Singer-songwriter Michael Bernard Fitzgerald dreams big. Sure, as the winner of one of the major songwriting awards at the Ship & Anchor and Calgary Folk Music Festival’s annual songwriting competition, you’d imagine he’s used to prodigious thinking, but he never thought he’d win the contest. He was thrilled when the honour earned him $3,000 — cash that evaporated by paying his backing musicians and spending a summer in Montreal. But victory and money were never Fitzgerald’s Grail; he was already captured by a massive dream.

The month he won the Fuel 90.3 Most Promising Songwriter Award was also the month he coaxed about five-dozen musicians to share a stage at the Grand Theatre. Getting that many people on the same page and stage took a lot more of his attention than just writing songs like the award-winning “Brand New Spaces,” a tune which rings a universal bell for listeners who’ve split with their bitter half.

Still, $3,000 and five-dozen musicians were not numbers that Fitzgerald was ready to hang his hat on. For him, the idea of getting 120 performers onstage together was the intersection where math and music met and made sweet love with each other. That’s what he’s arranged with Love and Manners, as the June 5 performance is titled.

While most people wouldn’t even have 100 phone numbers stored in their BlackBerrys, Fitzgerald figures the force behind his Love and Manners performance is progression. The Hamilton, Ont, native, who became a Calgarian at three, completed high school at Central Memorial before moving to Lethbridge to finish a couple of years in the university’s drama program. Follow closely, as this is where the other 119 performers come in.

“I can’t even remember where the original idea came from,” Fitzgerald explains over a beverage at a Calgary pub. “It’s structured chaos. The first time I did this kind of show, I approached the University of Lethbridge and got a grant. We did two nights there, a night at the Mac Hall Ballroom and a night at Myer Horowitz at the U of A, all with 30 people onstage. When you added in the people involved in production, the number got up to around 50.”

By “this kind of show” he means the kind of performance that requires more than a minivan, or even a tour bus, to get your band to the gig. Think C-Train sized, with no room to squeeze in roadies or groupies. The four-night tour was so successful that Fitzgerald was back in Calgary within a few months to release his CD, This is Michael Bernard Fitzgerald. He booked the Grand Theatre in November, 2007, for two sold-out nights featuring 56 performers. “That was [more than] a year ago, and I usually do these shows every six months, so with the year gap, I decided we would do 120 performers together onstage,” he says of the upcoming Jack Singer performance. “At once.”

“If you are looking at the stage up on the top left — the choir loft — it’s 40 singers. Top right is 15 acoustic guitar players, bottom left is 25 drummers, bottom right is a 30-person orchestra, and then there’s drums, guitar, keys and bass and myself. Then across the front [are] 15 dancers. It doesn’t start with it, but there is a steady build… they trickle in.”

Fitzgerald cites a “two-degrees-of-separation thing” in getting all the cast together, drawing on everyone from members of the Stampede Show Band to friends of friends of friends. “The cast will not meet each other until the night of,” he says. “It’s kind of cool. It’s the kind of thing that could go awry. If you watch the tapes of the last few shows, they were not perfect by any means. Not even close, but overwhelming. When the show is over, people are just flabbergasted.”

While Fitzgerald relies on separation and serendipity to assemble his cast, some tasks are more mundane. The group has no roadies, so loading in and soundcheck takes all day. As well, there are 10 opening singer-songwriters who later change into the ensemble’s ubiquitous white shirts and join the large cast. Each brings their music to sell at intermission. Getting everything into one building requires mammoth logistics.

In the midst of all this, it is easy to forget — especially because Fitzgerald barely mentions it — that the Jack Singer show is also the date of the release of his forthcoming Russell Broom-produced CD, The MFB Love LP. Recorded at various studios around Calgary, the album is the fruit of Fitzgerald’s continuing songwriting journey — one he claims he started because he lacks the ability to learn other people’s tunes.

A six-month stint in Australia for after high school started the process. At a hostel, he saw a posting for a private tour boat and landed the job of serving the boat’s guests and cleaning up. Often, it was so slow that he just cruised around. While on the beach, the songs arrived.

As gutsy as it may be to drop your life and move halfway across the world, it seems braver still to throw 120 strangers onstage together and invite the city. Still, neither is the scariest adventure Fitzgerald has encountered lately. “The scariest thing I’ve done in the last two years was playing to elementary schools,” he says. “At Canyon Meadows Spanish Academy, we’re playing the first song, and the kids were already squirming. Well, this isn’t working, so we had to think fast. We turned the whole thing into theme chants and clap-alongs.”

Sounds like a back-up plan that just might work, even with the 120-strong lineup, if the structure chaos goes awry.