Preview
RHYME RUSTLER: THE BALLAD OF ROBERT SERVICE
Written and performed by Grant Paterson and Jim Dobbin
Saturday, May 28
Mount Royal College
Although there probably isn’t a Canadian schoolchild, past or present, who hasn’t heard about the "strange things done in the midnight sun," the story of the man who wrote "The Cremation of Sam McGee" remains less well known than his humorous ballads of impromptu crematoriums and ice-worm cocktails. A beloved Canadian poet who wasn’t Canadian, a Yukon bank clerk who wrote tales about rugged gold miners years after the Gold Rush had begun to die out, Robert Service was a man of contradictions.
Tracing Service’s journey from Scotland to the frozen Canadian North, a new play called Rhyme Rustler: The Ballad of Robert Service makes its debut at Mount Royal College’s Leacock Theatre this Saturday before going on to a Stampede run at Vertigo Theatre in July. The show, created and performed by Mount Royal Conservatory instructors Grant Paterson and Jim Dobbin, dramatizes Service’s rollicking poetry against the backdrop of the author’s own history.
"I think a lot of people think he was from the North, or from the Yukon originally," says Paterson. "They don’t know about his journey to Canada from Scotland and up to the North, how he came to be there."
"We’re tracing his creative journey, what sparked his outpouring of poetry and what sparked his creativity in the North," adds Dobbin. "It’s about the relationship between the poet, the land and the Gold Rush, and how that came together in a sort of magical time in this particular man’s life."
While Dobbin takes the role of the journeying Service, Patterson backs up the production as both the Ragtime Kid, a musical homage to the character of the same name in "The Shooting of Dan McGrew," and the cast of characters whose chance encounters with Service drive the Arctic poet’s writings. Based largely on Service’s often romanticized autobiography, replete with recitations of Service’s intensely popular verse as well as ragtime music segues, Rhyme Rustler is a lighthearted imagining of a poet who was more interested in entertaining than enlightening.
"He didn’t want to be called a poet. He realized that he was writing what he called ‘newspaper verse,’ hence the name of the show," says Paterson. "He wrote things that please the common man and thought he was one of those people he would write to please. That’s why his poetry was so successful."
"He was sort of the Stomping Tom of the early 20th century," adds Dobbin.
Decades after Service’s death in 1958, the verse that made him a successful poet in his own lifetime continues to be taught in classrooms across the country as a colourful, often comical slice of Canadian literature. A man who successfully made the frozen tundra seem romantic, who could deliver a ballad’s punch line with cool finesse, Service himself was every bit as interesting as the cremated American prospectors and barroom gun battles he wrote about, even if the truth is still a little muddy. Paterson and Dobbin’s show aims to help set the record straight while entertaining us once again with the tales of Sam McGee, Dan McGrew and "the men who moil for gold" that delighted us in school. |
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