| When I began this engagement, almost 18 years ago, I didn’t think it would turn into a long run.
It opened in the spring of 1988 at the Calgary Herald, eventually transferred to two other venues, The Globe and Mail and the Calgary Straight, and finally wrapped up here at Fast Forward. It didn’t quite beat out Broadway record-holder The Phantom of the Opera, which celebrated its 18th year last month and is still on the boards, but all the same, that’s a pretty decent stretch of time for a theatre critic in Calgary.
How did it start? You have to go back to the late 1980s, when I was a junior reporter in the Herald’s Entertainment department, where I was often called upon to cover everything that my senior colleagues didn’t want to do – from Def Leppard concerts to Arnold Schwarzenegger action flicks. At one point, I was even sent out to review a play by a new little troupe with the funny name of One Yellow Rabbit. It was Leonardo’s Last Supper, a one-act by Peter Barnes, author of that vicious, lunatic satire The Ruling Class, of which I was a huge fan, so I was already predisposed to like what I saw. Nonetheless, I was impressed by this young company’s gusto and sense of style. Little did I know that one day I would write an entire book about them… but I’m getting ahead of myself.
In the wake of the exhilarating 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics and its Arts Festival, the Herald’s well-established theatre critic, Brian Brennan, decided to leave on a high note and move over to feature writing for the paper’s weekend magazine. Meanwhile, I’d proved my stamina as a theatre writer by single-handedly covering a little thing called (at the time) novaplayRites – a festival of five new Canadian plays staged by Alberta Theatre Projects, which was the most ambitious local undertaking of the Olympic Arts Festival. Consequently, my Herald boss, Susan Scott, an encouraging editor who liked to give young talent a chance, asked if I’d fill Brennan’s shoes. I was both thrilled and daunted – Brennan was an erudite and eloquent writer, and a first-rate journalist, too. Not an easy act to follow. And I wasn’t the only one who wondered if I was up to the task. On my first visit to the Shaw Festival that summer, artistic director Christopher Newton – a forbidding figure to me back then – took one look at the baby-faced kid who’d come to interview him and asked me, in that disdainful tone that Brits (even expatriate Brits) do so well, "So, where did they get you from? The sports department?"
It was up to me to prove I had the right stuff. I guess I did – a few years later, the Shaw Festival was quoting me in its season brochure. And, you may ask, what credentials did I have? Well, I had studied a bit of theatre at school and once played the lead in a college production of Noël Coward’s Present Laughter, but mostly I just loved the art form. I’d seen my first play, a high school staging of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, at the impressionable age of six and had come away enthralled. At about the same time, I also happened to watch Olivier’s Hamlet on television and was similarly taken. (I’d like to say I was first attracted to Shakespeare as a young boy because of the exquisite poetry, but it was really because he wrote plays with swordfights.) When my family moved to Calgary, my parents became Theatre Calgary subscribers and the first show I saw there was Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, starring Graeme Campbell (who would later go on to be a wonderfully wicked Thénardier in the Canadian production of Les Miz). As a teen, when I wasn’t seeing plays, I was reading them – Shakespeare, Sophocles, Tennessee Williams, anthologies of the year’s London and New York hits, and, during one memorably moody summer, the works of Eugene O’Neill. By the time of my Broadway "debut" – seeing Peter Hall’s production of Amadeus, starring Ian McKellen, at the Broadhurst Theatre in 1981 – I was thoroughly hooked.
It was a good grounding in theatre, but it didn’t prepare me for the unusual power of the theatre critic, the way his words affect the local theatre community as well as influence audiences. I’ve joked before that, if actors are, as Hamlet says, "the abstract and brief chronicles of the time," then critics are the chroniclers of the chronicles, and often the only thing tangible that’s left after a play closes, apart from a souvenir program, is a written record by its reviewers, coloured by their own opinions and biases. I’ve never pretended to be objective, but I’ve always tried to be accurate in my reporting of a production, while at the same time trying to capture the energy, electricity or – as the case may be – lack thereof in the live performance. I’ve also tried to be honest about my feelings.
Not everyone appreciated my candour. In my time at the Herald, I was banned from a couple of theatres, including Stage West – the latter for attacking its bad taste in reviving a 1970s bed-hopping farce in the 1990s, during the height of the North American AIDS epidemic. It was the commercial dinner theatre’s big Christmas show and, when people who’d read my review cancelled their bookings, I became persona non grata. (Eventually they invited me back.) I’ve been insulted by some of the best, including semi-legendary director Derek Goldby, who wrote me a scathing letter after I panned his Theatre Calgary production of Tartuffe. I’ve even been called "sub-puerile" in print – a delightful term that I’ve always meant to use myself.
However, I’ve found that most theatre professionals are just that – professional. They know my job is to critique their work. And I hope that, over the years, they’ve been able to sense that running underneath my occasional glibness or harsh words is a fundamental appreciation for what they do. We’ve all – artists and audiences – had our share of bad nights in the theatre, but what sticks with me and keeps me coming back are those nights of magic, when a play and its performers transcend artifice and the imagined becomes as powerful as the real.
I’ve experienced that magic a number of times in Calgary over 18 years. The sudden, heart-stopping chill after the satiric hilarity in One Yellow Rabbit’s Ilsa, Queen of the Nazi Love Camp (1990). The mounting adrenalin rush of excitement and horror in Brad Fraser’s Unidentified Human Remains (1989). The spine-tingling sorcery of Ronnie Burkett, conjuring complex humanity out of bundles of wood and string in his marionette masterpiece, The Memory Dress Trilogy (1996-2001).
Sometimes a play hits you where you live – like Alberta Theatre Projects’ beautifully exuberant and affecting Two Weeks with the Queen (1996), a comedy about a boy seeking a cure for his brother’s cancer, which I saw with my young sons less than a year after one of them had been treated for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Sometimes it makes you shed tears for things you’ve never experienced, like Pamela Gien’s apartheid memoir The Syringa Tree, performed with breathtaking brio by Meg Roe this season.
My list goes on, but I’m not ready to write my own memoirs yet, so I’ll stop here. I’m not bowing out of theatre-going or theatre writing, simply ending my run as a critic in Calgary. It seems like a good time for a scene change, with new blood taking over at Theatre Calgary and Lunchbox, and both playRites and the High Performance Rodeo – two festivals I’ve chronicled faithfully almost from the get-go – having hit the 20th anniversary mark. And, even though I’m leaving, Fast Forward will continue its tradition of providing the most extensive coverage of the city’s theatre scene, courtesy of some newer, younger writers. What are their credentials? They love theatre and they love to write – that was good enough for my boss in 1988 and it’s good enough for me.
Meanwhile, I’ll exit into the wilds of southern Ontario and try my hand at some other forms of writing. But they say they also have some kind of a theatre scene out there. I wonder if it’s as exciting as this one? |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.