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.
Back to the garden
They say you always have a special fondness for the first time: the first day in school, the first time on skates, the first kiss. I don’t remember a whole lot about my first theatrical experience, a one-act play in Grade 10 by Stephen Leacock called Guido the Gimlet of Ghent, a spoof on medieval mystery plays. I played the female lead, Isolde the Slender. It’s little wonder I’ve shoved it to the back of my brain.
A few years later, though, I tried out for my first musical, a production of Finian’s Rainbow at the University of Alberta being staged by the Jubilaires Club, so called because they put on their shows at Edmonton’s Jubilee Auditorium, a huge concert hall with 2700 seats. That was some introduction to the musical stage - every other venue since has kind of paled in comparison, at least as far as grandiosity is concerned. Only a couple of years later, we switched our shows to the Student Union Theatre, a much more modest venue, somewhat akin to the Music Hall here in Uxbridge.
I also recall keenly the experience of directing my first musical, a production of the longest-running small show ever, The Fantasticks, at a 100-seat black box in Grande Prairie in northern Alberta. The president of the GP Little Theatre knew me from university, and I’d only been in town a week (to take my first newspaper job) when he asked me to direct. I sort of had an idea of what I was in for, but the whole process was intoxicating. My vision up there for hundreds of people to see! The challenge of working with so many artistic minds - singers, dancers, choreographers, designers, musicians - soon convinced me that I’d chosen the wrong career, and I’ve bounced back and forth between theatre and journalism the rest of my life.
I was only in Grande Prairie for five years, but I must have participated in more than 30 productions in that time, evety conceivable kind of play, both acting and directing, and my 17 years in the Yukon just enriched the experience, as I turned to writing plays as well. And all this was a prelude to my arrival in Uxbridge in the fall of ‘95. My first show here wasn’t a musical, but a play called The Art of Dining directed by none other than Roger Varley, who I maintain a passing connection with. That play introduced me to a magic place called the Music Hall, a marvellous intimate space to bring plays to life.
One of the reasons I only did non-musical plays for my first couple of years here was that there was no adult community musical theatre group. Donna Van Veghel’s youth choir had staged polished versions of Joseph and Beauty and the Beast a few years before, but there was nothing for grown-up folk. So in January of 1997 I decided to try a musical to see if the community would take to it, and I chose a hauntingly beautiful adaptation of the children’s classic The Secret Garden. I had an amazing cast - Ted Barris’ daughter Whitney, her friend Alida Wesselo (soon to become my step-daughter), a talented young gymnast and dancer named Nicole Docherty (also a natural actress, as it turned out), a superb lyric tenor named Stewart Bennett (who ran the Hobby Horse and started the Highland Games), local surveyor and folkie Reid Wilson, and a bevy of others, many of whom I’m still in touch with. Local sculptors Ron and Linda Baird designed the set, and it transformed the Hall, and Tom and Anne Baker handled the music. I was extremely lucky in my collaborators that first time. The box office was encouraging enough that the next year we did Annie, and we were off to the races. We formed a society, Uxbridge Musical Theatre (I know - highly original!), and in the third year, we decided to do two shows - our blockbuster in January and a smaller show in the fall.
Now, 29 shows later, UMT (which became OnStage Uxbridge when it merged with the Players in 2005) is celebrating its 15th anniversary with a revue (you can read about it on page 6) which not only includes songs from all 29 shows, but brings back a lot of the folks who originally sang them. Not everybody we invited, but a lot of them. Stewart and Nicole and Whitney are up there, and when they sang a beautiful song tonight at dress rehearsal from The Secret Garden called “I Heard Someone Crying”, a lot of cherished images came back before my eyes. The experience of that first musical in the Music Hall had a lot to do with why I’m still here 15 years later. In a very real sense, the community that forms during the rehearsal of a play is a reflection of the larger community where the playhouse resides.
The fact that Uxbridge took our musical theatre group to its heart (and spawned several more in the ensuing years) made the decision to stay here easy. That combined with marrying Alida’s mother. But that’s another story.
