Like the iconic novel that inspired its name, Matt Masters’s musical Don Coyote began in Spain. House-sitting for a friend, the local country music artist read the adventures of Don Quixote as visions of Spanish windmills transformed into Pincher Creek wind turbines, and a city with its own delusional second identity took the place of Cervantes’ would-be adventurer.
In Masters’s take on the delusional, windmill-tilting knight, the titular Don is an Internet-addicted cowboy fanboy whose failing Ethernet connection forces him into the light of day. Finding high noon fantasy in Calgary’s streets, Coyote soon encounters his Sancho, a First Nations man who comes to the Don’s aid after his first misguided attempt at heroism, and then sticks around for the steady paycheque.
Built around Masters’s onstage storytelling, the production is a mix of video and projection provided by local visual artist Terrance Houle and Masters’ six-piece western orchestra. With Houle, a member of the Blood Tribe, jumping in as Sancho, the piece is a mix of theatricality and musical performance, all culled from a series of collaborations and fortunate moments of inspiration.
“When we first met, the draft was on pieces of paper, napkins and his journal and notebook,” recalls director Vanessa Porteous. “So, for the first time we talked about it, [Masters] more or less told me and others the story, but once we got going about a month and a half ago, we got rolling.”
Masters acknowledges a few Quixotic bumps along the way in creating a local, musical take on Don Quixote, including lineup changes and the vagaries of creating a musical with a cast and crew from different backgrounds and disciplines. However, in addition to its runs during the Sled Island music festival and the appropriate cowboy spectacle of the Stampede, the production has already been booked for Toronto’s prestigious Nuit Blanche arts festival.
For the Calgary native, however, being presented at the Glenbow during the show’s Calgary runs offers its own, enviable cachet. “When you have the Glenbow curating an art and design project in a music festival, you realize we have a crazy-ass project going on,” says Masters.
If the delusions of its protagonist are a little crazy, Masters and Porteous are quick to point out the equally broken identity of their hometown, a place where the beginning of July heralds fresh legions of drunken businessmen-cum-cowboys. Like Coyote, a Lone Ranger Internet forum administrator playing his fantasy out on the streets, Stampede revellers are drawing from a tradition that, in many ways, has as much to do with reality as Quixote’s fiction-inspired adventures.
“I think a lot about our western identity and the role the cowboy plays in it,” says Masters. “Things like the cowboy code [Don Coyote’s chivalrous code] — they’re really romanticized 1950s TV pitches, Roy Rogers and Gene Autry and advertisers, not these things burned into rawhide by Wild Bill Hickok. It’s a total construct, so I think it speaks interestingly to Calgary’s cowboy identity.
“One-half of Calgary has a community in agriculture roots, legitimately represented by prairie labourers, which cowboys are in,” he adds. “But Guy Weadick [founder of the Calgary Stampede], our patriarch, wasn’t a cowboy — he was a show promoter from New York City.”
“We’re all under this illusion we live in this western town, and really we all work in offices,” notes Porteous. “There’s also this illusion that we’re in a boom, but there’s a meth problem and a growing homeless situation.”
With Don Coyote drawing satirical attention to Calgary’s social ills and familiar delusions, Masters and Porteous are both conscious of Calgary’s relative blindness to its own identity. Gary Burns films like waydowntown and Suburbanators are some of the few prominent representations of Calgary. Both tell an explicitly Calgarian story.
“It’s a bittersweet Valentine to Calgary,” says Porteous. “[Masters is] born and bred, he’s an expert. He likes to think about what the scene is on Fourth Street and Recordland, and why is Olympic Plaza such a dive now. Calgary has its own magic, and I guess maybe that’s one of the things about the play I love. It reveals us to ourselves in an affectionate way without too much sentimentality.
“It’s just good to see something set in Calgary,” she adds.
But if Don Coyote exposes something inherently absurd about the way we live, all hat and no cattle, it’s not something that the show’s creators are in any mood to apologize for. For Masters, even Calgary’s manic fantasy is a reality worth holding on to. “I think that Calgary’s collective mythology of a cowboy city is just a great choice,” says Masters. “Anything more than that, who can say? It’s good for a city to have an identity — especially for a young city. As we try to define ourselves, we’ve at least got this foil to work off of.
“Good on Calgary for being Cowtown,” he adds.
