PREVIEW
MARG SZKALUBA (PISSY'S WIFE)
Mighty Pacer Productions
April 12 to 21
Beat Niq Jazz and Social Club
When director Christopher Cinnamon embarked on a production of Marg Szkaluba (Pissy’s Wife) at the Edmonton Fringe Festival in 1999, it almost didn’t make it to the stage. He couldn’t find a musician he thought was capable of carrying it off, and he refused to compromise.
"There was one point where I just didn’t think it was going to fly, because you can’t have somebody with just a basic knowledge of strumming a guitar – it doesn’t work," says Cinnamon.
The piece is a demanding one-woman-and-a-musician show that chronicles the life of an abused woman and her transformation into a touring country and western singer. The director eventually found someone who lived up to his expectations, and the show was a Fringe success story. So when he brought the show to Calgary, he knew he wouldn’t settle for just anyone. The cast turned out to be Elizabeth Stepkowski and Tim Williams, and the director knows he lucked out.
"You need professionals in order to do it properly..." he says. "And you have to understand the music really well and understand the script. It’s not like a musical, where you would be provided with the score and you just go ahead and do it."
Williams is the local blues guitarist who won a Betty Mitchell award for his work on Lunchbox Theatre’s Big Mama: The Willie Mae Thornton Story, and Stepkowski has a Betty of her own, for a lead role in Daniel Danis’s Stone and Ashes at Theatre in Exile. The script for Marg Szkaluba (Pissy’s Wife), by Ron Chambers, whose play Respectable recently premiered at ATP’s playRites festival, provided them with lyrics and a melody line, and not much else. The two created arrangements for each piece that reflect the journey that takes place in the script.
"What Tim and Elizabeth add to it – it’s a constant state of goosebumps for me in rehearsal," Cinnamon says.
Williams describes most of his work on the show thus far as "stylistic changes" from what the songs sounded like during the Fringe production.
"When we first started doing it, Elizabeth mentioned the opening number, which... was sort of a one-chord, pseudo-blues, George Thorogood kind of thing, except for a woman to sing," says Williams. "She asked if it would be possible to turn it into a really upbeat gospel tune. So I did that."
In another place in the script, the playwright wanted to cut out a song, a favourite with the cast and director, because it was too much like another piece in the show. So Williams added his midas touch to the other piece.
"I changed it from a sort of contemporary folk ballad into a mountain banjo piece," he says. "Partially because Elizabeth sings so many styles so well... it gives us the stylistic difference to allow me to keep the other piece that I wanted."
Composer Paul Morgan Donald created the show with Chambers, and fleshed out each song with his own arrangement, but it was left to Williams to start over and bring his own blues background to the performance.
"Unless you’re buying the whole production, you’re never going to get the same guys," says Williams. "I could write out everything that I play on charts, and it would just be stupid for somebody else to have to sit there and sight read all this stuff that’s going on with mine."
Rather than putting on the show at one of Calgary’s traditional theatres, Cinnamon has decided to use the Beat Niq Jazz and Social Club. The director says that since the play is actually set in a bar where Marg is performing, Beat Niq was a natural choice.
"I think that the less theatre and the more bar it is, the better," Cinnamon says. "We don’t have to worry about a set. The ambience, the world is right there for us.... There’s going to be liquor service right throughout the show – it’s not going to stop and start – so it’s going to be like a regular bar show, as if she’s up there, doing her songs and telling her stories."
Williams also says he feels at home there.
"If you look at what I do in a year, I play a lot more places like the Beat Niq than I do places like the Performing Arts Centre or Lunchbox," he says. |
