Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
Singing with the spirit
Last week wasn’t the first time I’d performed in a historic site which had more than a little to do with the work I was performing. During my Yukon years, in fact, I became a bit blasé about it.
For several summers I was a cast member in the “Gaslight Follies” at Dawson City’s Palace Grand Theatre, a three-storey wooden opera house built by a fellow named Arizona Charlie Meadows, who started out his show biz career in Buffalo Bill’s wild west show, but made his fame and fortune (fleeting though both were) in the Klondike Gold Rush. More than once I actually played Arizona Charlie on the Palace Grand stage, which would be like playing Alex Pantages at the Pantages.
I also premiered an original one-act play at the Grand called Paradise Alley, which told the story of three women in Dawson’s red light district during the height of the gold rush. A key scene in the play was a fire which swept through the town in the late winter of 1899; many of the survivors found shelter at the Palace Grand. When we performed that scene, it was haunting to imagine it actually happening there just a few decades earlier.
The only problem with that nostalgic scenario is that the Palace Grand we performed in wasn’t the one that Charlie built. It was a reconstruction. An accurate, detailed reconstruction, on the same foundation, but not the original. When Parks Canada took control of Dawsin in the 1960s, and decided to make the Grand an operating theatre for tourist shows, they elected to tear it down and build a replica. One wonders if they’d make the same decision today.
I came closer to the actual spirit of the author in the summers I recited the poems of Robert Service (he of “Sam McGee” and “Dan McGrew”) at the Bard’s cabin on the upper slopes of Dawson. I used to walk up and down on his front lawn, declaiming to the ravens (and the tourists), and chances are he did the same thing from time to time. Certainly he lived and wrote in that same cabin for three years, so as I sat alone on the porch on a quiet Sunday morning, I could easily imagine him smoking his pipe in the chair opposite me, recounting the latest tall tale he’d heard during his strolls up the Klondike creeks.
Unfortunately, most of the poems I recited on the lawn weren’t written in the cabin. His most famous ones were written while he still worked for the bank, before he moved to the cabin, or during the First World War, after he’d already left the Yukon for good. There was just one, called “Goodbye, Little Cabin”, which he wrote in the days before he took the last sternwheeler, and that one never failed to bring a tear as I recited it to the very cabin it spoke about.
That was the same feeling, only stronger, that I had this past weekend as I and the rest of the cast performed the musical Emily, based on Lucy Maud Montgomery’s “Emily of New Moon” series, in the same church that Maud attended for 15 years as the wife of its pastor. We performed a version of “Anne of Green Gables” there in the summers of ‘08 and ‘09, but although Montgomery wrote many books about Anne in the Leaskdale Manse, the character wasn’t created here. Anne Shirley was born on Prince Edward Island.
But Emily Starr and all the other fascinating characters in Emily, were, I’m convinced, dreamed up while Maud was sitting in this church, and now they’re coming to life, perhaps for the first time, in the presence of her spirit. Perhaps she never conceived of them in a musical, but I’d like to think she would enjoy our production, especially the moving hym to PEI that forms the play’s finale.
I play Emily’s dying father in an early scene, and it’s a bit spooky that as I go up the aisle to my death, I slowly pass the pew that Lucy Maud Montgomery sat in all those Sunday mornings. I’m almost a bit hesitant to let any of the audience sit there, because it’s like they’re taking her seat. She wrote the story, she should be able to watch any show she likes, right? Okay, I’m just getting silly. Aren’t I?
On opening night, I learned something about our leading lady, the remarkable Katie Wilson, and her own connection to the old Leaskdale church. In the early 1920’s, her great-grandparents wre married on the altar which has now become Katie’s stage, married by the Rev. Ewan Macdonald, Maud’s husband, probably with Maud looking on. Without that marriage, Katie would not be here.
So in a very real sense, both Katie and the character she performs, Emily Starr, were created in this same place. And in the first scene, Katie actually sings the lyric “I was born to tell this story”. Kind of gives you shivers.
