Music Theatre

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. 

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.

On November 20, the Shaw Festival’s winter season hits its full stride, with the openings of both its holiday offerings: A Christmas Carol, and Irving Berlin’s full-scale musical extravaganza Holiday Inn.

In 2019, Holiday Inn was notable as the first musical to be programmed as part of the Shaw’s winter holiday season. It was also notable as the directing debut of one of Canada’s most versatile theatre artists: actor, playwright, teacher, and now director, Kate Hennig.  

The production was such a popular success that it was the natural choice to bring back this year with the same creative team, and many of the original cast, to celebrate the reopening of the theatres as well as the holiday season.

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.