But, now it seems that mounting the Workshop later in the Fall had put it back on the burner. Once again, I dusted off the script and score for “Now You’re Talkin’” and started thinking about doing some work on it … as if I hadn’t enough to do!

Rehearsals for “Charity” weren’t all that difficult for me. ‘Herman’, the owner of the Dance Hall, wasn’t a huge role but he did have one big number in the second Act – “I Love To Cry At Weddings”. I’d sung it for Alan at the audition and was pleased with what I’d done. I had, unfortunately, used the version of the song in the “Selections From” Song Book not realizing that it was in the “popular key” (a key in which “regular folks” could sing) rather than the “show key”. At the first sing-through I was completely blindsided by what I was going to have to do vocally in the number. Instead of starting the chorus of the song on a high ‘F’, which is what I’d sung in the audition, I now had to start a third higher … on an ‘A’! The voice is an odd part of one’s physiology to begin with. It can be cajoled and manipulated to make it do very difficult things and reach heights one didn’t think were possible. But it also takes an incredible amount of physical, mental and emotional energy to reach those heights. I sort of faked my way through the initial passes at the song and eventually got somewhat more comfortable with it. It got even better at the outdoor Stage with the attendant heat and high humidity. Taking my own advice to my students, it was also a case of “letting the character sing” rather than being too “in my head” and getting in the way of ‘Herman’. I wrote in my Journal: “Apparently the amazement of the group still stands when I go for those notes. The fact that I get them at all sort of amazes me. They are all hanging on what I sing, I am told, and holding the sustained high ‘A’ from falsetto to full voice really gets them going.” I looked forward to the number every night.

Timlock was made the permanent Producer late in the Summer. I guess up to that point it had been a case of him proving himself to the Board.  The quality of the productions and the atmosphere and enthusiasm that permeated the physical plant was undeniable. We had a love-fest going on and there was no drama – at least not IN the Theatre.

Toward the end of the season the cast usually held a Talent Night, an after-the-show get-together in the scene shop where folks would do their party pieces for each other (and a few friends) and drink until the wee hours. I usually avoided these events, one, because they went on forever and two, because there was some dreadful things put up for “approval” that should have remained unseen. For some reason, I got it in my head to challenge myself and had offhandedly suggested to Sofia Costantini, a great dancer in the Company, that we put together a dancer number for the show. I needed to put to rest for myself the “more nerve than talent” comment that a critic had bestowed upon me years ago after a POPS Concert where I had to do some dancing. It had always bugged me and this was my chance to let it go. Sof and I worked on a dance she’d choreographed to “All That Jazz” from “Chicago”. I’d told her not to pull punches with regard to the complexity of the steps. It was sweaty work, rehearsing during stolen moments in the late afternoon heat, but we got it polished to the point where I felt confident in what I was doing.

These talent affairs were interminable. They usually started about midnight after the show came down. Everyone had greeted their friends who had come to see the production and then took a bit of time to dude up for the party. They went on till two or three in the morning, the crowd getting thinner and thinner (or drunker and drunker) as the night wore on. Fortunately Sofia and I were on in the first hour. No one had seen me do any dancing of consequence and I was somewhat surprised at the response. The initial hoots and catcalls quickly turned into applause and cheers as our moves impressed and the ovation at the end was took us both unawares. I was happy with the results of our work.

Alan had stayed to watch and I stopped by his table afterward. He was scribbling away in a small notebook. “Writing letters?” I asked. “Nope. I’m jotting down notes about this great audition I just saw!” Over the summer I’d gotten closer to Alan. At one point he’d asked me if I ever worked out of town. I told him that when the show and role were right I’d travelled to anywhere. He seemed to file that away. I learned later that he’d leaned over to Timlock during our dance and asked “What is this guy doing in Winnipeg?” Seemed like I’d been making an impression. The summer wound down and we all said goodbye to one another. Now it was into other things.

Since Timlock had decided the New Musical Workshop was to go ahead, there was work to do organizing the details for the eleven day project. As part of my office duties I was put in charge of getting details in order with regard to scheduling and rehearsal space. While I’d submitted my show for consideration there were six other submissions that had come in. Being in house, I had an opportunity to suss out the caliber of my “competition”.  I must admit to getting more and more anxious as I read the scripts and listened to the music. The subject matter, styles and quality of the material varied greatly to my less-than-objective eyes and ears. Some were pretty esoteric. Some were out, way out, of the box. Some were wonderfully commercial. But they were all accomplished and well constructed. I could tell which ones might rise to the top of the heap and I didn’t hold out a lot of hope for my piece. There were four “judges”; two in town and two in Toronto How they would come down was anyone’s guess. I held my breath.

I don’t know why, but my piece was chosen. Maybe it had to do with the fact that I was from Manitoba (probably a consideration for the funding) or that my music was a bit more accessible than the others or that it was a smaller cast (two of the pieces had gigantic casts in the tradition of the “mega-musicals” that were the rage back then). In any case, I was up to the plate. “Don’t wish for something because you just might get it!” As is always the case, for me the pursuit of something is always more exciting than the catch. The excitement and energy of the audition seems to be more satisfying than the reality of the work that sets in after winning the role. This was now real. My songs were going to be sung. My words were going to be spoken. This story was going to be told. At least in theory. It was a work “in progress” and who knew what was going to happen on that road.

Of course, the on-going Shapira drama had to interject itself into our lives again. Of late he had applied for a medical leave which had been rejected. Then he had applied for day parole which had also been rejected. It seemed that he was doing everything he could to get out of prison. Then we awoke one morning to newspaper headlines once again. This time it was Timlock who got the big black letters above the story. I’d known that he had blown the whistle on the irregularities in the Company’s books but even so, I couldn’t understand why he decided to tell the world that he was responsible for the upheaval and Shapira’s incarceration. As he explained it, he didn’t want to appear complicit in the cover up which, he was sure, would come out eventually. The dynamics and intrigue of the whole affair were described in great detail in the news coverage. Timlock was angry that his profession was being “used” like this, that Shapira was getting away with what he (Timlock) considered to be criminal activity. He felt that calling out Shapira was the right thing to do. There were varying opinions on that … even to this day. When would this end? It would be a while!

I zapped off to Toronto and New York to see some shows for inspiration and for some Equity business and returned home to a whirlwind of activity that propelled me into one of the most frustrating, exhilarating, aggravating, intense and joyous experiences of my life.

Over the years, I had come to consider Directors a necessary evil in putting shows together. They seemed to me, at least in some cases, to be little more than traffic cops or, at the worst of times, impediments to my perspective of a character’s through-line and goals. They wielded their “power” in frustrating, soul-deadening swaths which made the joy of performing seem unachievable. There were, however, notable and affirming exceptions. Back in Portland days, Bill Dobson and Gene Davis Buck approached their craft with finesse and humour. In Winnipeg, the joyous exuberance of Richard Ouzounian and the gentle considerations of Robbie Paterson infused their productions with truth and clarity that allowed both performers and audiences to luxuriate in the wonder of making Theatre. Alan Lund, whose wisdom and experience enveloped him in a constantly visible aura, provided a foundation of experience and assuredness in which one felt safe and comfortable. I was about to meet another of those exceptions.

                Dorothy (“Dottie”) Danner’s family tree reads like a theatre encyclopedia counting Harry Danner, Blythe Danner, Luke Paltrow and Gwyneth Paltrow among her kin. Her resume is crammed with performing and directing credits from Broadway to Opera stages around the world. I wondered what I was in for as I approached the first day of rehearsal at the Edmonton Opera for their mounting of “Pirates of Penzance” in which I was playing the “patter role” of Major General Stanley. As always, there were introductions and the sizing-up moments as we launched into a music rehearsal with our MD, the miraculous David Abell. Fortunately, dear Tracy Dahl was playing ‘Mabel’ in the cast so I had at least one ally at the outset. But Irving (Gutmann) had assembled a crackerjack cast and the group (Don Bernardini as ‘Frederic’, Claude Corbeil as the ‘Pirate King’, John Dodington as the “Sergeant of Police’ and Clarity James as ‘Ruth’) quickly fell in love with each other and became inseparable! The next unknown was our Director.

            My first impression of Dottie was that this woman was, simply put, FUN! Her sense of humour was somewhat irreverent and wonderfully “theatrical”. She had a ton of stories about her time on Broadway and in “the biz” and we responded to them. She put everyone at ease and her only demand was that we all work hard to make this a great production. Our first conversation was not what I expected. “You dance”. It wasn’t a question but rather a statement as she stood before me with my resume in hand. “Well, I don’t know if you’d call me a dancer. Perhaps I “move” a bit”, I said. “Your resume says otherwise”, she persisted. I succumbed and told her that I had a few steps I felt comfortable doing. “Good! That’s where we’ll start with the “MG”, she said, “because the character should come out of the performer’s personality”. In the rehearsal weeks that followed I was breathlessly turned into a male version of Gwen Verdon playing a trouser role! I was in my glory.

My second impression of her was that she worked incredibly hard. I could actually SEE her working. It wasn’t an exterior thing. She was the embodiment of someone in conflict with herself, a mental battle of ideas being fought and showing so very subtly on her face. They were private moments that I spied on at every opportunity. I could see experiments happening inside and then, at a certain point, given voice in a clear and considered explanation of what she wanted me to do in any particular scene. I would hang on her every word because I knew what she had gone through, if only for a few moments, to come up with the right direction. If it didn’t work for her she wouldn’t blame me. She would go back behind the table for a few minutes, have the inner war all over again and come back to me with another solution to the problem. I soon learned that, rather than my standing and waiting, I was expected to offer insights of my own. They were put “into the hopper” and a moment later out came a melding of her idea and mine. It was wonderful to experience.

Because I could move well, most of my numbers had an element of dance about them. “The River Song” was one in particular. We ended up calling it the “Ballet du Breeze”. At one point, the “Major General” dressed in a voluminous nightshirt, is, unbeknownst to him, being stalked by the Pirate King and Pirate and Police Choruses who, hiding in various places on the set, are trying to kill him. If you look closely at the the picture at left you can see one of my assailants disguised as a “tree” complete with white gloves. The humour of the scene depends on the near misses and the obliviousness of the “MG” to the peril just inches behind him. It was all a question of timing for both me and Claude Corbeil, a great comedian and singer. Dottie gave me the places she needed me to be on the stage to accommodate the Pirates blocking. The “how” of getting from one place to another was left up to me. A critic later referred to my performance as “the major-general, who, caught up in some pastoral English moment, flits (yes, flits) about the stage like Isadora Duncan complete with scarf”! We worked and worked and worked the elements to the point of exhaustion. The “almost-got-him” moments had to be timed to the nanosecond in order for them read honestly and during rehearsals the lady’s Ensemble would sit and watch us and laugh and laugh when the moments worked. Those responses spurred us on.

All during the weeks of rehearsals, I would haunt the Edmonton Public Library desperate for news from home about the Shapira/Rainbow affair. These were days long before the Internet or cells phones, so getting information on the fly wasn’t easy. When the Winnipeg Free Press would arrive at the Library, it would be from days earlier. I knew the investigation had been extended but there were no public updates forthcoming. It was frustrating.

Moving to the stage required a lot of adjustments because of the huge sets. Having all the levels and endless staircases now in play complicated the timing a bit, but for me provided new physical elements of which I took great advantage. Then the costumes were added. My first outfit was wonderful. With the addition of mutton chops, I looked like Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria (see above). It was made of wool and all the dashing about during my first numbers got me sweating like a stuck pig. The switch to the nightgown in the second act was a mercy.  At our first full dress we got to the “Ballet du Breeze”. From my upper entrance perch I could see all the Ensemble Ladies rushing from backstage into the house to watch the number. As the Pirates and Police hide themselves about the stage they give me my entrance cue: “Yes, Yes, the ‘Major General’ comes”. I enter on the top platform and work my way down the stairs to the mid-level singing about the noise I thought I’d heard. Finding nothing, I relax and I launch into my aria. As I sing “Sighing softly to the river comes the loving breeze” two things happen. On the beat after “breeze” the Police make a lunge for me on the stairs and at the same time I jump off the fifth step on to the deck. As I took off, the “breeze” I created with my leap billowed the nightshirt up over my head exposing my hairy torso along with my “tighty-whities” and excess avoirdupois. The shrieks of laughter that came from the ladies in the house enveloped me, much like the nightshirt which I now desperately tried to push down from around my head if only to see where I was about to land. The guys on stage tried to stifle their reactions to no avail. I felt more embarrassed than anything (less so the ‘Major General’ because he was “alone” on stage) but we both recovered and continued on. Needless to say, the underwear was changed to something less contemporary the following night.

The production was a triumph! As I’ve mentioned before in these pages, I am in heaven when I hear an audience laugh at something I’ve done. Opera audiences are especially great because they normally get so few chances to do that. The experience was incredibly positive all round. Dottie was happy. David was happy. The cast was happy. Even the Orchestra, which had initially reacted rather negatively toward us because they weren’t playing their usual Beethoven or Mahler, got caught up in the fun and ultimately succumbed to the material and performances. And it ended all too soon. We all expressed how wonderful it would be to work together again, but of course it never works out that way (except in this case – two more productions with both Tracy and Dottie were still down the road) and we were done. I took off for a couple of weeks of R&R in Hawaii with my Mom. Dottie had arranged an audition for a production of “Candide” at the Hawaii Opera Theatre, but, fortunately because of scheduling conflicts, nothing came of that.

Once back in Winnipeg, a lot of things happened at the same time. Travel Manitoba had been waiting for me to return to record a new series of narrations for the tourism kiosks at the province’s borders. That took some time but paid a lot of money.

Timlock, now firmly ensconced at Rainbow, needed an assistant for a few hours a week to start getting things re-organized in the office. He hired me. He also instituted two new projects for the Theatre. One was a Class Workshop Program. The other was a “New Musical” project! I was over the moon about both of them. While organizing the office came naturally to me, it also gave me an opportunity to delve deeper into the workings of the Company and its history. Digging into dusty old file boxes yielded a treasure trove of information which I mentally tucked away as “deep background”.

Organizing the “School” was another matter altogether. We were starting from scratch. The intent was to provide classes during the run of the summer shows taught by the Professional Cast members and would be open to Company Ensemble members and folks in the community interested in honing their skills. It would be free to everyone. My job, initially, was to create an outline of approach and a list of possible instructors. Having run the School at Portland Civic Theatre School for years, I had some experience putting such a program together. However, at this point, I was just a grunt listing questions that someone else would have to answer in detail. That someone else was an actress named Jo Havilland who lived in England and would be coming back to Canada to perform at Rainbow. She had teaching experience and Timlock thought she would be a good fit to run the School that summer. I was fine with that.

The summer’s shows were “Oliver” and “Sweet Charity”, both to be directed by Alan Lund. Casting was still to be decided. I wanted to play ‘Fagin’ but even at this point that was a long shot. Feelers had already been put out to Toronto performers like Barry Morse, David Walden and Jan Rubes, so I’d just put it out of my mind. Doing both shows, which Timlock had intimated would probably be the case, and teaching a class or two would be more than enough work. Running the school as well would be just too much, I thought.

The other project, the New Musical Workshop, was more than exciting, but I found myself with a wee dilemma. What would it look like if I was working for Rainbow and got the nod for my show to be worked on by the Company? Timlock set my mind at ease by telling that they would be looking for nation-wide submissions! On one hand, “competing” against writers from all over the country was a rather daunting thought. But, on the other hand, since the project was being funded by the Manitoba Arts Council, a priority was given to Manitoba talent. That would be a watching brief for a while.

The Shapira scandal seemed to be on the back burner. While a bit of reporting had seeped out with regard to the police investigation and the intricacies of the scams he’d pulled, there was nothing to indicate it was going to be wrapping up soon. We would wait.

One afternoon the phone rang. “Riii-ii-chard. It’s Irrr-ving”. Irving (Guttman’s) distinctive greeting always set me a’flutter. I quickly tried to assess what the offer would be. I couldn’t think of anything the Manitoba Opera was doing that required a character or buffo performer. But, as it turned out, this offer was for a “real” role; the small part of “Gregorio” in Gounod’s “Romeo et Juliette” which Irving was directing. It was serious singing and I was in! He also offered me the role of the ‘Don’ in “Don Pasquale” for a School Tour being “directed” by THAT Director. I begged off on that one. That took care of a few weeks at good bucks. Everything was comin’ up roses!

Then, out of the blue, Shapira called me! For some reason, with Jack there was always a silence that preceded his first words after I said “Hello” so I knew who it was immediately. We talked for about twenty minutes. I was relatively cool in my responses to him. Oddly, there seemed to be a kind of clarity in his voice that I’d not heard before. He told me how his “rehabilitation” (he was a day patient at the Health Sciences Center) had been going and how his therapy sessions had served to calm him down a bit. He blamed his state of mind before the hospitalization as the reason for all his troubles. While he took some subtle shots at Rainbow’s management (meaning, I guessed, Jack Timlock) he didn’t go into one of his typical rants. We rang off but he called back a few minutes later and told me I must tell no one about his calling me. It was all rather strange and I think it took some guts for him to call. It didn’t, however, ease my anger that he would try to defend himself to me when the public record spoke for itself. We didn’t talk about the investigations and what result they would produce, but I couldn’t help but think that he must have been anxious about the future.

Alan (Lund) came in to town to listen to folks for the summer shows. There was always a strange sort of political thing about auditioning at Rainbow. You did your party pieces and then, invariably, were asked if you would take whatever was offered you. That was a trap and everyone knew it, a leftover from the old days when “committing to the team” was all that mattered. Everyone dutifully said “yes” to the question and held their breath until casting was announced. Thank heavens those days are long gone! I was singing for ‘Herman’ in “Charity” and ‘Mr. Bumble’ in “Oliver”. I’d given up on ‘Fagin’ since they were still looking in Toronto. ‘Herman’ starts his one song, “I Love To Cry At Weddings”, with a sustained high ‘F’ on the word “I”. It was right in my wheelhouse back in those days and I nailed it! Then into “Boy For Sale” for ‘Bumble’. Afterward Alan told me he was surprised that I had a legit voice. Thank goodness for that Opera training! I had to wait a while to find out if I’d been cast (although “word” was circulating out of the room that I’d bagged both roles) and went on about life for a bit.

“Romeo et Juliette” rehearsals started with the fight sequences. Having a sword back in my hands felt like the old MTC days.  For the major battle in the third Act, which was being “choreographed” by John Kaminsky from the RWB, I was teamed up with the ‘Stephano’, a character which is sung by a soprano. Sword combat was by no means this lady’s forte and she was very nervous. It was pretty basic for me but we spent a LOT of time perfecting the moves which John had tried to make as simple but effective as possible. After a few “mishaps” the sequences finally started to work. I still have a scar on the knuckle of my right thumb from the experience.

Irving was directing and our conductor was John Matheson who was from the “this-is-opera-and-there-is-no-other-art-form-like-it” school of conducting. I was already feeling somewhat apprehensive and his rather pompous attitude put me more on edge. I had learned the role – it wasn’t very big at all – and felt comfortable with the French and all the notes. In the course of the sing-thru, much to my horror, I discovered that I’d missed a whole page of my dialogue embedded in a Chorus and had to be taken through it note by note in front of everyone. If the earth had opened up swallowed me at that point, I wouldn’t have minded at all. I hate being embarrassed, especially when it’s of my own making! But it was only momentary and everything turned out fine. I got to know Irving better during this production. We had some dinners and he would call late in the evening because he wanted to laugh. I guess I amused him with my cynicism about certain performing approaches and we “dished” about folks. He told me I should be going out for “limited” character roles, that I had a “decent” voice. Not exactly what I wanted to hear but Irving knew his stuff and I took the fact that he was casting me all over the place as his stamp of approval. There was more to come!

The photo at left shows me as Gregorio. I include this picture as a reminder to myself of the non-smoking year and a half I’d endured. The up-side to that hardship was that I added a couple of extra notes to my upper range. The downside was that I looked like I did; but I got by playing yet another “brawler”. Once on stage and in costume there was a lot of standing about while Irving adjusted things. I took the opportunity to get to know some of the Chorus guys a bit better. They seemed to be at sea about what was going on and, surprisingly, what was being said! How could they go through all those rehearsals and not understand the language they were speaking? A bunch of them gathered about me as I explained the conflict that was coming to a head in the scene and what I was shouting about. Over the few rehearsals that followed I found myself saying over and over again to anyone who would listen that Opera was just another form of “Theatre” and needed the same kind of commitment and concentration; that “the voice” becomes subject to the character, that it doesn’t exist by itself. With a fine singer you remember the high notes, but with a fine actor, you remember the performance. That seemed to give them some confidence and the ensemble scenes appeared to rise above the norm. It was an excellent production. To tell the truth, I couldn’t figure out WHY it was a good production. Perhaps it was the voices; perhaps it was the simplicity and beauty of the set; perhaps it was Gounod’s glorious music; but for me, as little as I had to do, it was very satisfying.

As the show ended, word started to leak out that the Rainbow probe had finished. There were no conclusions at this point but the Crown Attorney indicated that he expected to make some announcements shortly. The investigations had gone on for six months and during that time Arts Groups all over the city had come under scrutiny from City Council and provincial funding bodies. THEIR conclusions were that the Rainbow situation had been an aberration, that cultural activities were “essential” and that they would continue to support and fund the organizations that provided so much to the cultural life of the city. This was incredibly reassuring and actually resulted in some major improvements and upgrades to existing facilities. However, a price was still to be levied by the police investigators!

Things were progressing with the Summer plans. I had been cast in the two roles I’d auditioned for. I had organized the Theatre’s School component for the Principal’s stamp of approval. Word had gone out about the New Musical Program and I had made my submission. It was a matter of waiting to find out what the decision would be. In the mean time, I zapped down to Nashville to do a project for Ducks Unlimited.

Ducks Unlimited was a strange organization! On one hand, they raised an incredible amount of money to preserve the marshlands (the natural habitat of ducks) all over North America. On the other hand, the organization was made up exclusively of duck hunters!! I guess it could be called “sustainability” nowadays, but to my mind, it was a case of duck killers saving the lands on which they killed the ducks! I put those thoughts aside as I was offered an obscene amount of money (yeah, call me a mercenary) to do a live, half-hour narration for the Canadian delegation’s presentation for D.U.’s annual convention at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville (a facility which, in its size and scope, can only be compared to the West Edmonton Mall, or the Mall of America for my Yankee friends). This convention was a high-powered, cut-throat event where the various regions would try to outdo each other’s presentation, boasting to one and all that they’d raised excessive amounts of money and that their region and conservation programs were the best. The money the regions paid the various ad agencies to create the presentations was in the millions of dollars. I could tell the Canadians had spared NO expense in putting together the extended promo.  It was astonishing! The gigantic multi-screen presentation reminded me of the cutting edge “Ontario” film at the province’s Expo ‘67 Pavilion. The visuals were inspirational, uplifting and mind blowing! The music was pulsating, edgy, contemporary and heartfelt. Into this, insert ME and a “message” that could have been delivered from a pulpit on a Sunday morning! The whole affair was beyond anything I could have imagined for a duck hunter’s convention. It was only three days but it all stays in my mind as the pinnacle of excessiveness … and the lengths to which people will go in attempts to outdo each other!

I had planned a short trip to England to see some shows and Timlock suggested that I meet up with Jo Havilland to deliver and talk about the plans for the Rainbow School program. England in the late spring is a beauty and combining a two-day hike to Guildford, nine shows in London and the business meeting in Bournemouth put me in seventh heaven. Jo was excited about the potential of the school, but had reservations about how much work it would be. Her hesitation wasn’t really my concern. I was really there to tell her what the job would entail. We left it that she would think further on it. The London shows were inspirational and I returned to Canada ready to get into some theatre of my own. I also returned to Canada to learn that Jo had decided NOT to take the Principal position. Guess who got that job!!

Then the news hit the papers! And it just kept coming and coming; the commentary, the Editorials, the analysis, more and more reporting. Hardly a day went by when there wasn’t some new information added to the story. I can’t imagine what he must have been going through. Pictures of him on television during the trial showed him to be drawn, pale and looking ill. Someone who had been so in control of his life had been run through the mill and was now shown to have no power left. While I always thought he was clever, I never thought he was smart. There were instinctive responses to situations in which I saw him (and which I’d experienced) but there was nothing to indicate that he was actually thinking about the repercussions of his actions; nothing was thought through.  In the office we speculated that he would go kicking and screaming, taking down as many people as he could along the way. But, uncharacteristically, he was quiet. He had been coached on what to say and how to say it. It’s hard to see in the picture here of him walking down the court stairs but through his glasses his eyes are looking toward the photographer, not with defiance or arrogance but rather embarrassment and confusion and not a little shame, as if he were asking, “How did this happen to me?” That photo made me feel sorry for him.

He was sentenced to a year and a half in prison and fined fifty thousand dollars. He had already paid back over a half million. His lawyers had cited his medical issues when pleading for mercy, specifically the sleep apnea which deprived his brain of oxygen while asleep and “Pickwickian Syndrome” (obesity hyperventilation syndrome) which affected his breathing while awake. But it made no difference. He was walked into Headingly Prison and that seemed to be the end of the story.

In fact, nothing could have been further from the truth!

THE ROAR OF THE GREASEPAINT – Part Twenty

            The script drafts, revisions, rewrites, the music sketches and printings and the demo and test tapes of “Now You’re Talkin’” sat in a file case on the corner of my desk like a painful and taunting reminder of the hours and hours of work I had, so far, put into this project over that past year. What was the point of all this? The ambiguous responses from the various theatres to whom I had sent scripts and tapes sat close by, keeping me aware of how my efforts had seemingly been for naught. I don’t know why I didn’t salt them away in a closet or a drawer. Perhaps I just wanted the jolt of seeing the material from time to time to keep some perspective in my life. But, for the moment, I relinquished those possibilities and got on with other things.

The meeting with Leslee (Silverman) was, I knew, not about the show I’d written. A few months earlier, in the course of an update about “Now You’re Talkin’”, she had asked me if I would be interested in getting involved in a new project for Actors Showcase. They were considering mounting their first fully-fledged Musical, a production of “Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang”. She had offered me some choices: I could be in the show, do the Musical Direction or direct it. It was nice to have options. I’d thought about it and this meeting was to cement what my involvement would be. Simply put, the piece was an adaptation of a story by Mordecai Richler about the empowering of children. It had originally been commissioned by Young People’s Theatre in Toronto and musicalized by Dennis Lee and Jim Betts in the late 70’s.

I’d not directed for quite a while, not since my Portland days; but the thought of opening another avenue for income and creative control was too much to pass on and I took the Directing job. We signed the contract and I was off to the races. I decided that getting together a production team would be the first order of business and then I would turn my eye toward casting the show. I was, at this point, being held captive in a show at MTC called “Royalty is Royalty” by W.O. Mitchell, one of Rick McNair’s favorite writers, and had an infinitesimally small role playing the leader of a rag-tag marching band – more “rag” than “tag”, with eight lines and some crowd scenes – so I spent a lot of my off-stage time in my dressing room organizing my concept and approach for “Jacob”. I had again been reminded of what I did NOT want to do as a director while watching the McNair School of Staging, which was to call people on stage, tell them to start talking and “let’s see what happens”! “It’ll work itself out” was his mantra and, out of our own self-preservation more than anything else, it usually did. Steven Schipper, who was one of the Assistant ADs at the Theatre, would come in from time to time and clean things up, but it was a confusing and uncomfortable process. I was happy to have something to do with my time off stage!

Putting together my creative team was not an easy task. My involvement had been confirmed pretty late in the season and, as a result, a lot of the better folks had already been snapped up. I was scrambling to find people I knew could do the job and, importantly, with whom I would enjoy working. I settled an excellent Stage Manager (Janet Sellery) and Lighting Designer (Kevin Fraser), a husband and wife team I’d met in Toronto in the late summer. After some back and forth I brought Bev Aronovitch in as our Musical Director. Because my visual concept for the piece was rather complicated, I needed someone with a lot of design experience and who didn’t mind going off-the-wall a bit. Enter crucial Thread Number Five in this saga!

I’d met Jack Timlock at MTC (where he was Production Manager) just a short while after arriving in Winnipeg and our paths had crossed any number of times over the past years. He was freelancing now and I hired him as my designer. Timlock (I’m going to use his last name to differentiate him from Jack Shapira – who would re-enter the story very shortly) was a feisty guy to say the least. He was outspoken, very funny and bitchy at the same time and, as he put it, “said things that other people were only thinking”. That got him into trouble from time to time, but most of the time I appreciated his down-to-earth manner and his candour. Because he had been a Production Manager at a lot of theatres, he knew what limitations were in play for any particular engager – financial, physical and aesthetic – and that was a reassuring asset in putting a show together. We began our trek into “Jacobland” as I explained my needs. He sketched and modified designs as the days went by and we were both getting excited by the potential of the visual component of the show.

Most of our meetings started with some chattering back and forth about what was going on the community, mostly gossip but usually substantiated snippets of the theatre drama about town. It was during one of these preambles that he told me about some “financial irregularities” at Rainbow Stage. As their Production Manager, Timlock was responsible for keeping his eye on budgeting and expenditures and the Company’s accounts. There was a group of Rainbow’s Board (which included the City’s Mayor (Bill Norrie) and the Lieutenant Governor (Pearl McGonigle) which, over time, had become aware of some questionable expenditures and had asked Timlock to notify them of anything that caught his eye in this regard.

Concurrent to all this was the continuing set-tos between the entire Arts Community and the Winnipeg City Council. Arts Funding was an explosive topic at Council meetings (which were broadcast locally on cable and made for some exciting viewing). The constant attacks by anti-arts Councilors Alan Wade (“The Wicked Witch of the Arts”) and Al Golden about “why these artsy folks should be given “free rides” from the city” were the focus of conversations in artist’s hang outs and Arts Board Rooms around the city. Additionally, as if to give credence to the municipal acrimony, the Free Trade Agreement between the US and Canada was being fiercely debated. Part of those embroilments concerned The Arts and resulted in a national Commission called “The Status of the Artist” (in which, over the months ahead, I was to play a small part). Across the country, the viability of funding for the arts became extremely contentious. It always comes down to money doesn’t it!?

Thus, Shapira’s appearances before the City Council asking for money when, in the back of some minds he was “doing stuff” with Rainbow’s coffers, were the settings for some major arguments. His request to the City for $72K for the production of “Anne of Green Gables” was met with sneers and an approval of only $12K and the war was on. It didn’t last very long.

I popped in to the Rainbow office a few days later to discover that “Jack Shapira was no longer with Rainbow”! WHAT??? My mouth must have dropped a mile when the General Manager told me this. There had been a blow up at a Board Meeting a few nights earlier and that was “it”. People were being told that he was “on vacation” but no one believed that. The full Board had been informed of the financial irregularities, confronted Shapira and, despite his heated objections, had told him he was done. He was being replaced by … wait for it … Jack Timlock! In talking to Chickie (Shapira’s wife) I learned that even she had been concerned about how her husband had been acting of late, thinking that it was ten years ago and that he still held sway over his empire. In a way, it was sad. Why would someone sabotage themselves like that? He was a wealthy man in his own right. Why embezzle from Rainbow? A few days after that conversation, Shapira called. I’d not heard from him for quite a while. He sounded beaten but still managed take umbrage that no one was calling him. What the hell did he expect?! He had indeed been away, in San Francisco, getting psychiatric help (he said) and had come to a lot of realizations, like how much of a bastard he’d been to a lot of people over the years and how humbling the therapy sessions were. He swore me to secrecy until he made his formal announcement. The newspaper headlines said it all.

But that certainly wasn’t the whole story. Timlock, who chose me as his vomit pail for some reason, let go over lunch one day, telling me that he had known what was going on for a couple of years and had been accumulating Xerox copies of phony cheques and ledger entries as he didn’t want to be seen as an accessory should all this come to light, as indeed it was about to. Initially, Board spokespeople were treating it as an internal matter, trying to be pro-active and circumspect. But with the municipal and provincial government connections sitting on the Board, it was only a matter of time before the real story came out. And a week later it did!!

The timing for this could not have been worse. With the arts under siege across the country, to have a scandal come to bear was a coffin nail. But there was no let-up in the headlines! The commentary, analysis, editorials, Letters to the Editor just kept coming, day after day after day! Investigations of other arts groups in town were now being threatened. From time to time I would get messages from Shapira on my machine. “Why aren’t you calling me?’ and a hang up. “Some friend you are!” and a hang up. How could I respond to all this? It wasn’t as if I could offer any advice or commiseration. I blamed him for what was happening and would have gone off on him had we spoken. I lay in bed at night getting angrier and angrier at the memories of his constant pleas of poverty when negotiating contracts, his battles with Equity about raising professional quotas and my coming to his defense with Equity over and over again; we’d all been duped! And it wasn’t over!

We were now well into rehearsals for ‘Jacob Two-Two” and I was grateful to have an oasis from all this upheaval. It wasn’t a peaceful oasis but served to center me and put my head in another space. The lead up to our first meeting was exciting and energizing. Even though it was late in the season, I’d got my first picks for the Adult roles. Robbie and Pat Hunter were on board for “Mr. Fish” and “Mistress. Fowl” and they were my anchor. The kids were another matter. I auditioned dozens of them and, with some degree of agony, managed to find the right shapes and sizes and abilities.

Being organized is almost a sexual experience for me. (I can’t believe I actually wrote that down … but it’s the truth!) There is a visceral joy at having everything in order to be used as a foundation for the challenges and the unexpected when putting a show together. If you “know your shit” you can deal with anything. And I knew my shit! I knew the show backward and forward and inside out and had taken great pains in explaining the concept to everyone so we were all on the same page. At one point during that first cast meeting, Leslee (who was watching everything that was going on … after all, it was her theatre) come over to me at a break and told me that I was using words that were too big for the kids to understand. “What??” says I. “I don’t think words like “ameliorate” and “expeditious”” are day-to-day words for 8 year olds!” says she. It had been a long time since I’d been in a “kid environment” so I toned it down a bit. They would creep back in from time to time, but I monitored myself.

There were up and down times – as there always are putting a show together – but I was immersed and, like a warm bath, I was luxuriating in it! Scheduling was a problem that frustrated me. Some of it was of my own doing. I was still doing “Royalty” at MTC and constant commercial recording sessions early in the day and this lead to unavoidable conflicts, especially on matinee days. The kids weren’t available till after school and my Musical Director was only on site for three hours a day. I knew that the “Festival” sound she was trying to coax out of the kid’s singing was going to go the way of all flesh once we hit the stage. I would be side-coaching them, screaming “Louder!!” or “”More energy!” or “Tell me!!”, but I let the “technique” sessions take precedence for a while. It was helter-skelter but we managed due mainly to everyone’s spirit and energy. While the kids bounced off the walls from time to time they got down to business when it came to doing the job. The adults were stabilizing influences and, with my crackerjack Stage Management team, we got the show on its feet, shaky though they were. Our first run-thru was stupendous! Our second was like we had never rehearsed the show at all! But that’s the way it goes sometimes.

While I had pretty well bought into the script, the music, for me, left a great deal to be desired. It had been written ten years earlier and was very dated. With the exception of a couple of the songs, the musical numbers bore little relationship to what was going on in the story. They seemed to have been inserted for the sake of “let’s have a song here” and that didn’t sit well with me. So, in my arrogance, I decided to write some new material to help the story along and give the characters some depth. We found out rather quickly from the licensors that this wasn’t going to fly at all. It sort of miffed me because I’d written some good material and it was being sung very well in rehearsals. This was back in the day long before “re-imagining” existing scripts or “reconstructing” older material was a trend. At this point in my life “recreating” a theatre piece seems a bit like cheating or taking the easy way out. If a play doesn’t “work” for you, do something else, or write your own material. But back then the published version was sacrosanct and I was, like I said, arrogant and thought I knew better.

Performing to music “tracks” is pretty well “old hat” these days. Back then, it was new. Very new. Bev, my MD had mastered computer sequencing and in the time she’d not been with us, had turned the rather lame score into a virtual symphonic masterpiece. The great thing about tracks is that they are consistent. The bad thing about tracks is that they are consistent! Once the “play” button is pushed, there is no room for error. There is no turning back. There is no vamping till ready, there is no missing an entrance, there is no screwing up of any kind. The cast found that out rather quickly when they started rehearsing with Bev. The cue word for the music to start was the cue word and once it was said the musical train was headed for the next station.  It took repeated tries but once it was in their heads, it was great. I was over the moon and so was the cast. It was just the boost needed to take us to the next level.

There is a dreadful time in the course of putting a show together when the company moves from the rehearsal hall to the stage. The group is thrown into a new environment that bears no relationship to where the past weeks have been comfortably and, ultimately, complacently spent. In this new space, emotions are forced to the surface. The “normal” disappears. The bright stage lighting, the costumes, the backstage darkness, the ranks of audience seating in front of you, the busy stage crew all serve to remind you that the performer is no longer the focus. Now the production becomes the most important thing. It surrounds, envelopes and overwhelms you. As a Director, I love this period! Deep down inside there might be a few misgivings but you know, IF you’ve done your job, that all the elements are in place. The mechanics are set. If you’ve also been a performer, as a Director you understand the upheaval that is about to take place for those poor folks on stage. But you also know that it will all settle in short order.  This new “reality” will become a haven, an all-too-brief tight-knit family unit of joyous human beings doing what they love. That’s it! That’s why this happens! And that’s how it did happen.

I had to work hard to maintain my objectivity. As we went through the tech period I came to realize that the mistakes were minor and fixable and while there was still some detailing to be taken care of in the performing, I was impressed with the cast’s and crew’s work … and mine. We opened to great acclaim. Nothing went wrong (always a blessing) and despite the fact that the vast majority of audiences were made up completely of kids, the responses were always over the top and sustained. I did notice, however, that the kids in our show were giving in to temptation: “Wow, if I get a big laugh by doing the line this way, I’ll probably get a bigger laugh if I do this with my face while saying the line, or do that with my body!” I got on to that right away with a small but firm lecture about removing the “improvements” and honouring what we had all worked so hard to put on the stage. That seemed to work.

Before I knew it, “Jacob” was over. I was pleased and proud of the product but, as is always the case, when it’s over, you just walk away. In this case, I had put my foot back into the Directing Waters and would see what it led to. Needless to say, the constant thrum of the Shapira/Rainbow scandal continued to permeate the atmosphere like a behemoth’s heartbeat, fading then growing as the investigations went on and on. The call for arts funding re-assessments and audits of all the city’s arts organizations grew and, toward the end of the year, the Rainbow investigation was expanded. Now the Fraud Squad was looking waa-aay back as more financial “irregularities” surfaced. We waited.

I happily began teaching a Musical Theatre class at MTC and that was energizing, getting me back into a performance mindset as I had snagged a small role (“The Minister”) in Rainbow’s first winter show, “Anne of Green Gables” and was about to start rehearsals. Alan (Lund) was to direct. The wonderful thing about this experience was watching Alan work (again). In this case, he had directed the original production of “Anne” in 1966 and hundreds of times since then. I was anxious to watch how someone who knew a show so well would keep himself interested. The fact that the rehearsal period had been reduced to the minimum (two and a half weeks) put the pressure on all of us. Alan’s approach was incredibly methodical and VERY fast. He would get miffed from time to time forgetting that we had never done the show before and expecting us to read his mind about what he wanted to have happen in a certain moment. But then he would check himself and remember this was new to us and get back to his normal generous approach. The show opened to great audience reception (who doesn’t like the nostalgic and sentimental pap that is “Anne of Green Gables”?) and we were off on another run.

By now, Timlock had very quickly gotten the reins of Rainbow Stage firmly in hand. It always struck me as odd when he would arrive at the theatre during “Anne”. He would sit about in the Green Room with folks coming up to him and intimating their desire for work. I knew he hated being schmoozed by actors (“The only reason people like me is because I can give them work”, he would complain). Since he was now in control of things everyone’s attitude had changed toward him. I avoided him not wanting to give the impression that I wanted work too (which, of course, I did) but he would see me sitting waiting for my next entrance and throw himself down beside me with his head very close to mine and start whispering gossip; only this wasn’t gossip; it was information from the source! I was becoming a confidant, a confederate, slowing being drawn into the vortex of this whirlpool that was picking up speed. There was something exciting about it, but at the same time something that felt a just a little bit dangerous. At the same time it was all I could do to resist my impulses to ask what was being done in the coming summer and were there any parts for me. He eventually volunteered that information and I found out that, having now been appointed Resident Director, Alan had asked for me and that the Summer shows were “Sweet Charity” and “Oliver”.  I also learned that, in addition to his job as Rainbow’s Producer, Timlock was in preparations to open a new Dinner Theatre at the Westin Hotel. There were to be a LOT more changes in the months to come, most of which would heavily involve me for a long time to come.

“Anne” closed and I headed West to do ‘Maj. Gen. Stanley’ in a production of “Pirates of Penzance” for Edmonton Opera. Before I left I had tried to get in touch with Shapira to find out how he was doing but was usually thwarted by Chickie who would go on about him just hanging about the house, unshaved and unwashed. I hoped that I could get “news” from Winnipeg via newspapers at the Library (these were days long before the internet) because this growing saga was not over … not by a long shot!

It had been almost a year (time flies when you’re having “fun”) since Leslee (Silverman) had approached me about “writing a show” for her theatre. The ups and downs of the creative process had yielded a foundation which, even after all this time, still needed work. Aside from some positive and encouraging input from admittedly subjective friends and family, I had been writing in a vacuum. The only objective voice had been Leslee’s, but with nothing to work toward I was at a loss for what to do next. Rick (McNair) had, after being plied with a lot of food and drink at a listening party at my apartment, finally given me some input. Aside from telling me between mouthfuls of food that he liked the music and that the script needed “more surprises” that event had been of little value. I decided to take my heart in my hands and sent out scripts and demo tapes to some smaller theatres back East for some truly objective commentary. And I waited.

            In the meantime, money work burgeoned. Along with Robbie, I had been cast in Rainbow’s production of “My Fair Lady” playing sidekicks ‘Jamie’ and ‘Harry’ to Cliff Garner’s “Doolittle’. We were a wee oasis of friends in a desert of principals all from out of town. Back in those days importing performers wasn’t a cause for much concern. It was considered “acceptable” because that was the way it had always been done – a ‘tradition” that was to change in very short shrift … but more of that later. It became apparent very early on (at least to my eye) that while our two leads were established and well- regarded Actors, their Musical Theatre experience was, well, questionable. While “My Fair Lady” has it foundation in G.B. Shaw’s “Pygmalion”, Lerner and Loewe’s adaptation of his play presents some challenges to anyone who approaches the Musical thinking this is just Shaw with some songs thrown in here and there. There are great differences in terms of approach and woe betide the actor who ignores the craft required to make it work! Unfortunately, our ‘Henry Higgins’ was baffled by what it took to make the transitions from speaking to singing work; and, amazingly, our ‘Eliza’ had a hard time with the essential Cockney accent! It confused me that they had been cast in those roles! Our Director had his work cut out for him!

            Alan Lund was a titan in Canadian Theatre! His storied history ran the gamut from the earliest days of Canadian Television choreographing and dancing across our tiny black and white TV screens with his wife, Blanche, to the Artistic Directorship of the fabled Charlottetown Festival for twenty years! Now, before my very eyes, here he was walking into the rehearsal hall of Rainbow Stage. I stood in absolute awe.

He exuded theatre, not flamboyantly or ostentatiously; but rather it was an aura that surrounded him and moved with him as he greeted us on that first day of rehearsal. One could sense his wisdom, his experience and, best of all, his utter devotion to the craft of making theatre! He was gentle, patient (except when he wasn’t – a focused anger that could fill a room to make a point and dissipate moments later) and consummately aware of the incredibly difficult process it took to mount a show. He had been doing it for so many years and it showed. He treated all his performers that way. Even in the huge production numbers there was never a sense of urgency. I saw a thoughtful approach as he wandered through the Ensemble, pausing for a moment, making assessments as to the big picture then, with gentle touch on the arm or the shoulder, giving a calm instruction as to what should happen on a step or a gesture, or indicating where he needed someone to move to. I trusted him as soon as I met him! Little did I know that I was to work with him many times in the years ahead, and that was soon to become a great friend and a crucial thread in my developing story.

            Cliff, Robbie and I were the major components of two major production numbers (“Get Me To The Church On Time” and “Little Bit of Luck”) and, because we were “seasoned” Musical performers and were well possessed of our characters, we had a whale of a time working with Alan and, I could tell, he with us. The unfortunate thing was that Robbie and I were in little else in the show and there was a lot of time sitting about or not being at rehearsals at all. It seemed to me that when we were in the room Alan was most alive doing all the tried and true vaudeville bits and bringing the old steps to life again. It was magic and I loved it. This was not the last time I would experience his genius. He was, after all, to become another thread.

            Over the years, there had been tense relationships between Actors’ Equity and some of the theatres (and, unfortunately, some members) in town. “Traditions” had inculcated themselves and were just “the way things were done” and were left that way. As the National Councilor I had worked to bring things into line with the rules but there were still situations that needed attention. Through cajoling and persistent “encouragement” we had gradually managed to get Rainbow Stage – an Equity engager – somewhat closer to the required “quotas” of Equity to non-Equity performers. Due mainly to Rainbow’s very large Choruses in its big shows, for decades non-Equity performers had far out-numbered the Equity members. Happily, that was changing, but one matter still to be dealt with was the Archival Video Regulation.

There had been a loosely-worded regulation allowing for a visual record of a production to be preserved by electronic means. That rule had evolved to mean a camera with a wire through the lens to make it unusable for commercial purposes. This meant nothing to Producer Jack Shapira. The Rainbow Archival Video had become a cash cow. It was widely known that multi-camera video copies of productions were being sold (at $50.00 a pop) to cast members as “souvenirs” of their time at Rainbow. For months I had repeatedly reminded  Jack that this wasn’t permitted but it seemed these warnings were falling on deaf ears. It was now time for a show-down and the Archival Taping Night of “My Fair Lady” would be the test case! What follows is the painfully detailed record of that night written in my Journal the following day.

“After arriving at the theatre, I walked into the stage area and could see out into the house. Over to the left in the audience area was one camera. I stopped for a second, closed my eyes and prayed that I wouldn’t find a second one as I walked three steps further on stage. There, ready to go, was camera number two and I could see number three in the booth! Lord, Lord! What had all these conversations been about over the last eight months!! The Stage Manger and Head Carpenter were standing there looking at me and, in his typical fashion, the SM threw up his hands, shrugging his shoulders as if he knew nothing about it. Damn! I was going to have to play the villain in all this again!

“It went up to our top floor dressing room to deposit my bag and met Robbie on the way. “I’m going to have to have to have two of those cameras pulled”, I told him. The amount of incredulity swirling about my mouth prompted Robb to say “Why did he do that?” referring, of course, to Jack’s blatant disregard for all that I have put myself through over the past while to save him from what I knew would be disastrous repercussions from Equity. There was no recourse in all this but to try and deal with it rationally first. In retrospect, I probably should have just left it alone and reported it the next day to the Head Office in Toronto. The words of warning to Deputies were “Don’t Confront!” But that’s just what I was about to do!

“I headed back downstairs. Jack was in some kind of involved conversation with the Music Director, but I hung around and made myself very obvious. Soon they finished, the MD walked away and I approached Jack. “I have to talk to you” I said very calmly. I think he knew what was coming because he became immediately defensive and in a rather belligerent tone said,  “I have to talk to you too!”

“Jack, do you really hate me?” I started. I could see his eyes dart away trying to figure out where I was coming from. The crucial thing for me in all this was to remain totally cool, rational and calm. I knew he wasn’t going to be.

“After everything we’ve been through in the past eight months, you’ve got three cameras out there?!” Jack’s Explosion Number One”: a bit of reason, lots of Equity blaming, lots of bravado. He knew he was on shaky ground at best.

“Jack, I have to tell Equity. Or you have to pull two cameras!” Jack’s Explosion Number Two: less reason, more yelling, much grasping at straws.

“Jack, don’t do this to yourself. They’ll blackball you, close you down and that will be it!” Jack’s Explosion Number Three: less bravado, a little more reason (God, I hated doing this!) and thoughts about being closed down quickly took over. “Well, I’ll see what I can do” he said. “Ernie (the cable station guy who was doing the recording) isn’t going to like this!” and he walked away.

“I stood there for a moment, somewhat at a loss as to what to do next. Jack Timlock, the Production Manager, was standing a distance away and had obviously seen and heard what had gone on. “You’re right and he’s wrong” he said as I walked by. I just shrugged and put my head toward getting my make-up on and the show.

“Shapira was on a headset trying to explain to Ernie out in the house what he had to do, that it was out of his hands. I stopped by him and watched him for a moment and went up to the dressing room. Robb had obviously told the guys in the dressing room what had happened and they were waiting for a report from me. I told them the situation, that Shapira was dealing with getting the other two cameras pulled and some thoughts were exchanged about the whole business. I started to put on my costume and was just about ready to start my make-up when who should appear at the door, huffing and puffing from hauling his great girth up the four flights of stairs, but Jack! Mercy, he must have worked himself into a state to get up all those stairs!

“Why don’t you get a vote from the others!” he yelled. “Then see if Equity gets so high and mighty!!”

“Look, Jack”, I said, getting up from the table and going toward the door. “I can’t bother them in their preparation, besides, it’s after the half-hour” and I began to close the door on him pushing him out at the same time. That was obviously the wrong thing to do. I could sense young Shaun, the Stage Management Intern, somewhere behind me having come in to collect our valuables. Jack shoved the door back open with a huge crack as it banged against its frame and pushed me out of the way, hitting me in the process. Shaun edged passed us and fled the room. I learned later that he had ended up crying hysterically, telling the folks downstairs that “Jack was yelling and hitting Richard”.

“This is MY theatre!!” he screamed at me. I could see him gasping for air. He had risen to the occasion. I had touched him where he lived.

“I’ll close this show down right now” I said. I don’t know what possessed me to say that but Robb told me later that he almost blurted out “Oh, no, Rich, no!” My words broke over Jack and he backed away breathing very hard, looking completely bewildered and livid at the same time, like a wounded animal. He tried to leave, pulling the door with him, heading toward the stairs. There was no way I could let him go down those stairs in his current state and I followed him out, cornering him on the landing.

“Jack! Calm down!” I insisted, pushing him back from the stairs.

“NO!” he barked over and over, still panting, trying to get past me and avoiding my eyes.

“Look, I’m not letting you go down those stairs till you relax. You’re going to give yourself a heart attack!” He kept trying to get past me and I finally let him go after a couple of minutes. I watched him bustle himself down the stairs, quite uncertain as to what he could possibly do next.

“Back in the room, the atmosphere was of amazed expectation. It all seemed like a suspended moment, something none of us thought was real. But it was real and the show still had to go on. I finished my make-up, quite calmly actually, despite being not a little hyped with all the adrenalin pumping through me. Robb and the others were very supportive saying that, with the exception of the “close you down” line (about which we all had a good laugh) I was very much, in their estimation, in the right. Time would tell the validity of that observation. I thought I was doing the right thing.

“But there was another dimension to this event which I wasn’t, until a few moment later, aware; a dimension that perhaps to some degree explained Jack’s almost irrational objections to pulling two cameras. Not to lose touch with the situation (and not to appear to all and sundry to be “hiding” from the it) I went down into the Production Office. The show’s Overture had started and I had about twenty minutes before I was on. There was Jack sitting behind the production desk and Timlock leaning against a counter. Both were being “lectured” by a young woman, no more than 20 or 21 years old, quite literally being verbally whipped by her! I calmly walked in and sat in a chair in the very middle of the confrontation. This was Ernie’s wife and, if I thought Jack was irrational in our encounter, this girl was way off the deep end!

“In the course of all her rantings (and after I introduced myself as the cause of all the to-do) it slowly came to light – at least to my eye – that Jack, who knew what the situation was with Equity, had, very simply, neglected to tell the Cablevision people that they could only use one camera. Now, after they had spent some seven hours setting everything up and with this witch of a woman going for throats, I became the next whipping post. But, and I think much to Jack’s surprise, I wasn’t backing down or giving in. He was between a rock and a hard place and had to decide what ultimately was going to hurt him less!

“I tried to calmly explain the situation to her but she didn’t seem to care about Jack or the trouble he could get into with. She was concerned about the cameramen and the time they had given up and how they had other commitments that night! What? This was really getting us nowhere fast. The only thing I was truly concerned about was that no cameras were running now that the show had started. It turned out that one was so a record was indeed being made from the allowable camera.

“Timlock had to go out at one point, which, after a moment, when Ernie’s wife left, forced me and Jack to face each other. The girl came back in, pointed at Jack and said “I want to speak to you … outside!” and turned on her heel and exited.

“Jack got up slowly, took a large breath, opened his eyes wide, bared his teeth and looked like he was scared to death. “Don’t be such a chicken-shit” I said. “What’s she got on you?” He didn’t answer but walked out of the room like a man headed to the gallows. What an hour this had been!

“That was pretty well the extent of my dealings with Jack. Our paths didn’t cross for the remainder of the night. As I said, the adrenalin had hyped me and, as a result, my performance was as energized as it could possibly have been! I felt great but rather concerned about the down-the-road picture, that all this would cool Jack with me for good and all.

“After the show, while waiting for Robbie in the Green Room, I walked over and sat down beside Chickie, Jack’s wife. She obviously knew what had gone on and told me that she (and others) had just been waiting for Jack to “go off”. It had been a long time in coming and Chickie had told the General Manager to keep an eye on him. She was sorry it had been me that he’d blown up at. All I could do was shrug and say I was sorry I had provoked him.

“Actually, Jack and I did speak at one other point during the evening. He told me that he understood my position and he was aware of all the times I had gone to bat for him with Equity. I also learned later that, had I approached the Equity cast members and asked them to vote on the camera situation, there would have been no recourse for Jack so adamant would their reaction have been to the multi-camera recording.

“(The next day) I wrote off a long from-the-heart letter to the head of Winnipeg Cablevision with copies to Equity, Rainbow and Robbie. I made reference to the “implicit” rule in the Equity regulations about “a single, stationary camera with a wire or device fixed to the lens”. Where I came up with “single” and “stationary” is beyond me. The ambiguity of it all was very frustrating and would have to be something that the National Council addressed. 

“The following evening after the show was the traditional viewing of the video of the production. Jack had avoided me all evening. I stood at the back of the scene shop while Jack made a speech to the cast as to how and why the videos got started. Then he expressed Ernie’s (!) concern that “through an error in judgment” the quality of the video wouldn’t be what he wanted. I guess we were all to assume that the judgment error was mine, but I just didn’t see it that way. It could very well be interpreted as being Jack’s error. I made a mental note of all this, shrugged, said goodnight to Chickie, and, with Robbie, walked out to the car hoping that now it was all over and if I didn’t work at Rainbow for Jack ever again, so what!”

This was not the end of the Shapira drama!

During the run of “Fair Lady” I had committed myself to hosting the “Entertainment Stage” at the daytime Walkabout of Prince Andrew and “Fergie” during their Royal Visit to Winnipeg. I quickly learned that political wonks should never never ever be in charge of programming events like this. It was a shambles and all rather embarrassing. It was a rainy day but thousands had turned up with their umbrellas at the Legislative Building grounds to catch a glimpse of the Royal Couple as they took the traditional stroll among the common folk. By the time they got to the Stage the much-too-tight schedule was shot to hell. A welcoming speech I’d been asked to prepare had been vetted by the “suits” and slashed to pieces and ended up meaning nothing. A kids choir (which had been dreamed up by the “suits” and called “The Multicultural Children’s Choir” but ended up being called “The Manitoba Children’s Choir” because there were NO “multicultural” kids in the group!) started the forty-five minute presentation by singing very badly.  Another under-rehearsed vocal group sang and a few drenched Indigenous Dancers bounced about the stage. It was terrible!

At one point, sitting on my stool at the side of the stage trying to make myself invisible while waiting to make the next introduction, I looked out at the umbrella-ed audience. There, down front, was Fergie looking right back at me. I guess my face was betraying my inner feelings. She put her finger up to her mouth and gave me a big smile. That jolted me out of my state and I smiled back. I was up next to sing “Feel The Spirit” for the first time in public. As I started, some of the “handlers” came up beside the Couple and whisked them back through the crowd for the end of the Walkabout … after only twenty minutes of the show! The sodden crowd moved away from the Stage following the pair and, after my song, we stopped the show. Everyone had left and there was no point continuing. I got off the stage, gathered up my backpack and coat, walked down the path away from the crowd, tossed my announcing script into a nearby trash basket and was home twenty minutes later. What a depressing experience. But I did get a smile from a Royal!

By now, responses to the “Now You’re Talkin’” packages I’d sent out were starting to come in. I had asked for feedback but most of the replies just indicated that my script had been passed on to the Company’s “reader” and they would get back to me. With the exception of one theatre, I never heard another word from any of them. Rejection is not a nice feeling. I wondered why all that energy had been expended to begin with. But then what had I really expected? But there was no time to get lost in those thoughts! I had other fish to fry. “Fair Lady” closed and I immediately packed my bags and headed east to Grand Bend, Ontario for a few weeks to do a mount of “Schubert Alley” at the Huron Country Playhouse. Steven Schipper was AD of the Summer Theatre and had offered me a two- week engagement – two-hours work in the evening and sitting in the sun on a Lake Huron beach during the day. I needed the break.

The time went by quickly but I felt isolated. I got somewhat bored early on, all the while feeling that I should be back home doing something else. The run ended successfully and my guilty feelings were eased as I landed back in Winnipeg and started to prep for the upcoming season..

Then, Leslee called me back into her office!

NEXT: A NEW ROAD, A NEW THREAD … AND MAYHEM!

(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!

I first met Irving Guttman in the early sixties in Montreal. He was already in the pantheon of great Opera Directors with an international reputation and firmly established as a propelling force in the burgeoning Canadian Opera scene. I was a newly-minted “opera singer” out of the Banff School Opera Division and now in the Chorus of the Montreal Opera Company making $57.00 a performance. To give some perspective on that fee, it would be the equivalent of $457.72 in today’s money, so I wasn’t doing too badly for a newbie. I had already done one “big” opera (my first with M.O.C.) with Irving as Director (“Marriage of Figaro”) and now headed into my second – ‘Tosca”. The great thing about these particular operas was that I had already done them as a Chorus member in the Opera Division at the Banff School so I knew the music very well. While I went on to do three more productions in Montreal with Irving as the Director, it was during “Tosca” that my most indelible memory of him was formed and, a bit later in “Aida”, that his most indelible memory of ME was formed!

Irving was gangly, laconic, somewhat lugubrious and very droll. He hunched over a lot to make himself seem smaller and had a huge head and very large shoulders. While not overly intimidating, he commanded respect merely by his slow and distinctive speaking when directing. It was during an early orchestra rehearsal on stage that Irving needed to give our ‘Tosca’ (the spectacular African American soprano, Ella Lee) some revised blocking for the finale of the production. In the opera, Tosca murders the lustful head of the Roman police, ‘Baron Scarpia’, after he has promised her he would rescind the orders to have her incarcerated lover ‘Mario’ executed for supposed crimes against the Republic. However, unbeknownst to Tosca, he has secretly told his henchmen to really perform the execution. Tosca meets up with Mario on the parapet of the Castel Sant’Angelo prison telling him that he is supposed to “play dead” when the firing squad shoots him, that the bullets will be blanks.

Because the Chorus’s only duty was to sing the glorious “Te Deum” at the end of the first Act, many of the Chorus Men were used as the soldiers of the firing squad later in the opera. I was one of those soldiers. The moment for the execution arrives. The shots are fired and Mario falls as planned. Tosca watches, whispering to herself that he should stay still till the soldiers leave. The squad departs and Tosca rushes over the Mario only to discover that he is dead after all.

Irving had instructed Ella to stand to the side of the stage and sing as normal and watch him as he did the new blocking for her. Irving became Tosca! Now to say that he got into the part would be an understatement. Tosca’s realization that Mario is really dead is vocally and physically fraught. Off to the side Ella began to sing with all the drama and hysteria associated with the moment as Irving, now fully immersed in the character, took flight: “Mario! Mario! Aaah! Dead! Dead? You? Like this? Dead like this! Like this?” Irving pulled himself away from the body and began tearing back and forth across the stage, lip-synching in his most pseudo-diva fashion as Ella screeched away (musically, of course). His long arms reached to the heavens, hands clawed at the air as his face contorted in “her” pain and fury. He rushed back to the prone body, throwing himself onto Mario (played in this production by Richard Verreau who let out an “Oomph” as Irving landed on him) trying to wake him up!

At this point, the murder of Scarpia has been discovered off-stage and the orchestra begins an “agitato” buzz as distant angry voices start to howl: “It was Tosca! She did it! Don’t let her escape!” We (the soldiers and officers) rushed onto the stage! “There she is! Tosca, you will pay for his life!” Irving turned to the advancing soldiers and, with his hands clawing the air and his face contorted with fury, lip-synched Ella’s words back at them “With my own!” He pushed past the crowd and dashed up the stairs to the top-most part of the parapet, turned to the group below and, with arms outstretched to the heavens as Ella sang the opera’s final line – “Oh Scarpia! Before God!!” – leapt off the back of the set! The orchestra reached the majestic conclusion of the Opera as the soldiers rushed up to look over the wall and the lights went to black!!

It took a moment for the work lights to come on and for our eyes to adjust. There, eight feet below us, was Irving now surrounded by the stage crew, stretched out on the thick mattresses that had cushioned the fall, his arms folded across his chest looking back up at us.

“E-l-l-l-l-la?” he droned.

“Yes, Irving” she said, walking up the stairs to the parapet and looking down at him.

“Di-i-i-d you ge-e-e-et al-l-l-l tha-a-a-at?” 

Ella leaned over, put her hands on her knees and, in her Yankee drawl, said “Some of it. Would ya mind doin’ it again?”

There was a split second as her response was translated – most of the chorus guys were French – and we all lost it!

Flash forward twenty-three years! I had moved up in the world considerably since those days and so had Irving, now an “eminence grise” in the Opera world. He had become Artistic Director and Advisor to any number of Opera Companies in Canada and the US. He had helped esstablish the Manitoba Opera Association and, I discovered, had been keeping watch over all the goings-on in the background while relentlessly mentoring emerging and established singers far and near. Even though I’d done a few tours for the MOA, I wasn’t aware of Irving’s connection. Bruce Lang, the General Manager, had been the person who always hired me … until “Die Fledermaus” came along.

There are not many non-singing roles of any consequence in opera. I can count on one hand those that come to mind. ‘Frosch’ in “Fledermaus” is one of them. He is the jailer and appears only in Act Three, but in a major way. Bruce had been in touch to ask me if I was interested in playing the role and we’d arranged to meet at the office to talk some more. I arrived to find Irving sitting in the office with him. After pleasantries, I told him that, while he might not remember, I had been in all those Choruses with the Montreal Opera so many years ago. “Oh, I remember you very well”. That took me by surprise! “You were the kid who almost landed in Zubin’s lap on the opening night of “Aida”!

“Aida” is the grandest of the Grand Operas! It is famous for the “Triumphal March”, an immense extended spectacle featuring as many people as a Company can cram onto a stage along with live animals (think horses, camels, elephants), dozens of extras, horse-drawn chariots, a large troupe of dancers, huge prop statues of the Egyptian gods and anything else you can think of that says “Visual Excess!!” In our production (which starred Virginia Zeani as ‘Aida’, the ledgendary John Vickers as ‘Radames’ and Lili Chookasian as ‘Amneris) I was an ‘Ethiopian Slave’. I knew that because that’s what my loincloth costume said – “Ethiopian Slave”. In order to give a better impression that we were African, we had to cover ourselves with “Texas Dirt”, a deep red powder that coloured the skin and hardened like sun-baked mud. On top of that we were swathed down to glistening perfection with baby oil … LOTS of baby oil! There were six of us accompanied by our supernumerary soldier escorts, huge muscular guys who had been hired just to push us around. We were paraded into the wings to await our entrance, singing from offstage to augment the huge chorus of Egyptian High Priests, Temple Officials and the various hangers-on that accompanied such occasions. As the procession processed, at a signal from Stage Management, we started to walk on to the stage. The Place des Arts stage is gargantuan! As we cleared the wings, the guards, as they’d been instructed, began to push us roughly toward center stage.

For some reason, my guard had decided to “get into” his role. As we approached the middle of the stage, he gave me a shove so hard that I fell forward on to the stage floor and because of all the baby oil I began to slide on my stomach toward the front of the stage. My hands could get no traction, covered with as they were, and there was nothing for me to grab on to and I just kept sliding, like a fish going down a sorting chute, heading toward the abyss of the orchestra pit! I could feel myself slowing a bit as my shoulders went over the edge of the stage. I stretched out my arms to my side trying desperately to stop myself. I grabbed hold of the lip of the stage and, like squirrel whose rear legs can turn backwards to climb down a tree, my hands revolved and found a tiny crevice into which I jammed my thumbs. I was looking straight ahead and could see Zubin Mehta’s face just a few feet away (much as in the picture here) getting closer and closer to mine, his eyes getting wider and wider. With all my strength I bore down with my thumbs and, just as my belly button – the fulcrum beyond which there would be no return – began to slide over the edge of the stage … I stopped! The guard had caught up to me by then and grabbed me by my legs, pulling me upright and back into the still-parading procession. This all took a matter of seconds but it seemed like an eternity – at least to me – all in slow motion! Needless to say, the amount of baby oil was reduced and it didn’t happen again.

Bruce and Irving laughed at my recounting of the experience. Irving told me he had to control himself from involuntarily standing up in his seat in the audience as he watched my slide. Funny what sticks in one’s memory.

I’ve often wondered what happens in the back rooms of theatres when people are hiring for shows. Certainly there had been conversations between Irving and Bruce about who to contract for the MOA’s productions as, over the years, there had been with other General Managers at the various other opera companies Irving was advising. How many times had my name been brought up in considerations either as a performer or a Director? Over the span of my career I figure it has gone something like: at the start “Who is Richard Hurst?”  then “Get me Richard Hurst!” then, a while later “Get me a Richard Hurst type.” and finally, “Who is Richard Hurst?” It’s an odd thing to think about, but one never knows how you’re being thought of by others. Sorry, just a bit of hindsight paranoia taking hold for a moment. In any case, Irving said the part was mine; I signed the ‘Frosh’ contract and began a renewed and much cherished history with Irving who would cast me over and over again with the Winnipeg, Calgary and Edmonton Companies he steered. When the would phone would ring and I’d pick it up hearing a momentary silence and then “Rii-iichh-aard, it’s Irrr-viiing”, I knew work was on the horizon.

There is a strange thing about opera audiences. They’ll laugh at anything! Probably because of the high drama and tragedy they’re so used to stage, anything with even the faintest hint of humour will send them into gales of laughter. I always sit at a performance completely baffled at those responses. “Frosch’ is usually played as “a drunk” and, depending on the translation, the actor, the director’s whim or pure indulgence, it’s a part that can, and usually does, go way, way beyond the bounds of taste and believability. I’ve seen some painfully embarrassing portrayals usually spurred on by that opera audience’s desperation for something “funny” to laugh at. I was determined to not fall into that cringe worthy category. However, our Director presented an obstacle in my achieving that goal.

David Morelock had directed “Fledermaus” many times in various places and, as a lot of directors did back in those days, had an immovable formula for his directing of it. We all found out rather quickly his intention was to stick to that approach. In the case of ‘Frosch’ he wanted him played a certain way and felt quite comfortable having me parrot his line readings and physicalization. That was a no-go with me, and, as it turned out, with some of the others in the cast. Our group was stellar: the glamorous Heather Thomson was ‘Rosalinda”, Richard Margison was ‘Alfred’, Cornelius Opthof was ‘Eisenstein’ and our own Tracy Dahl was ‘Adele’ returning to Winnipeg in glorious triumph after conquering Opera houses all over the world. When I came to rehearsals, I would detect a distinct tension in the room. High-end Opera singers in “tension mode” are not a pretty sight! It became obvious that there were some who wanted to try something new and were going to the floor to convince Morelock to depart from his normal approach. Then there were others who stood their ground because of the “this-is-how-I-do-the role” approach to performing.

I felt slightly left out because this was my first swing at ‘Frosch’ and I needed some guidance. However, I knew that being asked to replicate a Director’s portrayal (as I had been the case on previous occasions!) was simply not acceptable. I adopted a measured approach by taking his suggestions and expanding and elaborating on them. It was at this point that I think he realized that I was a rather capable actor and, after three or four more rehearsals, acquiesced to what I was doing. At one rehearsal well into the process, much to my amazement, he asked me what my name was!!! WHAT MY NAME WAS??? Opera is a rough business!

Using orchestra overtime constraints as a rationale, he proceeded to cut my part to the bare nubbins reducing ‘Frosch’ to little more than a doorman for the singing characters that arrive at the jail he oversees. But that was alright with me actually. There was still a lot for me to do to bring this character to life. Usually, there is an extended monologue/pantomime that introduces ‘Frosch’ to the audience at the top of Act III. This was where I had always become massively embarrassed watching these performers stagger about the stage, knocking into things, falling down and generally “acting” drunk. The trick to playing drunk on stage is to play NOT drunk, to play the character’s need to hide the fact that he is drunk. While it’s a more reliable approach it’s also much more difficult to detail. It’s also much more fulfilling when it works. ‘Frosch, the drunk’ lives in the moment. For him there is no past or future but only what he experiences AS IT HAPPENS. And that’s how I played him … MUCH to everyone’s delight!

There were old chestnut “bits” that David decided we should incorporate, like trying to hang a hat on a wall hook and not being able to figure out why it wouldn’t stay there. It’s only silly when you play the bit but, as I discovered a long time ago, actually funny when you play the Truth each single moment of the problem. And then there was the “harp bit”. There is a holding cell in the corner jailer’s room. (Can you see where this is going?) As ‘Frosch’ moves back into the room at one point, he absently runs his hand across the bars of the cell like one would with a stick along a picket fence. Much to his amazement, this action produces a beautiful harp glissando. And I’m off!! Our conductor was Anton Coppola (uncle to Francis Ford), a little martinet of a Musical Director. He was almost five feet tall filled with wild Italian fury and had been doing opera forever (he’s still alive at 101 years of age)! I developed a great respect for him however as, in amazement, I watched him rehearse and conduct without any reference to a score! He took his job very seriously albeit humourously and brooked no dissention. His word was law! But he seemed to find something funny in my harp bit and as we rehearsed it, initially with the piano and then with the orchestra, he would go into a frenzy when the pianist and ultimately, the harpist, would mess up the timing with the glisses. “WATCH HIM!! WATCH HIM” he would yell at the top of his lungs.

I smile in remembering all this not so much because of the bit itself and what went into making it work, but because of the audience’s reaction to it. They went nuts! I’ve said before in these pages that there is nothing quite like hearing an audience laugh at something you’re doing on stage. But this was overwhelming! Because of the hat thing and a few other bits I’d done, they had, in a very short period of time, come to “know” ‘Frosch’ and how he reacted to things. They were beyond primed waiting for the next thing I would do. I also knew that I had them in the palm of my hand!  With the first harp gliss as I ran my hand across the bars and halted, the laughter began. It just built and built as each element of our (his and my) bewilderment took us deeper and deeper into the “bit”. It culminated in my realizing what was happening and sitting down on a stool, putting my arms through the bars and, like a real harpist, “playing” a tiny bit of “Claire so comfortable and centered in the experience.

Immediately following the opening performance, I received three offers for a year hence – from Irving, ‘Njegus’ in “The Merry Widow” for Manitoba Opera, from David Speers, ‘The Detective’ in “Porgy and Bess” for Calgary Opera and, again from Irving ‘Major General Stanley’ in “Pirates of Penzance” for Edmonton Opera. The first two are spoken roles and the third is a major singing role. The unfortunate thing about these offers was that they were ALL happening at exactly the same time!! I’ll keep you in suspense about which one I took.

I have little actual detail to write about my next theatre experience except that it taught me a valuable lesson about my place in this crazy business. It revolved around a production of a rather weird farce called “The Foreigner” by Larry Shue at MTC. During my early years in Winnipeg I had set aside the directing abilities I’d developed during many shows in Portland and relinquished any hopes of breaking into that exalted echelon in my new city. I had become immersed in acting and singing and dancing and no one knew me as a Director although my resume listed some of my credits in that area. As my reputation evolved, I decided that I might dip my toe back into directing, but the opportunities were not presenting themselves despite my asking. I thought another route might be the way to go, and, to that end, approached the Manitoba Arts Council for a Professional Development Grant as the Assistant Director for “The Foreigner”. I took my plan to Rick McNair at MTC. That the theatre wouldn’t have to pay me anything was, to say the least, attractive to Rick and I got the “job”.

An “Assistant Director” is a nobody. The job is neither fish nor fowl. There is no true definition of the position. The job is whatever the Director wants it or needs it to be. There are no proscribed responsibilities. There is no “power” associated with the job. And, as I quickly discovered, no one, and I mean NO one, pays any attention to the person occupying this position. I tried to offer help in any way I could to the Director, Stage Management, and the Cast, all to no avail. I became a ghost taking up spaced in the corner hoping for a glance, a request for some input, some small acknowledgement of my existence. Nothing. I spent all my time taking copious notes on things I noticed might need some attention – a continuously fumbled line, a prop that needed some repair, a bit of blocking that wasn’t working (at least to my eye) – but wasn’t being asked for my input. Our Director was a very nice man, maybe a bit passive and indecisive, but hadn’t done a lot of directing and was (again, at least to my eye) trying to keep his head above water and not cause any conflict with anyone. I could have helped but thought that would be perceived as an infringement on the power so I just kept taking the notes at no one’s behest and, all, really, for no reason whatsoever.

Eventually, I got to be friendly with most of the cast and, out of desperation, asked if anyone wanted me to run lines with them. That got a few takers and I started to feel at least a little bit useful. However, those line-running sessions turned into something else altogether. Because our Director was rather noncommittal in his approach, the actors weren’t getting the input and guidance they needed. As time went on, our line-running sessions turned into bitching sessions. The folks with whom I was working now felt comfortable enough to lay out to me their grievances and frustrations about how the rehearsals were going, about other members of the cast not being up to snuff and, worst of all, asking me give them some direction for scenes they thought weren’t working! I was caught! I couldn’t go to anyone with these complaints. I had, unintentionally, been turned into a confidant, a co-conspirator.

In my most diplomatic style, I broached some of the turmoil with the Director, prefacing some of “my” observations with words like “perhaps” or “maybe” or “do you think”. But all to no avail. He thought things were going just fine the way they were. I backed off and, understanding the boundaries, reported back to the complainers that they would have to fend for themselves. I suggested to them that they might test the waters for themselves by making the tiniest of changes a little at a time and, if a challenge arose from the table, to say they were just “trying something” for themselves to see how it would work. If there was no pushback, keep the new approach. It was very underhanded of me to take this tack and I felt like a traitor doing it, but, amazingly (or perhaps not) it worked! They weren’t drastic changes the actors gradually incorporated into their portrayals, but changes enough to mesh with what the Director wanted and what the actors felt they needed. I just stayed in the background, watching and taking notes and, from time to time, getting a little eye-raise or wink from folks in the rehearsals who were now feeling a little more “looked after”. I felt somewhat satisfied with that result but very unfulfilled artistically.

While not a total control freak as a Director, I need to maintain a sense of my vision for a production being carried out. I have been charged with that responsibility and am the only one who can make the decisions. Input is good. Conversation and discussion is good. Approachability is good. But bringing someone into my mind to understand my sensibilities and thought processes is not how I can operate. An “Assistant” Director is, to me, now, someone to whom I would have to explain things that I am still in the process of developing myself, and I have found it almost an intrusion when I’ve acquiesced to someone’s request to take on that position. I know it’s uncharitable of me and the antithesis of being an educator and I’m not proud of that. It’s only happened to me twice and in both cases I was left with a sense of guilt and, at the same time, pity for the poor individual who had to endure the same reticence I’d experienced in that job. Lessons learned … on both sides of the coin.

NEXT: IT TAKES A L-O-ONG TIME TO WRITE A MUSICAL!

THE ROAR OF THE GREASEPAINT – Part Sixteen

I’ve found, over the years, that I invariably fall in love with the people I’m playing opposite. Elsewhere in these ramblings I’ve written about the “sizing-up” that goes on during the first days of rehearsals and that seems to happen no matter what. But this “falling in love” is something else, something that happens surprisingly, gradually and very securely as one eases into the playing of the piece. These are the deep relationships that evolve on a number of levels. My ‘Bobby’ to Patsy Maxson’s ‘Amy’ in “Company” and everything else we did together”, my ‘Happy’ to Russ Fast’s ‘Biff’ in “Death of a Salesman”, my “Deadeye” to Paul Massel’s ‘Captain Corcoran’ in “Pinafore”, my ‘Noggs’ to Lorne Kennedy’s ‘Nicholas’ in “Nicholas Nickleby”, Tracy Dahl in EVERYthing we did together!, my ‘William’ to Miriam Newhouse’s ‘Mary’ in “How The Other Half Loves”, my “Peron’ to Jayne Lewis’s “Eva” in “Evita” all fill my heart even as I think about them from this point in Time. Trying to understand what makes this happen is another thing altogether.

On one hand, there is the person, the human being I meet and discover a point of entry or a commonality to share, whether it’s an outlook on or an approach to life. It might be a personality trait or idiosyncrasy to which I find myself drawn. On another hand, there is the character they’re playing. Sometimes, I think I subconsciously overlay the words and personality of an appealing character onto the real human being compounding my attraction. And then, on yet another hand (!) is the person’s talent. This is perhaps the most serious of them all. Love comes out of respect and in all the cases above (and there are many more) I have deeply respected their abilities, their devotion to the craft and the way they use their talent to give a depth to a character and to themselves. Most of the time, it’s a combination of all three that touch me deeply. And miraculously, as has been pointed out to me many times, these connections are invariably apparent on stage. I think there’s something mystical in those connections that an audience picks up on and makes them comfortable, puts them at ease and allows them to trust us. Rainbow Stage gave me an opportunity to experience that magic once again.

Sigmund Romberg’s “The Student Prince” is an old warhorse of an operetta, a form of theatre popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their stories usually revolved around some kind of royal personage falling in love with a commoner and facing challenges of all kinds. The music was syrupy and sentimental and appaled to folks of a certain age. “Prince” had some wonderful songs like “Serenade” (“Overhead The Moon Is Beaming”), “Golden Days”  “Deep In My Heart, Dear”, the unfortunate “Come Boys, Let’s All Be Gay, Boys” (the connotation being very different when it was first written) and so many more. In our production, ‘Prince Karl Franz’ was played by Brian Gow and I played ‘Dr. Engel’, his tutor and guardian.

I didn’t know of Brian. He had been brought in from Toronto and hadn’t done much Theatre. I had listened to Mario Lanza singing “Serenade” for years and had fallen in love with both the voice and the song. In fact, I’d sung it many times myself in my more tenor-y days (even then it was a bit of a stretch) and was anxious to hear how this new young guy would do it. The first days of rehearsals at Rainbow are usually devoted to the music and, as usual, it was the ideal opportunity to do the “sizing-up” thing. The singing in “Prince” is all “legit” and there’s no escaping it. It’s an Operetta after all. Since all my scenes were opposite Brian and since I had to sing with him, I was very anxious to hear how he would tackle this iconic music. They started with “Deep In My Heart, Dear” (my favorite song in the show) and I held my breath. One phrase in and it was all I could to hold back my tears. This lad had a voice from heaven with a clarity and tone beyond his years and a beautiful vibrato that would break your heart! Oh! My! God!  We launched into our “Golden Days” duet, our voices soared and meshed, and I fell in love with him right then and there, thanking the heavens that I got to sing with him!

The relationship between ‘Karl Franz’ and ‘Engel’ is very deep as the isolated young royal, immersed in University life away from the Court, blossoms into a man filled with confidence and kindness. All their secrets are shared and there is a profound trust between them, a sort of father and son against the outside world. With that as our foundation, Brian and I began to build that relationship in real life. We had immediately gravitated toward each other and, over the weeks of rehearsals, spent a great deal of time talking about our lives, the challenges of working in the Theatre and of dealing with that in day-to-day existence. As our personal bond grew, so did the bond between “Karl-Franz” and ‘Engel’. Our scenes were such a joy to play and all the peripheral activities in the hall halted when we were on stage. The real world disappeared.

Halfway through the piece, the ‘Prince’ becomes ‘King’ and must leave the Doctor behind as he ascends to the throne. Their leave-taking is heartbreaking for both of them and while ‘Engel” reappears for a moment as a ‘ghost’ later on, this is the last time he is seen. News of his death comes later in the play. This farewell scene always did both of us in. The Prince exits leaving ‘Engel’ alone on stage as the lights fade. It was hard to hold back the tears and, as they say, “there wasn’t a dry eye in the house”! It was entirely satisfying!

As the run progressed the inevitable routine settled in. One develops and trusts an inner sense of timing both on and off stage knowing when one is supposed to be in a particular place at a particular time. It’s just something visceral that becomes a part of the performance. One Sunday night toward the end of the run, and for the first time in my career, I missed an entrance! Even now, the embarrassment and shame well up inside me. There was no excuse for it even though afterward folks tried to blame the Tannoy and Stage Management. I was signing posters on my regular perch in the Green Room area (the “perch” pictured above with Celoris Miller, myself, Jack Shapira and a very young Donna Fletcher) for some of the Ensemble folks and it suddenly struck me that I had been sitting there much longer than usual. One of the Assistant Stage Managers walked by and said “Aren’t you supposed to be on-stage?”

Reality stopped! I really can’t remember how I got onto the stage. I did remember hearing words I’d never heard before as I dashed to the entrance and bolted on to the set. There was nothing subtle about it. I was out of breath and hadn’t prepped to go on as I usually did so my first line, a rather innocuous question to the Prince, was now filled with a strange urgency and a touch of inexplicable anger. A performer’s responsibility is to maintain that suspension of disbelief for everyone involved, the audience as well as the other performers. I had missed about 15 seconds, an eternity on stage! I realized that Tim Seabrook (playing the Prince’s valet) and Brian had been making up dialogue about going to back to Court, normally a fraught exchange that happened between me and the Karl-Franz.

It was about that time that my own reality caught up to me. Like those Norman McLaren multi-image ballet dancer films, after-images of me running on to the stage started slamming into my back like so many Richards piling up behind me. I began to sweat and, while all the lines were back to normal at that point, what I had done began to settle in on me. The scene lacked its usual pathos; there was no doubt about that. I finished up and left the stage walking to my normal waiting position in the dark for my re-entry at end of the Act. I started to feel ill inside. All the emotions started to well up in me trying to get to the surface, but I controlled them for the moment. I remember I kept flicking my finger off my thumb, a nervous externalization I had never experienced before, and my head was spinning. I went back out for the last little bit of the scene, the curtain came down releasing us from the last bit of the fantasy and I began to cry. The folks in the scene rushed to me asking what was wrong, but I superficially pulled myself together and went backstage to apologize to Brian and Tim.

As they walked toward me down the hallway, I said “I’ve never done that before”. That’s when the tears came in earnest and I began to sob. Brain rushed to me and wrapped his arms about me saying over and over again, “Don’t, don’t. It’s alright.” I could feel Tim’s hand on my shoulder. I just stood there and wept.  Later, the guys told me that the whole experience had been “thrilling”! Brian told me he had been losing focus that evening and this was the shot he needed to bring him back. Apparently folks in the orchestra didn’t even notice anything out of the ordinary had happened but that didn’t mean much as they usually read books or magazines during the times they weren’t playing. Then the jokes started: “Join the club”, “So Richard Hurst isn’t perfect after all!” trying to cheer me up. Gradually and just a bit reluctantly, I appreciated it.

I’ve always prided myself on being in control in most situations. When the reins get away from me, as they did that night, my ego takes over and punishes me. I had betrayed a trust with my fellow performers, in particular Brain. I had let him down. That memory has never left me and, as I noted in my Journal the following day I vowed to “never miss another entrance as long as I live”. I kept that vow … for twenty-one years.

(A sidebar: The show closed and, as always, the intensity of the relationships faded. Fortunately in this case, my elevation to Equity Councilor necessitated trips to Toronto three times a year and, for the next nine years, Brian and I would meet up and we maintained that close connection. Unfortunately, my Council tenure ended and, despite the best of intentions, we lost track of each other. If anyone reading this knows where Brian Gow is now, please let me know. I would appreciate it.)

The time before, during and following “The Student Prince” was jammed with work creating a schedule that leaves me breathless even now as I read the Journal from those days. Passion and excitement overlay an existance as one careens through life with little regard for the pitfalls or potholes that sometime accompany such a rush of forward propulsion. With the constant commercial, voice-over and narration work, the Concert Touring, the networking for jobs and even creating some of my own, I bounded through a period that served to lift me into a stratosphere I had neither planned for nor envisioned but certainly had hoped for. I was consumed with this life in “the biz” and reveled in every moment of it. Having also fully immersed myself in the burgeoning new computer and music technology, I found another creative path down which to travel with some amazing and, eventually, very lucrative results. Those results will take some time to write about down the road. Over the next while, I reluctantly let go of my dreams of becoming “someone of consequence” in the MTC Administration and eased back into the more familiar and satisfying position of a performer on their stages.

While I had worked in the MTC Rehearsal Hall for Rainbow Stage rehearsals, it had been almost two years since last stepping into that room as an actor in an MTC’s productions! It was like the old days as the large cast of “A Christmas Carol” along with the Production and Admin personnel gathered socially for the “Meet The Donut” (coffee and crullers) assemblage for the half hour before starting. We numbered about 50 and I reconnected with folks I’d been away from (professionally) for all that time. It was good to be “Home”! This was my third crack at the ‘Cratchitt’ bat (High School and New York being the other two – as documented in previous entries) so I knew both the role and the story in loving detail and was looking forward to diving into rehearsing this wonderful character once again. My first clue that this was not going to be the regular approach to the process came very early in the schedule.

I guess I had grown used to The Resident Company approach from years earlier when we would hit the Hall running with the aim of getting on our feet with minimal preamble. This wasn’t that! Our Director’s approach was, to say the least, academic. I cringingly remember more than an hour spent discussing “why”, in one scene, the Ghost of Christmas Present offers Scrooge an apple! Have mercy!! The fact was that this was a passing stage direction the adaptor/”playwright” had made up and deserved no extended in-depth conversation as to the action’s psychological, social and cultural relevance! I spoke my thought out loud and our Director told us that he wanted to “explore every possibility” and the talk went on interminably around the table.

The truth is that these endless “bathtubbing” sessions were obviously a way for our Director to learn the script, a fact that became painfully obvious as we got to our feet after four days of tabletalk! I’ve found over the years that there are all kinds of Directors (as documented elsewhere in these pages) and that an actor’s job is to adapt to their approach or suffer the consequences. But this one was a new one for me. We would start blocking a scene and, as if a switch had been thrown, come to a halt as he entered into a trance-like state that lasted for minutes, a phase-out that had us all looking at each other wondering when it would end. I think he was privately picturing options in his head for what we should physically do.  It resulted in a LOT of wasted time. A scene and all its attending elements would eventually be set and we would move on, Stage Management having dutifully set down the blocking. But days later, when we got around to doing the scene again, he would rant and rave that what we were doing was not what he had told us to do (although it had been meticulously documented by our SM). Then, on the fly, would re-stage the entire scene resulting in confusion and a hell of a lot of tension. This went on for weeks but eventually it came together and we moved the proceedings down to the Stage!

Up in the Rehearsal Hall, the designer’s maquette of our set looked wonderful – an elaborate four-ton revolving house-like monolith with upper playing levels and a number of entry doors placed at various positions on the stage level. All this was surrounded by another turntable which turned clockwise or counterclockwise as needed. In the Rehearsal Hall, the structure’s floor plan and the turntable were represented by gigantic circular carpets which the four ASM’s would revolve to new positions for the various scenes and then the actors would take their places, pretending to be on an upper level or making an entrance through an imaginary door. Eventually, this Rehearsal Hall conditioning would translate on-stage into seamless transitions for actors and revolving elements in the many scene changes. At least that was the thinking.

On the stage were greeted with the impressive behemoth but quickly discovered that, contrary to assurances upstairs, there were a number of “kinks” yet to be worked out and the revolve and turntable, at least for a few days, had to be turned manually by stage hands, multiple ropes and a great deal of sweat. We had all grown used to the constant tension in the air, but at least now we had a chance to explore our new digs and get accustomed to entrance positions and exits, the upper balcony platforms, the eighteen inch wide spiral staircases – one for going “up” and the other for going “down” – and door after door after door on the stage level. It took a LOT of time to sort out which door to use for an entrance and I quickly discovered that the combination of walking up or down the inner spiral stairs AS the revolve turned was, to say the least, mightily confusing and stomach-turning! There were traffic jams galore as ladies in vast formal gowns decided they were going to use both sets of stairs to go “up” as I was trying to get “down”. Even when we got into performances, I was never really sure if I was going to go through the right door on deck level and be where I was supposed to be!

As I’ve mentioned before, I judge all Directors by the Ouzounian Standard of organization and efficiency and this Director was getting failing grades. He was immovable and ungiving, the opposite of what was needed at this fraught time during rehearsals. The teching of the set movements and the complex timing needed was getting very short shrift and, with a show this complicated and behind schedule, the SM team and Crew were at the very edge of mutiny. Even our Stage Manager, the ever uber-efficient and stalwart Jacqui Dawson (she had been come through the RDO school of SM’ing) was affected by it all. At one point she came into my dressing room, closed the door and crawled under the chair I was sitting in! But eventually, and only because there was no alternative, we got into some beneficial tech rehearsing and were happy that a day off was just ahead of us. Surely the set would be in working order when we came back for the final days before Previews. It wasn’t!

I love a crisis! It’s an opportunity to rise to the occasion and, calmly and rationally, collaboratively solve problems. I had been elected Deputy (yet again) and had “officially” been drawn into the chaos because of the rule infringements and overtime that were now happening because of the technical challenges. With our first Preview audience a day away talk of cancelling our first public performance started to circulate. In the Theatre “cancellation” is not a welcome word. It affected a cast’s morale and signaled to the outside world – and paying customers – that the show was in trouble … which it WAS!

I was sitting in the Green Room during another interminable break when my name was called over the intercom to come to the stage. There, clustered with arms folded and heads down waiting for me, were the Theatre’s General Manager, the Artistic Director, the Head Carpenter and our Director! Uh-oh! They told me they were going to look at that afternoon’s rehearsal with a critical eye and make the decision about cancelling. They needed me to approach the cast and ask that the dinner period be drastically shortened (with food being brought in for us at the Theatre’s expense) so that, should they think we were in good enough shape, we could start the Preview performance as soon after eight as possible. We started the run and, miraculously, with only a few hitches, everything went as it was supposed to. At the run-through’s intermission we voted to have Chinese food brought in and everyone was happy … except for one blockhead actor (who actually spent most of his time off-stage during the production anyway) who insisted that all this schedule changing was so the Theatre wouldn’t have to pay overtime if we went past eleven o’clock. The Theatre had already paid us hours upon hours of overtime so his complaint was unfounded and mean-spirited. There are times when I reach the tipping point and this was one of them. I proceeded to explain in front of the whole cast and no uncertain terms that all was being done by the book and if overtime was incurred, it would be incurred. He sulked off as the rest of us dug into the food, psyched and tugging at the bit to perform the show with people watching.

Everything went as smooth as glass! There was one big test for me, a particular entrance that was very complex both in its choreographed timing and in my external physicalization. It was Cratchit’s first entrance into the office. I entered from mid-Stage Left in an obvious hurry walking quickly across the stage floor and seamlessly stepped onto the turntable as the tower began to turn revealing the office.  At the same time, my high desk and stool tracked on from the opposite side of the stage as the lights started to came up to reveal the rest of Scrooge’s office and the entry door. As I hit the turntable (which was turning in the opposite direction) I began to walk in place creating the illusion that I was still travelling, an effect at which he audience gasped because, while they could see the tower turning, they couldn’t see the stage floor and the turntable. I loved that moment! I sped up my gait as the tower started to slow down and approach its final position, walked behind it, in a back door, around the inner stairs, and, in one sustained and fluid motion, came through the door onto the set, closed the door, took off my hat and scarf, hung them on them on a rack, met the desk and stool as they came to their resting positions, sat down, picked up my pen and began writing away in my ledger as the tower came to its proper halt! The audience spontaneously applauded as I remarked “Holy Shit” under my breath! Whew! When it worked, it was magical! And fortunately, it worked most of the time.

Up in the Lobby on opening night I was besieged by well-wishers and people telling me how wonderful it was to see me back on the MTC stage! The sentiments were not lost on me. It had been a hard and unjustifiable two years being away from those boards I loved so deeply and the time ahead was, well, you’ll see.

UP NEXT:  GREAT BIG OPERA

THE ROAR OF THE GREASEPAINT – Part Fifteen

I confess that there is a small part of me deep down inside that is masochistic! I place myself in situations fully aware that the decision to do so will result in great pain. It might be because I convince myself the eventual outcome will involve a degree of pleasure but it seems that the lure of money is also involved. It’s a failing, I know, but sometimes I can’t help myself. And thus I succumbed to yet another involvement with “That” Director and one more touring Gilbert and Sullivan experience. There was one point early in the rehearsal process that I found myself looking at ads in the newpaper’s Travel Section wishing myself anywhere but where I was! And “where I was” this time was Edmonton, Alberta.

I had been lured by a three-month touring contract and lots of bucks to play ‘Koko’ in “The Mikado”, a part I had wanted for as long as I can remember. I justified my decision in a number of ways, but aside from the role and the money, there was another element to the engagement – an opportunity to sing with the Edmonton Symphony. “That” Director was now, as if to add insult to injury, also the Producer/Engager of his own Company and was in control of all aspects of the engagement. Aside from “Mikado” another event was added to the contract in the form of an “Introduction to Opera” for young people called “Doctor Euphonius and the Dulcet Tones Present You Can Tune A Piano But You Can’t Tuna Fish”. I had (and still have) no idea what that title meant but putting another show (and more about that later) together with the touring production just added to the mayhem that ensued!

I’d not worked with any of our cast before but we quickly bonded if only out of self preservation from the hands of our Director. Having worked with him before I knew how to handle him and quickly laid down my own ground rules for the approach. Bewilderingly, he had played my role years earlier and was hell-bent on me reproducing his performance! I think you can guess how that went down. While G&S operettas can get silly from time to time (well, most of the time) there still should be, as I have mentioned before in these pages, a degree of honesty about the performing of them. As his demonstrations of how to play the role got more and more embarrassing, as diplomatically as possible I navigated myself (and the rest of the cast of varying theatre experience) toward something a bit less “am-dram” and through cajoling and a “perhaps-we-can-try-it-this-way” approach, we managed to settle on something more “professional”.

Alongside “Mikado” rehearsals, four of us were also preparing for the “Symphony For Kids” performance. One might assume that this program would be made up of accessible material suitable for seven or eight year olds, but that assumption was thrown out the window rather quickly as we learned we’d be doing scenes from “Elixir of Love”, “The Bartered Bride”, “Merry Wives of Windsor” and a variety of other operas rarely performed for adults let alone children!! But we ploughed through. Our Musical Director was David Speers, a gentle and generous conductor who was as baffled as we were at the Director’s choices. Some of the music was very difficult (“Bartered Bride” comes immediately to mind) but because, like death and taxes, our single performance was unavoidable, we managed to get it together … sort of. The first rehearsal with the Orchestra was a shambles. Cues and entrances were missed as were notes and words and this was in front of 60 symphony Musicians whose faces reflected their confusion as why we were doing this. One of my challenges was to perform the “Largo al factotum” from Rossini’s “Barber of Seville”. This is a monumental baritone aria made familiar to a large extent by a Bugs Bunny cartoon and a perfect bitch to sing! I felt a perfect fool standing in front of this orchestra but I launched into it. It is fast, wordy and very physically and vocally demanding. It ends on a high ‘A’ after a long, accelerating cascade of “la-la-la’s” and yet more words. I hit the ‘A’ perfectly (the only time, actually) and descended to the tonic of the piece and it ended. I felt like I was going to faint. After a moment of silence, the sound of raindrops seemed to envelope me. I turned to find the string section of the orchestra tapping their bows on their music stands. I got slightly embarrassed but acknowledged their approval and David smiled broadly. We got through that rehearsal and the kids performance and nobody was the any wiser. But it was back to the other reality soon enough.

My cast mates in “Mikado” (Norman Roberts at ‘Pooh Bah, Sam Mancuso at “Nanki Poo’, Tom Goerz as “Pish Tush”, Elizabeth Mabee as ‘Katisha’ and Susan Skinner at ‘Yum Yum’) had decided that since I wasn’t shy about speaking my mind I should be elected the Equity Deputy (or “Eckity Deckity” as it is sometimes known) and that responsibility added another layer to my experience!

Despite our Director’s meddling, we pulled it together and began our run. Community Halls, School Libraries and Gymnasiums, Old Folks Homes and Church basements (yup) became our daily haunts – very rarely a “real” theatre. Walking into a multi-purpose room filled with Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese and Chinese kids (and some parents) was incredibly disconcerting as we pranced, kow-towed and shuffled about the stage like Ginza-tourist-trap-factory-made Japanese dolls. It was during an Old Folks home presentation that our accompanist, Grant Hurst, got bent out of shape when a high-pitched whine filled the air as he sat down at the piano to begin the show. “It’s Mrs. McLean!” all the creaky voices shouted together pointing at an elderly dear in a wheelchair as a nurse dashed over to turn down her hearing aid! And on it went! We’d adapt our staging on the fly because there was no time to rehearse in the constantly changing performance spaces. But there was an extra dimension for me that drove me up the wall.

As Deputy (a duty I was to assume many, many times over the years, and which would lead to some dreadful tangles) I was a liaison between the cast and the Association’s West Coast office in Vancouver. Actors’ Equity is not, despite some assertions otherwise, a Labour Union. It is a “Professional Association” that has come to be accepted in the theatre world (out of tradition more than anything else) as the organization which, through negotiations with the Producers (Management), sets the rules and regulations for pay scales and working conditions for Actors, Stage Management and Director (Labour). If push ever came to shove, a Producer could take the Association to court and challenge its legal status as a bargaining agent for its workers … and win the case! The “Canadian Theatre Agreement” sets the parameters for both Producers and Actors and is the bible that keeps everything in working order. Except when it doesn’t! Or is ignored! Both happen! And, in this case …

As a Producer, That Director was even more inept. Under the best of circumstances doing both jobs was an impossible task.  On one hand, the Director was Labour. On the other, the Producer was Management. How was THAT supposed to work? It didn’t. As Producer his aim was to make money … at almost any cost … and he took the attitude (as some Producers do) that Equity was out to thwart those aims … at almost any cost!! While it was easy in rehearsal to keep things running “by the book” – rehearsal hours, breaks and such – once on the road we were at the mercy of what was being decided back at the office on a day to day basis. The initial touring schedule was neatly established at the outset. It broke down into two performances a day and the performing venues were arranged based on distances from each other. In-town there was no problem, and, to start, our out-of-town jaunts were also well organized. But after a few weeks, it began to fall apart. Because bookings kept coming in after we’d begun touring, proximities became problematic. We would do one show in the morning and two hours later would have to do our afternoon show … eighty miles away!! We even arrived at one venue that had no idea that we were performing there! It all led to a multitude of rule infractions – lunch breaks, half- hour calls, overnight rest periods, driving infractions (we were all in a van) and on and on. We sucked it up for a bit, but as can be imagined it began to take a toll very quickly. Mutiny was in the air! And it was up to me to prevent it.

My approach was diplomatic at the start. There had been a few in-town infractions but those were ironed out and the troop’s rumblings were assuaged with a bit of money added on to the paychecks. But on-the- road was another matter. Our Director, much to everyone’s chagrin, would pop up in a small town to see how everything was going. It was all I could do to keep the cast from lynching him! I would explain over and over again as nicely as possible that a) he was deflating morale by being there and b) he was ignoring the touring regulations. He was all apologies and “I’m trying to make it work” but twenty-four hours later he would turn around and schedule an illegal three-show day! We were headed downhill and my only alternative was to get the Equity Office involved. There is a point of diminishing returns in situations like this and the rule from the top was to avoid confrontation at all costs and turn the complaints over to the National Office. Which is what I did. Oh! My! God! I was informed that they’d been receiving complaints about this Engager for a long time! Why, WHY, hadn’t I been told about this at the outset!? I was astonished that no one had warned me and given parameters for approach when I’d sent in my contract and, more to the point, when I became Deputy!

Audiences never think about what goes on behind the scenes as they sit and watch us perform. All they see is what they paid their money to see. The intrigue never makes it on to the stage (most of the time) and all is well with the world. The stage was also our momentary place of solace as we escaped the upheaval for an hour or so. But the number of phone calls, cast meetings, heated ranting over meals, grew and grew. It was only days off that released some of the pressure and as time went on we got more and more of those days off as the bookings slowly dried up. I admit to a degree of sympathy for our Producer/Director. It must have been incredibly frustrating to be paying our weekly salaries with little box office money coming in. There was another Company, a non-professional group, also touring in the same area, doing the same kind of program and charging much less than we were. This kind of competition in such a small market can be debilitating and I understood how difficult it must have been to keep things going. He actually asked why he should be paying us per diems when the other Company wasn’t and demanded that WE write letters to Equity telling them that this other Company was preventing us (him) from earning a living! You can imagine how that went down with the cast!! But he had only himself to blame for the turmoil he’d created.

Our tour limped sporadically on and, with a whimper, came to a merciful end. After two and a half months of madly zigzagging back and forth across the Alberta countryside we were released from our G&S shackles and returned to the real world.

I reaffirmed two things for myself from that experience. One was that a respectful, calm approach and common sense can usually dissipate tension, and two was that no matter what, performers always rise to the occasion. I also vowed two things at the end of that tour. The first was to never work for this Engager again and the second was to never do a school tour again. I never have and I never have!

It was during the last days of the show that I learned I’d been elected as National Councilor by the Manitoba Equity Membership! I had been urged to run for the position by a number of co-workers and learning that I’d been given the confidence of the Community was most encouraging. While I won’t go into it all right now, I can tell you that over the next ten years my involvement with the governing body of the Association (as regional Rep and ultimately as Vice President) resulted in some wonderful (and harrowing) tales that both warmed and chilled my heart. Stay tuned for those sagas.

There is an unmistakable smell to old theatres. It’s a combination of make-up and powder, barge glue, wood and sawdust combined with a little body sweat and, in those days, cigarette smoke. Those smells get permanently bonded to the bricks and plaster backstage and, for me, are comforting, exhilarating and just a little romantic. Over the years, I’ve found those smells at the Grand Theatre in London, Ontario, Portland Civic Theatre in Oregon, the Pantages in Winnipeg. I encountered it again when I walked backstage at The Neptune Theatre in Halifax.

If it’s possible for all the “stars to align”, they did for this production of “Evita” in which I had been cast as ‘Juan Peron’. Richard (Ouzounian) was our Director and, for the life of me, to this day I have no earthly idea how I got the part. I bear no resemblance to Peron. He was over six feet tall and here I was a mere 5’7-ish”. But then Howard Keel’s words came drifting back to me about letting go of that idea. Lifts helped!

This was a love fest all ‘round. Rick Fox (at left) was a gem of an MD. The glorious Jayne Lewis was my ‘Eva’. Rock Star Alfie Zappacosta (at left) was ‘Che’. Ever wonderful Janet Macewan was ‘The Mistress’ and the Ensemble was made up of then-budding Canadian Theatre luminaries – Shawn Wright, Jerry Etienne, Ellen Horst, Daniel Kash, Lee MacDougall, to name but a few. Right from the start, and due to Richard’s and Rick’s patience and generosity in the rehearsal hall, we bonded very tightly. Initially, it was us against the music, but these were great voices and we rose to the occasion.

“Evita” is through-sung, which is to say it’s like an Opera in that there is no spoken dialogue. It makes vocal demands far beyond the “regular” Music Theatre fare. It is a monumental show requiring a legit sound from just about everyone and the first week was spent scaling this musical mountain. I can remember the first time the entire company sang “A New Argentina”. The last line – “Cannot be and will not be and must not be denied” – is sung in six part harmony at a triple forte. There is a famous picture in an ad for audio speakers where a seated man is holding on to the arms of an easy chair with his hair being blown back by the sound coming from the speakers. That is what the tsunami of voices sounded like on that day. Incredible! And that set the tone for the rest of the rehearsals, everyone completely committed and involved, both to the material and each other.

One challenge that actors face in the Musical Theatre and in Opera is contending with the old saw “emotions so big they have to be sung”. It’s a weak justification, especially in Musical Theatre for “breaking into song” – when words “no longer suffice” and the only alternative is to sing about what one is feeling. I’ve always thought that a composer or lyricist worth their salt will have done the work of making that very difficult transition; but even if that is the case, the performer must still make the psychological bridge from speaking to singing all while keeping it “real”.

But there is a pitfall in Opera. What does one do when not singing? The heightened emotions continue with the composer taking his/her turn at the crank, musically reiterating or underlining the passion to which the singer has already given voice. There is a tendency to fill that vocal silence with “acting” but somehow, for me, that approach has never fit the bill. My personal challenge in “Evita” was to make those silences work both for me and the audience, to keep us all present in the thru-line of the feelings. It required a LOT of thinking beforehand, plotting the progression in tiny increments and then fitting them into the musical line which underscored the emotional evolutions all over again. Jayne and I had conversations about this and came to the conclusions that we would still have to trust our inner monologues and unspoken dialogue in order to get from one emotional place to another. Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice had been masterful in giving us firm emotional foundations that were both guiding and supporting. It was a lot of work and exhausting in performance but incredibly satisfying when achieved.

There is one point toward the end of the show when Eva knows she is dying and sings about becoming Peron’s Vice President. He must make a choice of supporting her or, because of the demands of his Generals, leaving her behind as he rises in power. He looks down and sings, almost rhetorically, “So, what happens now?” Eva quietly sings “Where am I going to?”, a reiteration of what ‘The Mistress’ has sung earlier in the show as Peron casts her off in favour of Eva. Peron responds with “Don’t ask anymore” and backs away from her. During the musical underscoring that follows I remember looking up at Jayne and seeing a single tear roll down her cheek. The confluence of reality and theatre hit me like a bomb blast for a moment as I got overwhelmed by the intensity of the emotion we had created, fighting back the instinct to take her in my arms as a human being and turning away as the character. I held back my subjectivity until I got off stage and dissolved into tears myself. It had been so real. Mercy, I love the Theatre!!

From opening night through an weeks’ extension we were sold out. Doing that material every night was incredibly satisfying on so many levels and we all continued to find new insights into our characters and relationships. Toward the end of the run after a student matinee, the outgoing AD (Richard had just been appointed Artistic Director to start the following season) called Jayne and me into his office. He told us that he had been displeased with how our relationship was coming off on stage! He said our intentions were vague and cloudy, that my approach was “dead wrong” and proceeded to give us notes about how to “improve” our portrayals! We sat there, stunned! This was a conversation that should have a) happened during rehearsals and b) been with himself and the Director of the show, not us half way through the run! But he was the head of the theatre and we nodded at his input and left.

We looked at each other in the hallway and went our separate ways to get ready for the evening performance. I closed myself in my dressing room. My mind was racing, trying to assess each moment he had addressed, attempting to make some sense of his notes and going through the show in my head adjusting deliveries and transitions. I went on stage that evening petrified of what was going to happen. In the first scene with ‘The Mistress’, I tried to incorporate the AD’s requested additional layer of compassion but everything seemed to go awry. My conditioning had been thwarted and, like forgetting a line, I just kept thinking that this wasn’t right. Extricating himself from ‘The Mistress’ had to have a slightly brutal quality to it in order to justify his change of heart. Feeling sorry for her wasn’t what I was supposed to be doing in that moment. It went downhill from there affecting the relationship with ‘Eva’ and I found myself losing my focus and my ‘Peron’ started to disappear.

I came off stage after the first Act and people started asking me if something was wrong. I explained what had taken place earlier in the day and folks got angry that this had happened to Jayne and me. I calmed down and told Jayne to forget about the first Act and that we were going back to the way we had been doing it. Thank God she agreed, saying that our scenes had been the worst ever and all was back to normal.

The AD didn’t see the show again until the following evening. After it was over he appeared at my dressing room door and proceeded to tell me that what I was doing in the scenes we had talked about was SO MUCH BETTER than what I had been doing before our chat!! I could hardly believe it! I had written in my Journal the evening before about the incident and conjectured that he would do what he had just done and that I wouldn’t have the guts to tell him he was a complete asshole because we hadn’t changed a damned thing! Of course, I didn’t have the guts and just ended up feeling sorry for him more than anything else. He really couldn’t see the difference and only saw what he wanted to see. That’s the thing about acting. You prepare and prepare and create a character and relationships within the confines of the story that hopefully live for the audience as you take them on the journey. They demand nothing more than the truth in what you give them. It’s a matter of trust, in every way, with everyone, from the first day of rehearsals to the last day of performance.

I left “Evita” with a heavy heart because of the love, warmth and generosity of yet another “family”, momentarily gathered and now scattered in every direction. Miraculously, I’ve remained in touch with many of those folk and that’s comforting. But it was onward now, back to the Prairies with opportunities missed and opportunities taken!

Actors are a pretty judgmental lot. No two ways about it. Sitting in an audience, there is an assessment going on constantly – “I could do that role – I SHOULD be doing that role!”, “That’s not the way to deliver that line!”, “He has no idea what that character is all about!”  I have no hesitation in admitting that about myself. Sitting in the audience is a busman’s holiday for me. There is a continuous critical monologue going on in my head. If I’m not buying it, my seat is usually empty for the second Act. If someone hasn’t grabbed me in the first Act, they’re certainly not going to do it in the second. Sometimes I have friends in the show and that’s a hard one to deal with if the performances haven’t done it for me. “Great work” or “Good job” are easy outs afterward but we both know the words are empty. It’s the same in rehearsals.

The first few days are assessment days. With folks you’ve not met or worked with before there‘s a personal and professional wariness that will either be eased or heightened. “Nice to meet you” or “How ya doin’?” are exchanged during the first few social minutes, then everyone’s sits down at the table for formal intros and the director’s message and a first reading of the piece. That’s when it gets serious. The director is sized up if you’ve only met for a moment in an audition or if you’ve be cast by an AD and this is the first time for each of you.  “Is this a nice person?” “Can I trust this person?” “Do they know the material really well?” There are furtive glances as we speak our first lines in the play. You can usually tell from the get-go if someone is (hopefully) on top of the material. There is the sound of the voice, the sense of control and understanding, and, importantly, confidence. In a Musical it’s even more fraught as someone sings and “the voice” is privately adjudicated – a much more specific assessment – but eventually, everything settles down (for the most part) and “the play’s the thing”. Sometimes things don’t settle and there is a downward spiral that results in chaos and confusion. I was back to Dinner Theatre for this episode.

“Run For Your Wife” is a well-worn English farce by Ray Cooney. It concerns a cab driver who is leading a double life with two wives in two towns. Trouble brews when the cab driver is mugged and ends up in hospital where his two addresses are discovered and the police are called in to investigate. I played the very proper but befuddled Detective Sergeant Porterhouse. It’s not quite as sophisticated as an Ayckbourne farce but presents great possibilities to actors willing to commit. It is very precise and relies on honesty in the playing. This material can’t be “sent up”. Right off the bat we encountered two problems.

Our “star” was Dennis Cole, a TV actor who had made a name for himself in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s on the likes of “Felony Squad” and “The Young and the Restless” and any number of other shows. Like I said before, Dinner Theatre is where once high profile actors with now-ebbing careers “end” up. It was with great concern that we learned that our lead character would not be joining us until the second (out of three) week of rehearsals!! WTF? The other problem (initially) was our Director.

Every now and then I find a certain approach from Central Canada-based (read “Toronto”) male actors that just rubs me raw! It’s a kind of superior testosterone-fueled mentality that insinuates itself into every aspect of the process and colours relationships both on and off stage. I wrote in my Journal that “he (our Director) has a certain pseudo-macho quality about him which, if I were a woman, would drive me to distraction. I’m sure Christine (Mitges, playing one of the wives and one who didn’t take fools lightly) was ready to bash his head against a wall because of a particularly chauvinistic remark he made this afternoon. He uses profanity as if it was a sign of power or as if it was funny, but I don’t think many of us find it funny at all”. In his opening remarks he kept referring to the play as a “French Farce” and informed us that we would be using a metronome later in the process to get our “timing” down! What? WHAT? The piece was an ENGLISH farce and, while subtle, the differences are vast. Fortunately, all of us knew those differences and carried on in spite of him.

In shaded ways over the first days of rehearsals we disabused him of his metronome idea and refused to rise to the bait when he went off on one of his macho rants or made lewd comments to one of the ladies. (It’s good to know that over the intervening years that kind of behaviour has become completely unacceptable. But back it was rife.) When he realized that none of us were impressed by his approach, he calmed down … a bit. For some reason, as has happened with other directors, it was again a case of him looking over at me for approval after a quip or off-colour joke. I just ignored him. Much too slowly, he got the message.

Dennis Cole, we were told, had all his lines down – and he did, for the most part but our wariness was slow to ebb. He was a very nice man, strikingly good-looking in a boyish way and a good actor as well. However, his one failing was that he couldn’t do a British accent. Why he was cast in a British farce to begin with was an unspoken question that floated in the air for the first few days after his arrival, but our producers decided to make the character a relocated American and included small references at the start of the show to make that clear to the audience. There were jarring moments when I found it hard to believe that this American would be using the very English idioms and phraseology required of the character. I guess they weren’t going to go as far as to re-write the script and our ears got used to the anachronisms. It was obvious that Dennis was feeling somewhat intimidated by us. His world had been TV and film and he lacked the ease of being on-stage. In his world, once you got the scene on tape or film that was it. Now he faced months of doing the same thing night after night to a live audience. But because he was such a pleasant fellow, we encouraged and cajoled him along and he quickly settled in as one of us.

The crunch toward opening came quickly. While the metronome never made an appearance we inherently adjusted to a frantic pace and energy that had us breathless each time we came off-stage. It was exhilarating and we were all swept along in the whirlwind. Even Dennis rose to an acceptable rhythm as we moved out of the rehearsal hall and into the theatre. The space was smallish to begin with and the backstage area was incredibly congested. Because we were dealing with two different places in the play, our Stage Manager (the laid-back and meticulous Chris Pearce) had posted large labels on doors letting us know which door lead to which apartment even though they were in the same space, and huge arrows pointing to the “bedroom” or the “kitchen”. Even with the visual aids some of us still managed to get lost in the maze of prop tables and costume racks behind the set walls which led to missed entrances resulting in some tensions (and a few laughs – entrances into the apartment being made through the previously established bedroom door!).

After a couple of tech days we threw ourselves into a preview performance with an audience made up of the Theatre Staff. We were pumped to get in front of people and took to the stage looking forward to hearing someone other than our Director laughing. Surprisingly, there was minimal response to what we were doing. We couldn’t figure out why they weren’t reacting until we realized that most of our audience was made up of the Filipino kitchen staff who understood almost no English! Our speedy British banter, double entendres and jokes baffled them completely. Fortunately the serving and box office staff kept us on track and we got through it and were on to the opening.

As I’ve written before in these posts, there is NOTHING like hearing an audience laugh at something you’ve done on-stage. On opening night and for the rest of the 3 month run they never let us down – perhaps, better put, we never let THEM down ( I got called “masterful” by a critic in this one!). We were a tight septet playing off each other and enjoying the experience … well, most of it. I had mentioned in a previous post that dear friend Robbie Paterson and I have never exchanged an angry word with each other. Well, that isn’t exactly true. There was ONE word. Robbie was playing the next door neighbour in this piece and we had a number of small scenes with each other. Robbie is, how shall I put it, a “juicy” speaker on stage. During certain agitated exchanges saliva would build up in his mouth and be expelled on certain consonants. The folks at the tables right in front of the stage should have been provided with umbrellas! The person he was talking to on stage, which, in this case, was invariably me, got the brunt of it! For weeks I accepted the showers in silence until one night. I found myself doing a slow burn as I was being sprayed during our big scene. We exited and, as I yet again cleaned off my saliva-be-speckled glasses, got close to him and in my loudest backstage whisper “screamed” “SWALLOW!!” at him. Over the weeks that followed, it gradually turned into the dry season. That was the only time I’ve ever “raised” my voice at Robbie.

We kept getting extended for weeks on end. Some of the Toronto folks were getting very antsy to get back to “civilization” as one of them put it. Dennis was winding down and losing interest, it seemed. So we were on the road to the end. As the closing was announced, our audiences increased in number and responses and we went out with a bang. I had received some of the best notices of my young (at that point) life and sort of hated to see it close. It turned out to be the longest-running and highest-grossing show at Stage West Winnipeg.

During the last weeks of the production, word had started to circulate about a new three-block- long Mall being built. It would be called “Portage Place” and the long-established stores and services located along and adjacent to Portage Avenue were being expropriated for the huge project. Unfortunately, Stage West was smack dab in the middle of the area and would meet the wrecker’s ball. We were the second-to-last show to play the space and, sadly, by mid-summer a favorite playhouse for both audiences and performers was no more. For the longest time supporters tried to find another space for the theatre to continue but to no avail. I miss those days.

But where one door closes … well, you know the old adage. Toward the end of the run I had been approached by a very pleasant and organized man named Michael Utgaard who owned an Artist Management Company. He had an established reputation and represented mostly classical artists but wanted something a bit less “high brow” to round out his stable. He asked me if I would be interested in creating a programme suitable for touring and, needless to say, I jumped at the opportunity. Thus, “Shubert Alley – The Broadway Tradition” was born. It didn’t take long to put the presentation together. Unlike the recital preparation there weren’t a lot of choices to be made and I decided that a chronological approach would be best, making sure that the vast majority of the selections were very familiar to what I knew would be a less than cosmopolitan audience. Michael arranged an Arts Council grant to get pictures done and create a brochure describing our offering; and with Ross Houston as my cohort at the piano, we experienced our first “Contact Manitoba”.

“Contact Manitoba” was a Trade Show for performing artists to display their talents before Community Concert booking agents from Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Western Ontario. It happened every two years and was a dizzying experience. The competition to get booked is fierce and, while there were a LOT of artists plying their wares, there were none that fit into our category.   Everyone had fifteen minutes to “wow” the agents and then hope for the best.

If it’s possible for a group of people to collectively drool over an artist’s performance we experienced it that day. As we left the hall, Ross turned to me and said “We’re going to be millionaires!” Well, not quite. Reps for the Community Concert Series were booking for the season ahead and it would take a bit of time for our touring schedule to be organized but, in spurts over the next two and a half years, Ross and I traversed the Prairie countryside plying our Musical Theatre wares in front of immensely appreciative audiences. And if you think I don’t have stories from those days, stay tuned!

“HMS Pinafore” insinuated itself into my life again – twice! I succumbed once again to the lure of money and, against my better judgment (I said there was money involved) hit the country roads again (left)  with a remount of the tiny production we had done for the Manitoba Opera some time earlier. I was the only cast holdover from the “original” production but eased into the new relationships with little trouble and we actually had a good time – aside from the rehearsal period when we were subjected to THAT director again! Fortunately, he disappeared once we were up and running, but not before had offered me a lot of money to play the role of ‘Koko’ in a production of “The Mikado” that he was “directing” in Alberta later in the year. I told him I would think about it hoping desperately that something else would come along at home and I could turn him down. If nothing else, the tiny tour served to prepare me for the massive, full-blown “Pinafore” I was soon to enter into at Rainbow Stage.

I have mentioned that the success of a production rises or falls on the shoulders of the people involved and their relationships to one another. The second kick (actually, third kick) at the “Pinafore” can was a much different experience from the rest. To start, the cast was ten times the size of the Opera production in all aspects – the cast, the set, the orchestra and the stage! It was huge … as all Rainbow productions were. The Creative Team kept going back and forth about casting me as either “Sir Joseph” (the part for which I thought I was a shoe-in) or “Dick Deadeye”, a smaller role but attractive nonetheless. I ended up with the latter and headed into a couple of months eating the scenery. There had been a rumour that our director, the great Bob “Hutza Futza” Ainsley, was going to put the entire cast in roller skates, but thankfully, that never came close to fruition. It was, however, not going to be a “park and bark” (stand and sing) production and rehearsals kept up all breathless. We were all up for it.

I immediately sized up my “rival” for the ‘Sir Joseph’ and decided that he looked more the part than I did. Norman Roberts was wonderfully affable and, begrudgingly, did a tremendous job. Rich-voiced Dorothy-Jean Lloyd was ‘Buttercup’, the stupendous Cristen Gregory our ‘Josephine, baritone-turned-tenor David Dunbar as ‘Ralph’, model- handsome Tommy Oliver as the ‘Bo’sun’ and the glorious Paul Massel (now Father Paul) was ‘Captain Corcoran’. I mention all these folks because they still hold a special place in my heart as true and talented professionals who took their jobs very seriously but had a lot of fun at the same time. We were a very close knit group and socialized a lot together. I even convinced all of them to sing at Church a couple of times during the run and the fact that they would do that impressed me no end! (Pictured above left to right: Bob Ainsley, Pam MacDonald, Cristen Gregory, Tommy Oliver, David Dunbar, Paul Massel and me.)

My ‘Dick Deadeye’ was, as one critic put it, a “nautical Quasimodo”. While his name indicates an eye patch, a hump gives yet another physical dimension to his character. He does little but skulk about the stage spying on the other characters for “dirt’ to report back to the Captain and gets mercilessly and constantly roughed up by anyone nearby! I was pushed and shoved all over the stage and the audience (and the chorus guys) loved it. (That’s me being “nosed” by Tommy Oliver in the photo above) After all, what is a villain for! (My bow was invariably met by great applause and lots of boos and hollers!) I took full advantage of my outcast status. The hump part of my costume was built into a t-shirt and could either be behind the left shoulder or the right. I couldn’t decide so two were made. I ultimately chose the right shoulder. One night during the run I wondered how it would feel if the hump was on the other side and after my first scene changed into the other t-shirt. I continued to do that after each scene, back and forth, waiting to see who caught on first. NO ONE NOTICED! I then started to switch my eye patch as well, one scene on the right eye, the next scene on the left. Yet again, no one noticed. It was naughty of me but I was having fun waiting to see if anyone would catch on to my little game. I couldn’t believe it but no one ever did!

Another moment that was actually staged was my favorite in this show. In “Kind Captain” I sing about the “merry cat of nine tails” and had been supplied with a huge stuffed black cat. On a particular line I threw in the air and it disappeared into the orchestra pit. As if by magic, on the very next line, the cat came flying back out the pit, now pure white, and perfectly lands in my hands on the last note of the verse thanks to the most excellent timing of Celoris Miller who was playing the piano! The audience would explode as I gave a slow take toward then. I LIVE for that kind of moment!

The unfortunate thing about this business is its transitory nature. For a short while there is a visceral intensity that lifts us out of the ordinary and gives a deep sense of belonging and comfort. We rally about a common purpose and imbue ourselves with a security, even though we know it will end all too soon. We dive into relationships and rely on them to our very core. It’s the reward and punishment for the trust we allow ourselves all the while knowing, in the back of our minds, that it must all stop. Like all the others before it, this Summer wound down. I hated to see all these new friends leave town and grieved a wee bit for being abandoned.

But now it was onward … but not necessarily upward!

NEXT: The West and then the East …

I became a singer before I became an actor. While documented in detail earlier in these posts, it was through church choirs, school choirs, choir festivals, voice lessons, vocal workshops, voice intensives, opera choruses, opera seminars, vocal technique classes and opera performance that I finally, comfortably, sanely arrived at Musical Theatre. In my early school days in Canada, Musical Theatre opportunities were nowhere to be found. There was the occasional production in University (“Oh What A Lovely War” comes to mind), but it wasn’t until Acadia Summer Playhouse in Nova Scotia that my journey forward was cemented and I didn’t look back.

I hit my stride in Portland and while great fulfillment was to be found in so many productions over those years, the intimacy of cabaret and concert performance seemed to feed my soul. In that format I got to chose what, when and where I wanted to sing and to that end I “made” work for myself. Toward the end of my Portland days I developed and presented a cabaret act which evolved even further in New York. Unfortunately, I was lured to the Prairies and the two shows I was working on for “Don’t Tell Mama’s” (a piano bar in NYC) got put firmly aside as my life was overtaken by and committed to the Manitoba Theatre Centre . But that solo performing bug never left me.

While one might think that throwing a few songs together for a show might be an easy task, it isn’t! Aside from the self-indulgence and gratification of being on stage by oneself, there are considerations that limit choices. There’s a long list of questions one must ask oneself before tackling the actual rehearsing process, not the least of which is “WHY am I doing this?” That’s the hard one. There is no esoteric answer. Oh, you can probably make one up, like touching people’s hearts or giving them another human’s point of view about something, but the actual reason is Ego (and maybe, if you’re lucky, demand). Earning a bit of money might fit in there somewhere, but, honestly, it’s the performer’s innate drive to be looked at, listened to and admired. And that’s an admission I take some pleasure in admitting at this point in my life.

I decided to take this need a bit further after the heady MTC days faded and creating work for myself became a major priority. Helping to develop the “Music At Augustine” series lead to an ideal opportunity. It couldn’t be a cabaret-style event … or, at least I came to the conclusion that it couldn’t be, not this time ‘round. This was to be an “In Recital” event, something more formal and structured, something that would bring in more than just a theatre crowd. I set to work.

With the “Why” (and “Where”) questions inwardly answered, the next thing to tackle was the “What”. In the Cabaret world, structure is a lot more informal. There is the expected rapport generated by the sheer force of personality and banter that might (or might not) captivate an audience and lead from one thing to the next. It’s a relaxed atmosphere I liked a lot. But, for a Recital, there seemed to be an ever-narrowing series of elements – periods, styles, languages, content, themes, etc., etc. – that would dictate the performance format.

Through all those lessons and workshops and intensives I had accumulated a substantial library of music. There was the usual repertoire – Schubert, Faure, Strauss, Mahler, Grieg – that challenged me mightily mainly because of the language. I was alright with the French but my German left a great deal to be desired. My Mennonite friends would lower their eyes and smirk when, in German, I would launch into Schubert’s “Erlkonig” massacring Goethe’s words. I had always felt there to be barriers when singing in a foreign language, both between me and the words and the audience and me. In my head, I would be translating the French or German into English in order to give the words some hopefully discernible meaning. The audience would be reading translations in their programs in order to understand what I was singing. Something was being lost in all those “translations”.

The other part of the collection was the English composers. I seemed to gravitate to the music of Vaughan Williams, Quilter, Moore, Ireland, Bennett. They were melodious and struck a chord in my heart. Using this English foundation meant that I could go even further afield and include American Composers as well. There would be no question about accessibility and I would feel most comfortable singing in my own language. “The English Tradition” it was and the first hurdle was crossed.

Over the years, I have experienced any number of accompanists. Some were just pianists, players one encounters at auditions, musicians before whom you set some music and they play it, adequately, functionally, efficiently. They get you by … just. Then there are good accompanists, musicians who go a bit beyond what is written on the page and assume a level of artistry that aids and abets one’s performance. There are a lot of those and I take my hat off to them. But then, there are great accompanists. I’ve worked with precious few of those. These are the rare communicators who use their own humanity to connect with me. These people have taken some time to discover who you are and to understand why you have made a particular choice, musically, emotionally, spiritually. These are people who breathe with you, live with you as you sing. I have mental images of them reaching as I reach, feeling as I feel, all the while making me WANT to sing because they’re translating themselves through the music to me. It’s a conversation being witnessed by an audience that transcends words. We’re on another level. That sounds pretty heady but I can name those few greats with whom I’ve had that experience.

Back in the Portland days, Ron Snyder took my late-night cabaret performances to another level. While things could be pretty haphazard on any particular evening depending on the audience at the Bistro where we performed, Ron would rise to every occasion. He would support, cajole, urge, surprise, insinuate and reward us all with his hands on the piano keys. We were young back then but Ron had a maturity in his playing and an understanding of what it means to “accompany” a performer. He’s still doing it to this day in Pasadena at the Stoney Point Restaurant on Saturday nights and it you want to find out what it’s like to have him on your side while you’re singing, its open mic from 9:30 to 11:30!! *

Two other early vocal mentors were Ruth Dobson and Gibner King. Ruth was both a singer and vocal coach and possessed a musical knowledge that propelled all her students toward performance heights we didn’t think possible. Gibner (at left) was legendary (He looks rather dour in the photo but was anything BUT that.) Even from this vantage point, I didn’t realize how I was lucky enough to have had him in my life. He had been the long-time accompanist for vocal greats like Ezio Pinza, Grace Moore, Eileen Farrell and Jan Peerce and his sensitivity at the piano was the result of years of concert and recital performance around the world. My sessions with him were uplifting and inspiring and I’ve never forgotten his guidance, patience, encouragement and respect as I navigated the pitfalls of Mahler and Strauss.  I had bridged a seemingly wide divide between the Classical music world and Musical Theatre during my time with these wonderful people, a divide that was firmly bridged by their artistry and partnership.

And there was Vera Long. I could probably fill this post with tales of our musical adventures. While we did some concert work from time to time, it was as a Musical Director that I discovered Vera’s inventiveness and generosity. While Musical Directors usually have a number of other musicians to “accompany” a performer, the foundation for the entire musical approach lies securely in their artistic sensibilities. There was“otherworldliness” to Vera’s approach, a spiritual translation of mere notes on a page. In our work together developing the “Messiah” and “Godspell” productions, a close collaboration evolved that continues to be my MD standard to this day. Taking what is familiar and normal and making it new and astonishing was her great strength. Re-imagining Handel in contemporary terms astounded me and energized me as a performer and director. We worked together a lot over the years and I miss those incredibly creative days.

While New York City has accompanists hanging from every lamppost looking for work, aside from those audition pianists I mentioned earlier I didn’t have much occasion to make those connections, with a couple of exceptions. In putting together those ill-fated “Don’t Tell Mama’s” cabarets, I got to work with the wonderful Norma Curley. She is an established teacher and accompanist at AMDA today, but back then was accessible and I was lucky to have her help me develop my song list. And there was Mark Lebowitz (pictured at right), sadly gone now, who could play anything in any style at the drop of a hat. Oh my God, I loved working with him! I met him during “I Only Just Got Here Myself”, that Off B’way show experience documented a few posts back. His playing was so natural, so nuanced and so joyous, and we developed a musical rapport based in a complete trust of and almost-psychic awareness of each other. As an example, the very thought of my taking a breath would make him smile knowingly, as if he was inside my head, and would make his head tilt slightly to the side and his hands hover above the keys for a split second in anticipation of my action. We were completely as one when we rehearsed together and I deeply miss that much-too-short collaboration.

But back to “In Recital” choices. Deciding who to work with was pretty easy. I had worked with Ross Houston during “Side By Side By Sondheim” at MTC a few years earlier and had found him to be great musician, affable and very easy-going. I had also heard of Celoris Miller but hadn’t experienced her proficiency personally. That was to change in a major way in the time to come as we became close friends and collaborators on a number of projects. Celoris continuously reminded me of the importance of musical detail in performing and, while I had a bead on the relationship between the words and the notes on which they’re placed, it was her insistence on clarifying and cementing those connections which, for me, made a phrase come to life and touch the listener. I can see her testing me as we worked on a song, her upper body moving closer to the keyboard and the little finger on her right hand pausing then landing on the piano at the precise moment the vowel gave meaning to the word I was singing. It was always magical for me and for the students we taught together in classes. But more of that later.

Ross was the long serving in-house accompanist for the Company classes at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. While that might sound like a rather mundane job, I discovered that through those years of playing music for ballet dancers to practice positions at the barre or perfect various combinations across the floor, he had a developed a finely tuned musical depth. The short pieces that usually accompany a dance combination repeated over and over again can become almost academic. Ross told me (in one of our long conversations about his job) that he would mentally overlay a narrative dictated by the melody line of the piece fleshed out by the accompanying notes. It was that narrative that gave his playing an defined focus and to which the dancers would physically (and emotionally) respond. For me, it worked … in spades.

Together we began to develop the program. Ross had also been a mainstay as an accompanist for the Winnipeg Music Festivals, playing for singers of all ages and abilities and, as a result, had a broad knowledge of the repertoire. It took a long time to tie down the song choices. Ross introduced me to a number of pieces I’d not heard of and they fast were included in the program and became some of my favourites to sing. We decided to base the approach in a loose chronological order starting with music from “The Arnold Book of Old Songs” gloriously arranged by Roger Quilter and move into mid-century British staples and then jumping the pond to end the first part with a group of Spirituals. I knew I wanted to include some contemporary American music with a more popular flair so ended the concert with the likes of Bernstein, Loesser and Kern. There was, however, a space at the start of the second half that needed filling.

Jon Ted Wynne was a local actor I’d worked with a few times. He was a bit shy and retiring but always produced commendable work on stage. It was purely by accident that I discovered that he was a serious composer. Upon finding out that I was doing this concert, he approached me to consider a Song Cycle he had written as an emotional response to an ill-fated romantic involvement. It had originally been scored for Baritone and Orchestra but he had reduced the instrumentation to a String Quartet. It was called “Songs of Love and Sorrow”. Talk about hiding one’s light under a bushel!! The text had been taken from the Psalms and documented his loss and despair but contrasted with the ecstasy of the affair. It was about fifteen minutes long and would serve as a unique diversion from the otherwise familiar music we were doing.

While this new work was musically challenging and tended, at times, toward the lugubrious, there were also ethereal moments of great beauty. In rehearsals I found myself getting lost in the string quartet accompaniment. Jon Ted was at the piano guiding us through the dynamics and emotional pathways of his piece. I appreciated the amount of work he had put into the piece and hoped that the audience would enter into the experience too. I was very pleased with our program.

The house (church) was full of people when we began on that late Fall Sunday afternoon. To say I was nervous would be an understatement. Here was this Song-and-Dance-Man getting all high-brow in a Recital and I feared that the audience was there out of a morbid curiosity more than anything else. I needn’t have worried. The accessibility of the opening music calmed everyone down (including me) and because it was all very familiar (“Drink To Me Only”, “Barb’ra Allen”, “All Those Endearing Young Charms”, etc.) we all relaxed. I have listened to the tape a few times since then and, objectively, hear a very secure voice with a great musicality and a beautiful tone singing with ease and confidence, even, amazingly, in the Wynn piece. The audience had risen to its feet as one at the end. I’d not prepared an encore (enough is enough, after all) but, at the intermission Ross asked what we would do if they kept calling us back. I thought for a moment as said we would repeat “Oliver Cromwell” by Benjamin Britten, the last verse of which goes “The saddle and bridle they lie on the shelf, Hee-haw, lie on the shelf. If you want any more you can sing it yourself, Hee-haw sing it yourself … sing it yourself!” I thought that was appropriate after all my ninety minutes of sweating for them. I’ve never done another “Recital” like that one. But Ross and I would continue our collaboration, one would that would last for many years in the form of another solo concert called “Shubert Alley”.

I don’t know of a person on earth who has ever had a disparaging, negative or mean thing to say about Robbie Paterson. We had worked together in the early MTC days and developed a close bond. Thirty-five years later, he remains my Best Friend! Robbie is at once generous, kind, patient, funny, gentle caring, gloriously enthusiastic (about everything), compassionate and I (and anyone else, for that matter) could go on and on. We have shared many experiences together both on stage and off. Serving as Deputy Returns Officer with him in downtown Winnipeg for the 1984 Election comes to mind. You get to know someone REAL well sitting for twelve hours talking to each other constantly while sporadically checking in voters and eating egg salad and avocado sandwiches, Greek salad, lots of coffee and smoking cigarettes at the table (ah, those were the days!)!

Robbie had been commissioned to adapt Saint-Exupery’s “The Little Prince” as a Musical for Manitoba Theatre for Young People to (gulp) tour schools in Winnipeg and the surrounding area. I had been asked to participate. This was a somewhat tortured decision to make after my last School Touring experience, but because MTYP had done a LOT of touring (and we would only be “out” for a week) and because it was Robbie and because it wasn’t Gilbert and Sullivan, I threw my lot in with what became a loving and (most of the time) happy crew! All of us played a number of roles (my main one was “The Fox” pictured above, as well as being on keyboards) and, at the outset, we had a great deal of input into our characters and the music, a rare luxury in the creation process. Robbie was incredibly amenable to any suggestion that came from us (me, the gentle and sweet Jamie Oliviero as The Prince (still delighting kids with his Storytelling to this day), and the delightful Andorlie Hillstrom (my partner “Fiddler” experience). Robbie had also ended up playing the “Pilot”. I wish all theatre preparation could be like this. Craig Walls was the Director and, over the rehearsal period, though fraught at times, the give-and-take, the considerations and the tailoring to everyone’s needs resulted in a great script and our becoming a very tightly knit foursome (plus Lori Montcalm as our Stage Manager) tugging at the bit to get this wonderful catered-to-kids-with-a-message piece on the boards!

Touring in Manitoba in the DEAD of an icy Winter (complete with blizzards) is not all that much fun. After a short sit-down in the Gas Station Theatre in Winnipeg and a few days of run-outs, we were in the van, eating at Chicken Delights and sleeping in old motels that smelled slightly mildew-y and of previous occupants. The saving grace in all this was that we loved each other. A small squabble here and there did nothing to affect our closeness, most of that based in how much we enjoyed doing the play. The kids were always engrossed and responsive because we were speaking on their level and that spurred us on at each performance … well, most of them anyway. There were some performances of really small kids who took to wandering amongst us on the stage while we were performing which made for some really interesting moments. But we got through it. There is something wistful about arriving in a small rural Manitoba town in mid-December. After unloading the van (a routine we eventually got down to a science with Robbie inside the truck calling out the various pieces he passed out to us – I was always concerned about how the “SIM-patizer” (our word for “synthesizer”) had fared from place to place) and setting up the stage, we would take a bit of a break to wander down the very short main street, maybe having some lunch, and getting looks from the locals as we invaded their environs. “City folks” we could hear them say. We would then head back to the “Happy Thoughts” or “Beautiful Flower” Community School and astound the kid with our work. Sometimes, not so much!

I wish that every Producer or Artistic Director of a theatre that presents touring shows be forced to experience an entire tour from beginning to end to truly understand what actors and stage management have to go through from day to day on the road! Sure, there are guidelines for performance conditions and time and travel limitations in the Young Audiences Contract but, always, they seem to go out the window when the Tour is actually happening. Our last performance was at a Christmas party for a car dealership!! Why in heaven’s name would we be booked into the Holiday Chev-Olds Car Showroom to perform? WHY?  Sales staff, their wives and kids were more interested in partying and playing than in listening to a somewhat sensitive and quiet piece of theatre. It was like trying to perform in a theatre lobby at intermission! We were actually competing with our audience! People wandered about chatting and drinking and eating – this was a party after all – and the kids ran back and forth between the cars and onto our “stage”. We sped up this performance taking ten minutes off the show and were out of there and in seventeen minutes flat after it was over, sad that it had ended this way.

I loved doing “The Little Prince”. I loved the characters I played, the play’s message and Robbie’s music. I loved the people I worked with. While I’ll never be a fan of School Touring, this Tour was made bearable by the bonds formed between “we few, we happy few” who endured for the sake of perhaps the occasional life touched in some way we might only find out about later.

But now, it was back to the “real” world! And more Dinner Theatre!!

*Sadly and suddenly, Ron Snyder passed away a couple of days ago. I hope the small paragraph above about him will stand as my tribute to his incredible talent and friendship. Our ultimate fate is to forever live in the memories of those we leave behind. Ron is in my memory.