The air was electric with anticipation as a top-notch staged-concert production of Stephen Sondheim’s and James Goldman’s iconic musical Follies at Koerner Hall on the weekend of October 16/17 signalled the return of indoor live musical theatre to town. For most of us this was the first indoor live performance we had seen since lockdown back in March of 2020.
Back in my M.A. thesis-writing days in the late 1980s at the University of Warwick where I was studying English and European Renaissance Drama, I latched onto the phrase “necessary theatre” to describe a kind of theatre that is calling out to be created, that needs an audience, a shared community, in order to enable us to see the world around us in a new way – so that we are inspired to react, to do something to make the world a better place.
A decade or so later, in 1999, the phrase took on an entirely different resonance, as the title of a book, The Necessary Theatre, by Sir Peter Hall, which to this day stands as a powerful manifesto for state support, rather than private patronage, of theatre as an art form. Left to its own devices, he argued, if theatre has to support itself it will stagnate, falling back on the tried and true. (Not that state support is, in and of itself, necessarily a guarantee that stagnation will not ensue, particularly when that support is directed primarily toward large organizations competing for resources, who must meet budget targets for what they do.)
What is equally necessary for the very best theatre to happen, Hall argues, is for permanent companies of actors and technicians, secure in their premises, to feel they have permission to push the boundaries of their art.
Before the pandemic, Canadian musical theatre composer, lyricist and writer Britta Johnson was on a roll. Hot on the heels of her musical Life After’s US premiere at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre in 2019, she was off to Connecticut to workshop a new show with regular collaborator, actor, singer, and playwright Sara Farb.
Based on a true story from 1915 about a New York City mother suing her daughter—and heiress—for incorrigibility after the latter gets caught up with a seductive tango dancer, KELLY v. KELLY is the third in a series of three musicals that Johnson was commissioned to create for her three-year residency with The Musical Stage Company.
It was supposed to premiere at Toronto’s Canadian Stage in May 2020, but the pandemic struck mere weeks before the production was slated to begin rehearsals.
Just as the Stratford Festival’s stunning new Tom Patterson Theatre has been completed and is ready to be filled with eager actors and audience members, the exigencies of the ongoing pandemic are keeping its doors closed and forcing performances outdoors in an uncanny – or canny? – echo of the Festival’s roots.
Almost 70 years ago, in the summer of 1953, the dream of a young returning soldier who had fallen in love with the theatre he had experienced in Europe, came to exciting life in the very first Stratford Festival Theatre. That magical first stage, designed by Tanya Moiseiwitsch and envisioned by the first artistic director Tyrone Guthrie, sheltered under the canvas of the famous Stratford tent, kept whole though rain and shine by tent master Skip Manley for that groundbreaking first season.
Now, after an unprecedented year without any live performance at all by the renowned classical theatre company, an innovative new season will begin, not indoors, but in two tents, or more accurately, under two beautiful new canopies outside the Tom Patterson and Festival Theatres.
Ever since I began writing this column four years ago, I have searched out and championed companies and artists exploring and breaking down the barriers between musical theatre, opera and dance. Imagine my delight when I discovered a new festival debuting in the last week of May this year dedicated to the same goals, to “reimagining the future of music theatre” and to building a new community of artists, scholars, journalists and students from across genres and generations.
The Watershed Festival, given this name to symbolize the coming together of these many streams of interconnected art forms, is helmed by prolific Canadian composer Dean Burry, now also an assistant professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, where the idea of the festival was born. Burry has been a friend of mine since I directed the world premiere of his opera Pandora’s Locker at the Royal Conservatory of Music’s Glenn Gould School in 2008; I got in touch to find out more about both the inspiration behind the festival and how the pandemic might be affecting plans for participants and attendees.
One thing that is clear right away in speaking to Burry about Watershed is how closely the goals of the festival align with his own belief in the need to break through the long-standing walls between the worlds of opera and musical theatre: in both the professional and academic worlds. As he told me, “I feel as though this is something that my heart has been in for a very long time. I work a lot in the opera field, but never did think that opera had to be one boxed-in thing. I have had some professional musical theatre shows, as well, and I’ve found that as much as we all try to be open, a lot of people in those two fields have strong feelings about what ‘opera is supposed to be’ as opposed to what ‘musical theatre is supposed to be’. The reality, though, as far as I am concerned, is that they are all on the same spectrum; both are methods of storytelling that use every art form: drama, literature, music, movement and design.”
