The score of Merrily We Roll Along is considered one of Stephen Sondheim's best – and yet when the show debuted on Broadway in 1981, it was a notorious flop, lasting for only 16 performances. There were probably several reasons why the show didn't work, but most importantly in the opinion of most critics and scholars was the decision of Sondheim and director Hal Prince to cast very young performers, performers too young to have the experience and skills to play characters who start in their 40s and finish in their early 20s. For Merrily (and the original play of the same name by earlier Broadway legends Moss Hart and George Kaufman, on which it is based) begins at the end of the story of three showbiz friends, disillusioned in their financial success, and goes back in time 20 years by stages to the moment when they started off in New York, idealistically full of hopes of dreams.

Revivals, from concerts to full productions, have usually reversed the original casting scheme,  casting instead older performers of the right age for the beginning of the show who are able to navigate the journey back to their youthful selves. Toronto Musical Concerts did the same in their concert staging at the Al Green Theatre on October 17, and it works. Even with the performers using scores on music stands with only limited staging and bits of choreography, the show comes alive. The brilliant witty book by George Furth (who had earlier collaborated with Sondheim on the hit Company), interwoven with Sondheim's music and lyrics, combines cynical comedy with trenchant social observation as well as the ins and outs of both romantic love and the love between great friends.

Michael De Rose as Franklin Shepard stood out with his strong rich voice and presence. Ryan Kelly was appealing as his writing partner Charley Kringas, with his comic timing and great ability to 'youthen' over the course of the play. Lizzie Kurtz as Mary Flynn, the third of the central trio, captures the warm but acerbic Dorothy-Parker-meets-Carrie-Fisher quality of the girl in the trio and her journey from alcoholic disillusionment spiced with unrequited love for Frank back to excited, unblemished hope and ambition.

The concert, an Equity collective, was a bit rough on the opening night with the sound not balanced until partway through, and performers not always certain how best to position themselves to be amplified by the microphones positioned in front and overhead. The petite Lana Carillo as Gussie, Franklin's Broadway star wife, was often particularly hard to hear. On the other hand, the energy and commitment of the company was unquestioned and by the second half all was coming together, with songs such as “Old Friends,” “Franklin Shepard, Inc,” and “Opening Doors” sounding particularly strong.

The wonderful 2016 documentary about the original production of Merrily We Roll Along—called Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened—left me hoping to see a new production of the full show in order to explore its full potential. This TMC concert confirm the quality of the book and score and that the backward story arc is not only intriguing but an effective storytelling technique. In doing so, it whets the appetite even more for a full production of this brilliant but rarely seen musical.

Toronto Musical Concerts presented Merrily We Roll Along in concert on October 17 and 18, at the Al Green Theatre, Toronto.

Toronto-based “lifelong theatre person” Jennifer (Jenny) Parr works as a director, fight director, stage manager and coach, and is equally crazy about movies and musicals.

There is almost nothing more exciting for a lover of musicals than to be at the birth of a new show, and on the afternoon of Monday, October 15 at Toronto’s CAA Theatre, I was witness to the first public steps of not just one but four new musicals currently in development at the Canadian Musical Theatre Project (CMTP) at Sheridan College.

The October 15 performance was the third of three days of CMTP's Festival of New Musicals, a relatively recent event created to showcase not only new shows in development but also the phenomenally talented graduating students of Sheridan College's justly famed Musical Theatre Performance program.

The brainchild of producing artistic director Michael Rubinoff, the CMTP is an international incubator for the development of new musicals (launched in 2011) – and also a brilliant training ground for Sheridan's student performers, where they learn to engage with living composer/librettist teams on new works in the earliest stages of creation. The combined energy and dedication of all the artists involved was palpable in the theatre on the 15th, as was the interest and excitement of the audience.

For about three and a half hours we were treated to the (shortened) first acts of four completely different musicals, each unique in story, theme, musical style and directorial approach. Directorial approach? Yes – for one of the unexpected delights of the afternoon was the depth and quality of what we were seeing. While the performance had been advertised as a “staged reading,” it proved to be on the top end of that definition: each piece had been clearly rehearsed in depth and was given a polished, choreographed presentation, so that we were seeing both the material and the performers at their highest potential, even though the performers had their scores on music stands throughout.

Shared with us in order of what seemed to be readiness for production, the afternoon began with Erik With a K by Paul Sportelli and Jay Turvey, a lightweight, fun and spoofy review of the life of composer Erik Satie in bohemian, fin de siècle Paris, built around the theme of Life vs. Art.

Stars of Mars, a stand-up comedy meets The Martian meets sci-fi coming-of-age story, followed, with a book by popular comedian Ashley Botting and young composer Daniel Abrahamson. Brought together by Michael Rubinoff, their talents matched up to create a fast-paced, fun look at a potential first colony on Mars that the audience really enjoyed.

With the third piece, In Real Life by Nick Green and Kevin Wong, we moved into weightier material. Set in a dystopian future owing some inspiration to films such as The Matrix and Logan's Run, In Real Life centred around a young man, entrenched in a rigid computer-controlled study environment, who is shaken out of his routine with the news that his mother has died and left him a video message. The music and book worked seamlessly together to tell this engrossing story, and Ali Joy Richardson’s direction/staging tellingly contrasted the rigidity of the computerized study world with the freedom the hero finds in the dark web as he tries to unravel the meaning of his mother's message. 

Last on the program, Kelly V. Kelly, based on the true story of a mother in 1915 who had her daughter arrested for doing too much tango dancing, would seem on the surface to be an absurdist comedy but proved to be something else altogether: an engrossing mother/daughter battle with emotions swirling around the stage in the path of the tango dancers, yet not without its own share of comedy along with the drama and romance.

With a book by well-known actor Sara Farb and music and lyrics by the prolific Britta Johnson, Kelly V. Kelly is the third of three musicals by Johnson being developed as part of The Musical Stage Company's Crescendo Program (the first two were Life After and Dr. SIlver: A Celebration of Life). Beautifully staged by expert director Robert McQueen, this excerpt left me wanting to hear more.

All four shows are full of potential, as are the young performers who brought them to life. I look forward to seeing them all as they go out into the world and develop further – and for anyone who enjoys musicals, I highly recommend this festival as something to watch for in future seasons.

The Canadian Musical Theatre Project (CMTP), based at Sheridan College, presented its Festival of New Musicals from October 13 to 15, at the CAA Theatre, Toronto.

Toronto-based “lifelong theatre person” Jennifer (Jenny) Parr works as a director, fight director, stage manager and coach, and is equally crazy about movies and musicals. 

The fact of Indigenous performers taking over such a site of British colonial culture as Toronto’s Fort York has a wonderful power to it. Last summer (2017), Red Sky Performance debuted their magical exploration of the Anishinaabe “seven fires” legends, Miigis, on the Fort York grounds, and the triple juxtaposition of nature, the colonial military buildings, and the 21st-century urban skyline gave the piece an extra resonance that pulsed through the audience.

Jumblies Theatre’s Talking Treaties Spectacle, the latest version of which played at Fort York from October 4 to 7, is a community-oriented theatrical project that uses the Fort York setting as a launching pad for a relaxed exploration of the so-called “Toronto Purchase” and related treaties, largely from the point of view of the first people to live in this area. In Jumblies' hands, the project is an engine for community engagement in our history – from the urban neighbourhood members who take part alongside the organizing professional artists, to the core company of young Indigenous performers who take on most of the roles, to the larger community represented by the audience who come to experience the spectacle. For this is not so much a “show” as an event; a mostly light-hearted way to engage with ideas and historical facts that should be much better known about the founding treaties of our city and country.

While not a musical, music does play a part in the bookending of the event, with songs sung by a volunteer community choir anchored by one professional singer and several musicians, and with the live music (backed up with recorded elements) that carries the audience from spot to spot around the Fort as the spectacle unfolds. As this project continues to grow, it would be nice to see the role of music being expanded or made a bigger, bolder element of the whole.

The young Indigenous performers who took on most of the roles, though all of varying levels of experience, were clearly engaged in their passion and enthusiasm for the project. Jill Carter and Jesse Wabegijig, in the roles of Mohawk powerhouse Molly Brant and her spouse Governor William Johnson, were the strongest actors, though not appearing substantially until about halfway through, when they gave us the most satisfying chunk of history in an extended scene  of Johnson and Brant’s preparations for the great gathering of 24 First Nations for the signing of the Treaty of Niagara in 1764.

Part of the fun of the event was being tossed between snippets of historical events and Indigenous reaction to those events, all of it with an irreverent symbolic simplicity – the “purchase price” for Toronto including brass kettles, mirrors, lace hats, and bottles of rum being tossed into a pile, for example, or later, the trade price in number of beavers for various settler products seen tangibly as large stuffed beavers merrily tossed onto the Fort York green.

Was this really a play or musical? No, but it was, as promised by Jumblies, a spectacle – and a fun way to literally walk through some of our local and national history. Rather than a professional “show”, this was a lighthearted community event that performed an important role in bringing history to life in our current consciousness, with a great deal of energy and enthusiasm.

Jumblies Theatre’s Talking Treaties Spectacle was presented from October 4 to 7 at Fort York, Toronto.

Toronto-based “lifelong theatre person” Jennifer (Jenny) Parr works as a director, fight director, stage manager and coach, and is equally crazy about movies and musicals.

The Canadian Music Centre has served as a curator, presenter and preserver of Canadian musical culture for over 50 years. With a library containing thousands of works by hundreds of composers and an online streaming service with over 14,000 unique recordings, the CMC ensures that older material remains available to performers and audiences and that new works live beyond their premieres.

Besides being an archive for print and recorded music, the Ontario CMC office also presents their own concert series each year, held in their event space on St. Joseph St., Toronto. Curated in 2018/19 by Nick Storring in association with Riparian Acoustics, these concerts take place once a month and feature Canadian performers and composers, presented within the larger context of contemporary music. On Wednesday, October 3, the CMC presented cellist Elinor Frey in a concert of new music for the Baroque cello, each piece on the program commissioned for or by Frey herself. As a frequent performer on both the Baroque and modern cello, Frey brings a wide range of experience and expertise to her interpretations, whether the strings are made of gut or metal.

It is unfortunate that, within much of classical music, the idea of ‘new music’ is still heavily linked with the 20th-century avant-garde, often carrying connotations of being unappealing or intimidating for the inexperienced listener. Contrary to such misconceptions, Frey’s program was varied and exploratory without sounding overly noisy or abstract; in fact, each piece was a recognizable extrapolation of fundamental musical elements. Led by thoughtful and insightful program notes (each composer wrote a paragraph explaining the origin and concept of their work), we could see and hear that some pieces incorporated elements of minimalism, basing an entire movement on a small idea or theme, while others explored the Baroque cello’s warm tone and natural resonance, using both purely-tuned and microtonal intervals to create unique harmonic effects.

The pieces on the program often featured juxtapositions of harmonic and melodic fragments. Indeed, this focus on tunefulness and harmonic sonorities was reflected in the composers’ notes, with remarks such as “...a melody in search of its harmony” (Linda Catlin Smith’s Ricercar), “a continuo for some absent, slow melody” (Isaiah Ceccarelli’s With concord of sweet sounds), or “bell-like incantations of chords” (Ken Ueno’s Chimera) serving to illustrate each composer’s approach to reordering melody, harmony and rhythm. David Jaeger’s Constable’s Clouds, inspired by 19th-century painter John Constable’s strikingly modern cloud studies, was perhaps the most thrilling work of the evening, using rapid, virtuoso melodic passages and both bowed and pizzicato chords to reflect Constable’s kinetic paintings through sound.

Frey was also required to use extended playing techniques throughout the program, such as col legno tratto: bowing with the wood of the bow, producing a sound that is pitched but very soft, with an overlay of white noise. Both Scott Godin’s Guided by Voices and Lisa Streich’s Minerva, perhaps the most experimental work on the program, utilized a variety of such techniques; Minerva also had Frey softly singing at times, which highlighted certain notes within the harmonic series. Two works required the cello to be retuned (known as scordatura) in varied and, in the case of Ken Ueno’s Chimera, almost impossible ways. Frey described this particular retuning as something that, given the laws of physics and the tension of the string, should not be sustainable; it added an element of risk to the program, knowing that the tightly-wound gut could break at any moment.

Frey’s recital demonstrated that contemporary composers are using music’s essential components in original ways, reorganizing melodic, harmonic and rhythmic elements to create works that are both appealing and new. Whether exploiting the Baroque cello’s natural resonance, using scordatura to alter its acoustic properties, or simply allowing the performer’s virtuosity to shine through, this concert displayed a wide variety of approaches to a historical instrument that many consider suitable only for old music.

Frey proved that the Baroque cello can do so much more than we often require of it. In doing so, she also demonstrated that today’s composers are writing superb musical material, capable of confronting – and surpassing – our expectations.

The Canadian Music Centre presented “Elinor Frey – New Music for Baroque Cello” on Wednesday, October 3, at the CMC Ontario Region space on St. Joseph St., Toronto.

Matthew Whitfield is a Toronto-based harpsichordist and organist.