Musical Theatre and Dance

As I started to write this column in early February, we were under full lockdown … again. No theatres or concert halls were allowed to present performances for live audiences …again, and we were forced to turn to our computers (again), for virtual versions of our favourite performance genres.

The unforeseeable Omicron lockdown was doubly heartbreaking after the gradual resurgence of the fall, for creators and audiences alike; nowhere more poignantly, for me, than in the official closing of Come From Away only a week after its glorious reopening, its staging refreshed and the company thrilling – perhaps even more alive, if that’s possible, to the potential of the show than they had been at their original opening just under two years before. 

Pick your own heartbreak, though. Come From Away was just one of many shows that closed, never opened, or were postponed again. Some were able to pivot, including the Next Stage Festival which did a wonderful job of presenting a fully digital slate of a wide variety of shows. Most of the new live season that should have begun in January, however, was either cancelled or postponed until a time in the future that felt even more indefinite than before, because having the rug pulled out from under us after having hope dangled, was harder to bear than just hunkering down stoically, the way we had before. 

Yes, there were some new digital performances to immerse ourselves in, in the interim,  but not as many as earlier in the pandemic as when it was the only option. Tossed back and forth between changing protocols, companies have understandably played it safe, hesitating to announce new dates, for fear of having to postpone or cancel, yet again. The result: a gulf.

When the rapidly increasing spread of the Omicron variant and the new lockdown closed down our performance spaces once again in January, all kinds of theatre-going plans for the early new year had to be tossed out. Luckily, resilient companies and artists didn’t stop creating; their new and growing ease with filming and streaming, is still providing us with many ways to enjoy good music theatre in spite of the pandemic, and to cheer our souls during  the coldest time of the year.

Silver linings

Among these bright spots is the opportunity to catch filmed versions of live shows we might otherwise not have seen. One of these is prolific Canadian composer Dean Burry’s Sweetheart, a one-woman musical about Canadian-born Hollywood star and brilliant business woman, Mary Pickford. Burry is probably best known for his operas, whether written for children like The Brothers Grimm, or telling Canadian stories such as the recent Dora Award-winning Shanawdithit, but he has also been a creator of musicals from the beginning of his career. 

I have known Burry since directing his opera for and about teenagers, Pandora’s Locker, at the Glenn Gould School back in 2008, so I reached out to him to find out more about this show. 

Last Sunday I made my way to Toronto’s West End in search of the new location of the Pia Bouman School of Ballet and Creative Movement, in order to get an insider’s glimpse of rehearsals for the school’s return to live performance with The Nutcracker. In a long, low, industrial building near Lansdowne and Bloor, I opened a door into a world of ballet: girls (and some boys) of all ages in tights and leotards, sweatshirts and leg warmers, waiting to rehearse, groups of parents intent on creating scenery or sewing and fitting costumes and, in the main studio, students and adult guests rehearsing the early scenes of Act One. As a fight director, I often work with professional dancers, but there is something incredibly moving about being in the midst of young dancers at work—particularly when they are as quietly and happily intent as this group.

Not being a “West Ender,” I knew of the Pia Bouman School but had never attended a performance or understood its importance to the community. Then, when I was looking to see which Nutcracker productions there might be in Toronto this year—other than the luscious James Kudelka version performed each Christmas by the National Ballet of Canada—a friend mentioned that she was involved with the Bouman School’s production and, in fact, was going to be joining the cast this year as “the Grandmother.” Tedde Moore, Dora Award-winning actor, teacher, and coach (who had grown up in the theatre as daughter of Mavor Moore, and granddaughter of Dora Mavor Moore), it turns out, had been involved with the school from the time her daughters were tiny, and her stories made me realize that the Pia Bouman School must be one of the best kept secrets in Toronto for those outside its immediate neighbourhood.

Tedde met Pia in the mid-1970s when Pia was hired to teach creative movement at one of Toronto’s first Montessori nursery schools, which Tedde’s children attended. In Tedde’s words, they “met, clicked, and have been good friends ever since.”

For lovers of musical theatre, there is something uniquely magical about the holiday season this year as the world of live performance starts coming back into its own, including all the usual holiday entertainments we had to forgo last year, while we safely stayed home. 

Nutcrackers and Scrooges

Live performances of The Nutcracker are returning, from the grand scale of the National Ballet of Canada’s perennial favourite at the Four Seasons Centre to the smaller-scale beloved production of the Pia Bouman School for Ballet and Creative Movement, with a legacy almost as long as the National Ballet’s. There is even a new entrant on the scene which straddles  the line between live and digital: Lighthouse Immersive’s Immersive Nutcracker is similar to their Van Gogh and  Klimt programs, enveloping an audience within four bare walls on which is created a projected world – in this case, a shortened 40-minute version of The Nutcracker, part ballet, and part animation, fuelled by Tchaikovsky’s iconic score. Audiences are free to roam and even dance along, which seemed to delight some of the children who were there when I was.

Another returning holiday tradition is the many and varied stage adaptations of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. I had the great treat of attending for the first time the opening performance of The Shaw Festival’s version, adapted, and originally directed, by artistic director Tim Carroll, and this year directed by (former assistant director) Molly Atkinson. What was revealed to us in the cozy intimate setting of the Royal George Theatre was an intrinsically theatrical but also surprisingly musical version of the beloved transformation story: confirmed miser and hater-of-all-things-Christmas, Ebeneezer Scrooge metamorphosing into a spirit of joyous generosity. The show opens with a group of very tuneful carollers who not only set the scene and get the story started but pop up throughout to punctuate the action and to round everything off with what would – in non-COVID-wary times – be a group singalong with the audience. 

There is a magical spirit of theatrical inventiveness in this production from the use of a front screen that resembles an outsize Advent calendar – with windows to be cleverly opened and even used as props – to one of the cleverest and most whimsical depictions of the three Christmas ghosts that I have ever seen.