It’s finally time to see what the GCTC can do inside its new home
It’s a simple thing to say: There is a magic to beginnings, an insistent tug of the spirit like a great inrushing of breath. It fills you to think about witnessing things growing, changing, evolving, and that the immediate present translates into history the moment you blink.
In 1982 the Great Canadian Theatre Company snatched up some money and moved their small company into a converted garage out on Preston Street. Since that day, the low-slung, cramped, old building has become a locus for the theatre community, a point of origin and crystallization for the energies of the stage. And that process is happening again out at the new Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre in Westboro.
The new building is a state-of-the-art ecological marvel whose exterior positively oozes that sort of glass and steel modernity we’ve grown so enamoured of – long clean lines and a comfortingly mechanical feel, like something detached from a German suburb but washed ashore in the rapidly gentrifying part of Westboro.
It also sports the perfect skeleton for a new theatrical body that unveils its first show in the new space: The Man From the Capital.
The Man From the Capital is an adaptation of a Nikolai Gogol short story, one of those wonderful, universal tales of comic cynicism and corruption so scrupulously perfected in the tradition of Russian writers – a whole universe of self-deception and moral emptiness traced out in the claustrophobic microcosm of small-town life. But as musical director and actor John Millard points out, “the play is located so much inside its own world that you become drawn into a sympathetic understanding of it.” For Millard, this show is an exercise in how music can elevate the narrative, creating a “bubble of levity” that helps transmit the underlying humour of the show. Director Jennifer Brewin muses, “It’s more a morality play than anything else. None of the characters are really virtuous, and everybody seems to get their just deserts in the end,” she smiles winningly. “It’s kind of a shaggy dog story.”
Brewin assembled much of the cast and musical talent from a previously successful run of this show with Caravan Theatre, and restaged the formerly outdoor production in this new space. The challenges were not insignificant, explain Brewin and Millard. Where once the score used to float through the air from behind the scenes, now the band is present on stage. And while instruments and voices find a different resonance indoors, the production team is confident in the acoustic perfection of this new space, and in the new creation.
The new staging also allows them the freedom of a larger, more diverse cast. Nancy Oakley, the general manager, tells me this show has “the largest company, and requires a 40 per cent increase in production expenses over comparable large-scale shows to date, such as The Oxford Roof Climber’s Rebellion and No Great Mischief.” The production draws most of its talent from the local well too. The cast is headed up by Ottawa veterans like Todd Duckworth, Paul Rainville, Bev Wolfe, Sarah McVie, Pierre Brault and recent Ottawa University graduate Constant Bernard, who many say is at the start of an extremely promising career.
But to create a community requires more than just generating jobs – especially in the arts, where a community often exists in a tight, almost cannibalistic circle. It requires seeding and nourishing a generation of artists to follow, or even simply creating a symbiotic audience. In light of this, the GCTC cast six Ottawa University theatre students in swing and chorus roles. While the students gain the benefit of academic credits counted towards their degrees, more importantly they profit from the immeasurable benefit of being part of a professional show.
XPress sat down with the six students involved: Maxime Brie, Anthony Biggs, David daCosta, Greg Delmage, Bryony Etherington and Heather-Claire Nortey. They’re a young, engaged and attractive group of actors caught somewhere between the naiveté and enthusiasm of youth and the sober realizations of life in a difficult profession. Unsure of their role, unsure of their future, they are wholly grateful and excited to have been taken under the wing of the play’s professional actors. The rehearsals have been rigorous, the show as demanding on them as on the established thespians. But more than that, the atmosphere – the everyday aspects of working with professionals – is sinking in. “I’ve built up my skills with this research,” Nortey explains. “What we are doing is colouring our world.”
Fall is a season of beginnings, the start of a beautiful gasp of colour before the serene silence of winter. It’s quite a dramatic foil in which to belt on a long coat and come witness history.
As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – Oct 11, 2007
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/stage/stage.aspx?iIDArticle=13191
