What is your background in theatre?This is my third show in less than a year with Walterdale; previously, Kiss Within a Kiss and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas saw me attempting my Dubious Southern Accent, to much amusement. Elsewhere, I graduated with BA (Drama) from the University of Alberta, am currently Artistic Director of indie production company Allspice Theatre, and have done odds and ends of theatre in all corners of the city for many of my 23 years. Recent highlights without context include: juggling fruit at Nextfest, being doused in blood-coloured karo syrup in the women's washroom of the Timms Centre, chorus dancing in underwear and lederhosen at the Catalyst, girl-on-woodchuck action at the Fringe, and a slow painful metamorphosis into an African (not Asian!) rhinoceros.
What is you role in this Production?
Though Richard Hatfield is [successfully, I think] trying to rope me into aiding him with the lighting design and hang, I'm primarily an actor, playing the role of Filch. Filch is... he's an extreme August, if you know clown terminology. He's a variation on the lead villain's One Inept Guard, as he's got no skill-set beyond begging, though he's not very good at that. For some reason, he's managed to survive to adulthood, and J.J. Peachum enlists him into his beggar's army. Mayhem, murder and singing ensure.
Why did you audition for this show?
Sally Hunt told me she was doing the music and Kat Evans told me her design concept for the show was Victorian Steampunk. That was pretty much all the convincing I needed.
What has working on the show been like so far?
The most enjoyable aspect is the sheer physicality of the show. It's very big, very spectacular, very much outside the realm of Normal a lot of the time. The space that we've got to play in is all sorts of fun, with nooks and crannies and crevices and levels, and playing a character who drifts in, out, and around all of them is a joy. I've been increasingly fascinated by physical theatre and the studies of movement int he last few years, and I appreciate any opportunities to test the limits of what my body can do and and how it can contort to tell a story. Plus, I get to fall down a lot.
Most challenging are the words themselves. Not the dialect, I mean, so much as the phrasings and the conversation proper. Brecht and Blitzstein have come up with a script that never takes the short and economical route' they always take ten words to say what you can in five, and thirty to say what you can in ten. It's structured phraseology, buttressed in with nouns and verbs and further extends the hyper surreality of the potentially ordinary scenarios. Much of it doesn't just sound like anything a normal person would say... which forces us all again to get out of the habits of portraying Normal People.
What do you hope the audience gets out of the show?
While the story is exceedingly parablesque and often explicitly stating the underlying themes through blunt dialogue, I think, more than anything, the show is fun. The characters are complicated and richly developed, the sounds of the show are just so darn interesting to listen to, the visuals are striking and original, the twists are largely unanticipated, and the whole show is unlike a lot of other traditional musicals. It's a hoot.
As well, I spent four months growing a beard for this show. If you don't come, those four months were wasted.
* Photo: Douglas Dollars Stewart
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