Stagecraft
Post #3, 24 March 2022: Roy Orbison, Malcom Black, Patrick Clark, Rocket Rombough, Serge Fiori, David Ferry, Craig Russell, Ed Bickert, Yves Montand, John Wood, René Lévesque
Roy Orbison. Singer. Between his high period in the sixties and resurgence with the Traveling Wilburys, Roy Orbison played the 700-seat Playhouse. In 1976, he seemed perfectly at ease recycling old hits with his competent band. They had authentic rock energy, projected through two Shure Vocal Master speaker columns. That middling gear pegged this act low in the current pop music hierarchy. We, the crew, some of us musicians, knew about sound equipment.
Absorbed by backgammon in the Green Room, I barely noticed Roy arrive from the hotel in costume, opaque shades under the coiffed black bouffe. He sat beside me on the leather sofa methodically perusing a stack of girly magazines like a financier inspecting leaves of a prospectus. That was distracting—the game of backgammon, as I recall from those days, required momentum; concentration was all. Still, he conversed neither with me nor anyone else, not even his musicians.
At the five-minute call I scaled steps and ladders, head ducking steel roof trusses to reach the follow-spot booth. I made the white suit shine and its sequins glitter as the faded star gazed over his faithful, that sure voice ascending to its signature falsetto. Perhaps the hall was fuller than I remember, but the truth was he was soldiering through a low period. A decade later, he’d rise again for one last great run. (January 2009, Ottawa.)
Malcolm Black. Theatre Director. Succeeding Walter Learning, the gregarious Newfoundlander who’d built up Theatre New Brunswick in its first heady decade, was Malcolm Black, a pleasant, drily humorous man of fifty who’d wafted downwards from London’s Old Vic to our humble stage, arriving in the same season as Roy Orbison. Moving to Canada twenty years earlier likely had been a career lurch—in 1956 there was hardly a Canadian professional theatre to speak of. For the same reason, it was an extraordinary pioneer opportunity.
Sojourning across this vast country had produced in Malcolm an amicable resignation to its flinty truth: Canadian regional theatres’ box offices must not be burdened by the avant-garde. Actors liked him, and the company had a positive vibe under his leadership. Once, on tour, we stood together as a truly puzzled audience in the pulp mill town of Dalhousie N.B. filed from the auditorium having seen his exceptionally good Waiting for Godot, featuring R.H. Thomson and Gerry Parks. With real anguish, Malcolm murmured: “they know not what they do.”
A creditable book on directing had coincided with his stint at a university, and a professorial Malcolm surfaced from time to time. Once he explained to me why I’d never be an actor. (I didn’t want to be actor.)
“You lack that innate self-regard that tells you exactly what you’re projecting, at any distance, from any angle.” (17 February 2018.)
Patrick Clark. Properties Master. Labouring long into the night under TNB’s Properties Master Patrick Clark, he’d preside with Wildean repartee over the large worktable where we’d cut fabric and glue on appliqué.
“Agnéa,” he addressed the soft-spoken young man who’d adopted that fancy moniker. “You are Pre-Raphaelite.”
Self-identifying as “Late Edwardian,” which was plausible, he continued around his arc of helpers associating each of us to our historical period. Of me he said, “you are pure Renaissance,” though in a way that made its glories seem rather too innocent, if not naïve. (13 June 2016, Ottawa.)
Robert “Rocket” Rombough. Carpenter. Rocket’s finger sheared off in the table saw. Barry Eldridge sifts it from the shavings and ices the stub. I’m shaky calling the ambulance. (n.d., 1978, Fredericton.)
... Catalyst Theatre’s Vigilantes at the NAC last night; my thoughts stray back to NDWT’s production of James Reaney’s Donnelly Trilogy that toured to Theatre New Brunswick from Toronto in 1975. At fifteen, I was no judge of masterpieces, but this was a folk masterpiece. Later I’d emulate its aesthetic at school in performance projects with Ernest Bauer. When Rocket left NDWT to become TNB’s carpenter he still had that aura about him: minimalist, fluid, earthy, forceful.
Reaney’s genius was to mainline the nineteenth-century upper-Canadian settler mentalité directly into the Anglo-Canadian cultural nationalism of the 1970s. Later readings in Canadian social history explained how the Donnelly’s tragedy was symptomatic of tightening land availability in southern Ontario.
Jonathan Christenson’s Edmonton production seen last night was superficial and suburban compared to Reaney’s hard-knuckled poetic; more in tune with ‘Glee’ and music videos. Referring to action occurring “almost two centuries ago,” it betrayed a shaky grasp of what Eric Hobsbawm called “the long century.”
Keith Turnbull’s original NDWT direction flowed from Reaney’s specification of objects such as hand tools and ladders. These became evocative in the spare staging. It would be impossible now to recreate NDWT’s intense ‘structure of feeling’ fusing rural Ontario of the 1860s with the ‘back-to-the-land ethos’ of the mid-1970s. That once-vital conjuncture now seems as remote as Antiquity. (6 April 2017, Ottawa.)
Serge Fiori. Musician. Listening to Daniel Lanois, it’s one a.m., tidying up after a dinner. Pondering. Thinking about Harmonium’s Cinquième saison, remembering their concert in Fredericton. My eyes and ears widened, I recall walking out into the cool night—those downtown Fredericton nights, all hushed streets and still trees—feeling alive, joy rushing in behind my eyes. Serge Fiori bathed in light, the Mellotron shushing its heavy string sound, all in front of a matted colourful backdrop. (19 June 1993, Ottawa.)
...In 1977 Quebec’s super-group Harmonium swept into the Playhouse like a musical tall ship out of the port of Montreal. With serene assuredness, their cultural, aesthetic and generational confidence had first thrilled my Acadian friends and then me. It masked a fragility underlying their beautiful project. We couldn’t know it then, but Harmonium would become a short-running prototype for more durable Québecois acts to follow. Having virtually no music infrastructure or artistic guidance in the Maritimes, we could only be impressed by their coherent and deliberate evolution to artistic maturity.
By this I refer not only to compositions that are now canonical and Fiori’s signature voice, but the ambitious scale of the work, its impeccable organization, the acoustic opening set, the scenography. When the textured drop flew out to reveal the electric band on risers, Serge swapped his perfectly-tuned twelve-string for a white Stratocaster.
The set-up had passed smoothly. The artists were low-key during their brief sound check. During the dinner break I climbed on the riser to examine the mysterious whirring Mellotron, testing a few keys. That night, I sat with Jean-Guy, Bill and other francophone friends on the main floor close to the stage. I can’t recall if Fiori and Monique Fauteux opened with “Dans le noir,” their haunting play of male and female voices, written on tour as an overture to orient audiences to L’heptade’s atmospherics. (That never-released song—surely it would have been a hit—surfaced only recently in a recording taken directly off the sound console during their NAC date.)
Michel Normandeau and Fiori had chemistry, leaning into their mics, faces emerging from long strands of hair. Even following Normandeau’s departure from the group, the authority of their song-writing retained its perfect synchrony. Neil Chotem’s orchestrated passages, perhaps mannered on the discs, were magical in performance. One felt privileged to be part of this rare cultural phenomenon that grasped the élan of its times. (1 October 2019, Fredericton.)
David Ferry, Actor. Missing perfect sailing days, I closeted myself in TNB’s audio booth to create the sound design for the 1979 production of The Subject Was Roses. That summer one of my female friends had entered into what would prove to be a difficult relationship. Marc was a sour lad with “a face eleven miles long” (to quote the singing-comedian Jimmy Durante) who I’d recruited for occasional stagehand work. He was older than my insecure nineteen years and (marginally) more worldly. I was susceptible to his superciliousness.
During one pre-show, as we played backgammon in the green room, the program sound carried my soundtrack: the Andrews Sisters, Satchmo, and other 1940s highlights. Then came Jimmy Durante’s hoarse Lower-East-Side brogue... for its hawd, you will find, to be narrow of mind, if yowa young at hawt.... Shaking the dice, Marc sniggered at how ridiculously uncool that old-time singer was, razzing me for including him.
Having spent hours in CBC’s library absorbing the wartime decade’s popular music zeitgeist, I was rattled, wondering if I’d misjudged. Unfortunately, Tim Bond, our director, had already departed. Uneasily, I took it on myself to edit Jimmy off the pre-show reel. The next night, just before curtain, the usually-sunny David Ferry approached me with a wounded frown. We’d worked together before; he’d join us for ad-hoc road hockey in the parking-lot behind the theatre. Then in his twenties, he’d earned high praise for his “Timmy” in Bond’s flawless production.
Lithe, soft in manner, he inquired what had happened to Durante? In his dressing room before every show he’d sing along with Jimmy to ease into character. Flushing with embarrassment, I promised to restore Young at Heart, silently vowing to be less easily deterred in aesthetic judgements. (n.d. ca. 2010.)
Craig Russell. Impersonator. March 1979, Craig Russell comes to town. I’ve emerged from the stage crew to be its youthful chief. His flamboyant trans stage show is as outrageous as our bible-fearing river city can bear. The pick-up orchestra, composed of spiffily uniformed members of the Royal Canadian Regiment Band, is the target of much risqué behaviour from the Diva. Bassist Donny Gorman, an acquaintance of mine, takes it all in stride.
A crisis before the second show: one of Craig’s breasts is misplaced. A search party crosses the street to his suite in the Lord Beaverbrook Hotel.
At the rehearsal he’d been louche, mockingly cruising boys in the band, his powder box containing just one item, a mickey of Southern Comfort. At the end of the second show he faints, and the bodyguard bears him aloft through the audience. It’s a blast; only later I realize it isn’t really an act—the self-destruction is entirely real, as is Craig’s bravery. The shows are raucous, confrontational. To us he’s gentle and kind. (n.d. 2002, Fredericton.)
Ed Bickert. Jazz Musician. Ed’s self-deprecating guitar style was not exactly mellow, the lean and craggy jazzman could be as energetic as a chart required. Poised in his chair, he’d roll the treble down on his trademark Telecaster. Last night I pulled out a vinyl album of Ed and Rob McConnell recorded from 1982 to 1984 in Toronto and played it over dinner. There is something agreeable in the mutuality of this duo’s readings of lesser-known standards. I don’t remember acquiring the disc, but I met Ed and Rob in various situations over the years, starting with the jazz workshop at UNB held for a few summers in the late 1970s. Clarinettist and bandleader Phil Nimmons was the main organizer and teacher. Among the group, including Moe Koffman, Guido Basso, Bernie Senensky and others, Ed was the quiet one, continuously smoking and observing. Later, I’d see him at the Cock and Lion in the Chateau Laurier playing with jazz greats during the last years of the club circuit. (17 February 2018.)
Yves Montand. Actor, Singer. Having left Fredericton to join the National Arts Centre’s Theatre Department in Ottawa, I take a few minutes aside in the dark of the Opera hall to watch stagehands rolling the cherry-picker across the apron as a series of tight specials are focused. Remarkably, Yves Montand is personally directing the lighting for his show tonight. Well-built, looking strong even at a mature age, he’s business-like and precise about the shutter-cuts. I’m happy to be on deck briefly with this legendary actor, though there’s no opportunity to address him. The show is Sinatra-like, but with more song-and-dance; he’s a much better singer than I expected. (undated, 1981 Ottawa.)
John Wood. Theatre. Director. John Wood resurfaced last year at NAC theatre opening nights. I’d not seen him since he left Ottawa in the mid-1980s and he was so mild and warm compared to my memory. Artistic Director of English Theatre when I first worked under him on John Gray’s Rock and Roll in March 1981, Wood’s autocratic project for the English half of a national theatre had stalled not for lack of resources but rather from the climate of fear he’d created. (His erstwhile superior, the storied veteran Jean Gascon, by then sat isolated in an adjacent office, in reality superseded by Wood and his French Theatre counterpart, the Belgian Jean Herbiet.)
The best of his tenure derived from actors’ workshops occurring at the margins. These marked an as-yet unmatched creative ferment in Ottawa’s theatre history, but only rarely did they make the main stages. There, a company photo-call could take two hours as the fastidious Wood positioned us, the hundred-strong cast and crew, one by one in a studied tableau.
He’d imported an Alexander Technique specialist from New York City, a diminutive lady easily identified at the airport by spotting her caged parrot. I escorted her to Wood’s Centretown house. An ‘Actors’ Quiet Room’ was created near the two main rehearsal rooms for her to produce her magic. (Later that room was repurposed as my opera production office.) Sadly, most young actors who she succeeded in relaxing were immediately re-terrorized crossing the threshold of Wood’s rehearsal hall.
Paul Hanna, a former TNB colleague and John’s assistant, once described being chastised for excessive pencil noise during auditions. That was the Wood Paradox: the man could master a grand theatrical canvas, but the same uncompromising quality in him drained creative oxygen.
A theatre is a democracy in which the strongest man rules. That old saw needed a many-sided re-think at the NAC (and perhaps still needs a rethink in Ottawa, generally).
His Richard III, designed by Robin Fraser Paye on a massive ungainly raked stage, was rehearsed in suffocating tension. Neil Munro exploited it brilliantly in the title role. That tension seized the entire company, itself doomed by impending budget cuts, not to survive to the end of the decade. (January 2009, Ottawa.)
René Lévesque. Politician. Up early to the Maison du citoyen in Hull for Théatre du midi, overseeing sets and lighting for the NAC’s adaptation of Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style. On arrival, I find myself face-to-face with René Lévesque between the inner and outer entrance doors; we’re trapped together in the vestibule for a few minutes as scenic elements are muscled into the council room. (November 1981, Hull, Québec.)
Anxious to depart, Quebec’s Premier glances at his watch and grimaces, then shyly puffs his cigarette. Apologizing for the delay, I want to explain as best I can Queneau’s ‘exercises in style,’ how one short episode is re-told ninety-nine times, each with a new emphasis. As we watch the loaders at work, I imagine stylistic variations describing our parenthetical encounter: maladroit (foregrounding the grunting stagehands); olfactif (scenting the tobacco smoke); visuel (describing the Art Nouveau sets re-creating Guimard’s famous Paris Metro entrances); certainly, en Anglicismes....
Consistent with Queneau’s basic scenario, there’s a story kernel in my exchange with M. Lévesque; I don’t inquire why he’s here at City Hall alone without handlers. Indeed, he’s as down-to-earth as one might imagine, but clearly preoccupied. Could this be the very November morning when, arriving late to the premiers’ breakfast, he’ll learn he’s been politically skewered during ‘the night of the long knives’? Whatever the exact circumstance I won’t forget that bemused smile as we waited together for theatre-of-the-absurd to infiltrate Hull’s council chamber. (21 May 2019, Quebec City.)
I remember the TNB production of Waiting for Godot that you mention. It astounded and shocked me, bowled me over. I have never had a production of the play match it in impact; all have seemed second best at best. Lucky's dance was horrifying. I still can easily picture him him lifting his arms, the rags hanging down in shreds. I felt I had learned what the world would look like after nuclear Armageddon.
I enjoyed these immensely—so succinctly but vividly Written. I have wondered for years what in Orbison ‘s voice delighted me. Ditto the youngster in The Animals singing The House Of the Rising Sun. What did they have in common. Why do I like Pissarro more than Monet? Mysteries. So many of these vignettes brought back memories.