Music Theatre

New Canadian plays, musicals and music theatre works are popping up everywhere across the country this season. Three shows coming up this spring caught my eye in particular for how they are using music to explore and highlight various facets  of our multicultural Canadian identity. 

Fall On Your Knees

In Toronto the world premiere of the theatrical adaptation of Fall on Your Knees, the internationally acclaimed 1996 novel by Canadian author and playwright Ann-Marie MacDonald, which I previewed in my previous column, has just opened to standing ovations at the Bluma Appel Theatre and will travel after an all-too-short Toronto run to Neptune Theatre in Halifax, the National Arts Centre in Ottawa and the Grand Theatre in London. 

One of the most exciting things about this new adaptation is how it uses music not just as an element of the production, nor even just as a character in the story, but as the essential material weaving together the many disparate elements of a multigenerational tale, compared by some watchers to the House of Atreus plays in classic Greek drama. 

Beginning in the early 20th century and ending in the 1960s, FoYK traces the emotional saga of the Piper family in Cape Breton Island, a location famously characterized by its Celtic heritage and lilting folk music. This is just the first note, as it were, in a kaleidoscope of musical styles. One of the first characters we meet, the eventual patriarch of the Piper clan, James Piper, is a young piano tuner whom we know from the novel has been taught piano by his mother as part of a strategy to keep him out of the coal mine. As he tunes the piano in the home of the Mahmoud family in Sydney, he meets and soon falls in love with their 13-year-old daughter, Materia. His musical theme will be early piano exercise phrases marked by the single plangent note of tuning, while hers will develop from traditional Lebanese vocals and dance music to the rollicking sound of the music hall where she will work later to help support the family. 

When their first daughter, Kathleen, shows an early aptitude for singing and is encouraged to study seriously, opera is introduced as a significant leitmotif that will grow in importance as the play progresses. Interwoven is a minor theme of religious music, the leitmotif for the middle sister, Mercedes, whose twisted religiosity is symbolically caught at one point by a disturbing plot placement of Ave Maria. An even more rebellious strand in the weave is made up of such World War One-era songs as Mademoiselle from Armentières and My Heart Belongs to Daddy sung by younger sister Frances in her Lebanese uncle’s speakeasy. Finally and notably in the second half of the six-hour show is the wonderfully smoky and contrasting exotic sound of the blues, sung by Janelle Cooper as Harlem star Sweet Jessie Hogan. 

In Part Two where the story focuses primarily on Kathleen’s sojourn studying opera in New York, the Harlem music scene is contrasted brilliantly with the strictly classical arias she sings in the studio – and yet, the richness of the interwoven opera and blues also comes to symbolise Kathleen’s growing artistry as her friendship with her accompanist Rose ripens into a deeper relationship. Samantha Hill as Kathleen has a clear classically trained voice which is a joy to listen to and a wonderful contrast to the jazzy richness of Janelle Cooper’s club turns. All the musicians, though usually hidden away upstage, do a superb job, easily trading instruments and contributing vocals – Maryem Toller’s vocals were a standout in Part One. 

One thing that I had expected from early rehearsal photos of the production and missed seeing onstage was a more experimental or expressionistic movement style – except in one instance when a line of uniformed soldiers tumbles up to, over and around the upright piano as Materia plays a song of the period, giving us an unforgettable image of James at war in the trenches of World War One. 

Under the symbolic giant piano strings strung above the stage from the flies to the wings like the sails of a ship, and under the careful music direction of Sean Mayes, music weaves together the acting and physical elements of this production making a whole that is deeper, richer, more evocative of the colours, depths, dark secrets and eventual redemption within the story of this family and all those who touch their lives. 

Check out the event page for Fall On Your Knees! In Toronto until February 5; Halifax February 10-March 5, Ottawa March 8-25, and London March 29-April 2.

RUBABOO

A second world premiere at the Grand Theatre in London, with the intriguing name of Rubaboo, explores and celebrates another facet of our Canadian mosaic, the Métis heritage of the prairies. Commissioned by the Grand from the well-known Métis actor, singer and activist, Andrea Menard, Rubaboo promises to be a delightful evening of song and story combined, according to the Manitoba-born Menard, into a truly theatrical whole that she prefers to term a “cabaret,” but a cabaret with a purpose. 

In a promotional video Menard says that when the Grand’s artistic director, Dennis Garnhum, asked her about possibly creating a show, she was not interested “unless I was using the platform to further reconciliation,” and that she “wanted to be somebody who was furthering education [about Indigenous people and their history] and expanding compassion.” While this sounds very serious the name of the cabaret indicates that the evening will also be a lot of fun. Derived from the Michif word for “leftovers stew” or “big pot” Rubaboo promises to be a feast of music and masterful storytelling with the sound of drums and guitar adding grace notes to stories and songs of reconciliation, unity, love, frustration and resilience, to “help people fall in love with the Métis people.”

Catch Rubaboo at the Grand Theatre from March 7-25.

RETOLD

From the East Coast to the Prairies and back east to Quebec...

Back in Toronto, also in March, the Musical Stage Company and Yonge Street Theatricals are joining forces for the second edition of Retold via Launch Pad, their musical development program that gives three teams of writers and composers in-depth support and mentoring while they create new 30-minute musicals. For the first edition of Retold in 2019 the new musicals were inspired by articles published in The Globe and Mail, and performed in that newspaper’s headquarters. This new edition is inspired by three short stories by lauded Canadian writer Mavis Gallant (1922-2014) and will be performed at the Toronto Reference Library. While much of her working life was spent abroad in Paris, Gallant is famous for her depiction of Acadian history and life in Quebec. One of the chosen stories, The Carrette Sisters, displays in particular what The New York Times called Gallant’s “Joycean evocations of a mundane haunting Montreal.”

All three shows will be directed by Kaylee Harwood and will feature a cast of four talented actor/singers: Eric Craig, Emily Lukasik, Tracy Michailidis and Starr Domingue. 

Retold March 21-26. Tickets are free but need to be booked ahead of time.

QUICK PICKS 

FEB 2-11, 7:30: The Magic of Assembly, Toronto Dance Theatre, Winchester Street Theatre. TDT Artistic Director Andrew Tay is making a strong imprint on the company, introducing new and raw influences to the repertoire, including this new creation by punk street dance artist Ashley “Colours” Perez and electronic music duo LAL who will play live. www.tdt.org/events/the-magic-of-assembly

FEB 4-11, 7:30: Okay, you can stop now, Theatre Passe Muraille. In an immersive landscape filled with newspapers, Shakeil Rollock’s new physical theatre piece explores the tangible impact of history and the news on the lives of four people navigating their relationship to privilege and power. www.passemuraille.ca

FEB 16-19, 7:30: Firewater Thunderbird Rising, Friday Creeations and Native Earth Performing Arts, Aki Sudio. A return engagement of Christine Friday’s Dora Award-nominated multi-disciplinary one-woman, contemporary dance show, deeply rooted in the spiritual beliefs and way of living of the Anishinabek. www.nativeearth.ca 

FEB 24-25 7:30: Les corps avalés. Compagnie Virginie Brunelle, Fleck Theatre, Harbourfront “Torque” series, The celebrated Quebec-based company presents a stunning exploration of power relations, inequality and social upheaval, performed to live classical music from the Molinari Quartet. www.harbourfrontcentre.com

Jennifer Parr is a Toronto-based director, dramaturge, fight director and acting coach, brought up from a young age on a rich mix of musicals, Shakespeare and new Canadian plays.

Ten years ago, I was inspired to adapt Fall on Your Knees as a piece of music-driven theatre,” says director Alisa Palmer. On January 20, at the Bluma Appel Theatre in Toronto, that initial seed of inspiration will have its first public performance as a fully fledged two-part epic piece of theatre. 

“History told with a thumping, complex narrative, a host of colourful characters and a great big bow to psychology” is how the Chicago Tribune described Fall on Your Knees, the multi-award winning 1996 novel by Canadian writer, playwright, and actor Ann-Marie Macdonald, that has been acclaimed around the world and translated into 23 languages.

When is a play with music just that, and at what point does it cross some threshold into becoming “music theatre?” This is a question I grapple with all the time but it came up prominently in a conversation about an eagerly anticipated show about to open, and then was brought into sharp relief by two other productions already happening, almost simultaneously, this fall in Toronto.

For the past six weeks I have been immersed, as stage manager, in the 19th-century world of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya – or rather, in a version of that world seen through a contemporary Canadian lens that illuminates a classic of the past and, in breaking it open, offers insights that apply equally to our own times. (The production is a new adaptation by award-winning Canadian actor Liisa Repo-Martell, bringing together a wonderful group of actors under the innovative and daring direction of Chris Abraham.) 

Meanwhile, next door in the same building (Crow’s Theatre in Toronto’s East End), a new theatrical concert The Shape of Home: Songs in Search of Al Purdy is continuing to develop – undertaking a similar journey of turning a modern lens on an icon of the past, in this case the “unofficial poet laureate of Canada,” Al Purdy. The modern lens, in this case, is overtly musical.

Spring

It is rare when a show exceeds my expectations and even more rare when many shows do. This spring, three shows blew me away with their – very different – strengths. 

Damn Yankees: my first reaction after seeing the opening-night performance of Damn Yankees at the Shaw Festival was a desire to tell all the cynics, who don’t see the value in remounting the slighter offerings of the Broadway musical canon, to make their way to Niagara-on-the-Lake and take in this show. Yes, this is a slight, rather oddball, musical that gives a Faustian twist to the American obsession with baseball by giving an older fan a deal with the devil to help his home team win. But in the expert hands of director Brian Hill, it is so much more. 

Right from the word go the spirit and heart of this production is right on the money. It could have been cheesy and over the top, but it is not. Hill clearly understands the material inside and out and along with his expert creative team sets exactly the right tone and style so that we are taken along the deliciously comic journey, and at the same time gain an increasing recognition of the simple heartfelt values – love, honesty, loyalty – that lie at the heart of the story. 

It seems that the resurgence of music theatre is for real this time. After so many short-lived restarts and sudden heartbreaking lockdowns, it is invigorating to finally have almost too many shows to see! Music theatre and dance are now back live in theatres and in the parks for a summer season packed with a wide variety of shows for audiences to choose from.

Dixon Road

Starting off the season with a city-wide bang is The Musical Stage Company’s Marquee Festival encompassing a number of initiatives all built around the central idea of “turning points” in people’s lives. The biggest project, and one that has been in development for several years, is the world premiere of the musical Dixon Road by Fatuma Adar, which will take its first bows in the  High Park Amphitheatre (in association with Canadian Stage) June 1-19. Originally commissioned by The Musical Stage Company with funding from The Aubrey & Marla Dan Fund for New Musicals and developed as part of Obsidian Theatre’s Playwrights Unit, Dixon Road is a deeply personal story for its creator and one that many other children of immigrant parents will identify with. 

Dixon Road tells the story of a Somali family who fled the civil war in their homeland in the 1990s to find a new home in Canada, specifically in the neighbourhood around Pearson Airport near Dixon Road and Kipling Avenue now known as Little Mogadishu. Central to the musical is the dynamic between the father learning to navigate his new world and create a new identity for himself while his daughter – now growing up in Canada – starts to have dreams of finding new opportunities of her own. Adar based the book on her own experiences living on Dixon Road. She has also written the score (both music and lyrics) drawing on music that was popular in her community growing up, including R & B, hip-hop, contemporary musical theatre and traditional Somali melodies. I am excited to see Dixon Road and hope that this is just the beginning of an outpouring of new shows by new storytellers. 

I believe that theatre is at its most exciting when it is taking chances and pushing at the walls that define genre. Even if the risks taken don’t pay off 100%. The world premiere of Orphan Song by Canadian playwright Sean Dixon at Tarragon Theatre is a case in point. Orphan Song sits in an imagined prehistory (40, 027 BCE) where a Homo sapiens couple, Mo and Gorse, take in a Neanderthal child and embark on a journey filled with danger, unexpected mayhem, and discovery.  

Stories set in prehistoric times are notoriously difficult to pull off without invoking nervous laughter. On opening night there was an initial hesitation from the audience in accepting the simplified, stilted, language of these early human characters, and yet this hesitation dissipated in the face of the absolute conviction of the actors who give themselves wholeheartedly to the simplicity of diction and wide brush strokes of communication necessary. Sophie Goulet’s performance as Mo was superbly grounded, as was the magical work of puppet master Kaitlin Morrow, not only as the Neanderthal child Chicky, but as the creator of the stunning puppets and master teacher of the puppetry technique in the show: the excellent team of puppeteers brings compellingly to life not only the beguiling Neanderthals, but a wide range of wildlife from the small and unthreatening hedgehog to the terrifying hyenas and more.

Live theatre is back and breaking down the walls of convention in every direction. George F. Walker’s Orphans of the Czar at Crow’s Theatre is an uncannily apt combination of an iconic Canadian voice and the state of Russia just before the revolution, bringing new insights from that time that apply to ours through strong performances, inspired in some cases with a physical theatre/clown style. Over at Tarragon Theatre, Sean Dixon’s new prehistoric fable of family, adoption and the communication between species, Orphan Song, draws on the twin disciplines of magical puppetry and music as language to share important universal truths – and the season is just getting started. 

One of the things I enjoy most about covering this Music Theatre beat is how much territory is encompassed in that title. From the most classic of classical ballet in the transcendent performances by Harrison James and Heather Ogden as Prince Florimund and Princess Aurora in Nureyev’s version of The Sleeping Beauty for The National Ballet of Canada’s recent revival in March, to traditional Broadway-style musicals such as those now in previews at the Shaw Festival (Damn Yankees) and the Stratford Festival (Chicago) – and from traditional opera to experimental amalgamations of unlikely elements that somehow cohere to make something that unmistakably fits the category. This spring experimental music theatre is popping up everywhere and in widely varying formats: interestingly, the three very different shows that I look at here, choose to explore very dark themes, using a tool kit in which music is an essential, integral, ingredient.

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.