by Ken Chisholm (March 1999)
THIS IS A STORY WITH A BEGINNING, A LOT OF MIDDLES AND I HOPE, NO FINAL ENDING.
Or maybe it really did end on Wednesday morning, January 20th, when Luke Winterman announced that the board of the Cape Breton Summertime Productions Society had voted to discontinue the Cape Breton Summertime Revue after twelve years of shows.
Not being an early riser, I missed Winterman’s interview on CBC Radio One’s Information Morning where he had announced the show’s demise. Wendy Bergfeldt, of CBC Radio One’s afternoon show, Mainstreet, broke me the news when she called to invite me onto her show to talk about my relationship with the Revue over the years. “And can you bring your guitar?” she asked.
My relationship with the Revue began a few days before my high school graduation in 1977. My brother, Peyton, who knows about these things said there was a play at the Lyceum that I should really see. And so I talked to my friend Armand into going to the second night’s performance of the first run of The Rise And Follies of Cape Breton Island.
Up until that night, I had already decided I wanted to be a writer, but, being a socially incompetent teenager who read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, I had a particularly gothic turn of mind and figured I would become the next Ray Bradbury. I also wrote songs dripping with the usual teenage angst and blissfully unstained by any real life experience. The thought that the everyday life of the dirty old company town that I lived in could be material for a song or a story never crossed my mind.
But now, right in front of me was a show with a big, big cast of actors and singers and musicians that were from the community around me. And the songs they sang and the skits they performed came out of the history and the folkways that I had been born into. And like everyone else there, I felt the electric thrill of seeing my life become art.
“What’s your father’s name?”
“Go off on your way.”
“I’m a Cape Breton Barbarian. (Well we all are, or didn’t you know?)”
“We Are An Island.”
The material ranged from the melancholy to the angry to the defiant but it was exactingly rooted in the everyday life and experience of Cape Breton.
And it was a show that almost never happened.
In 1977, a group of actors and performers who had been students of Harry and Liz Boardmore at the fledgling College of Cape Breton formed the Steel City Players. Among that group were Kenzie MacNeil, Maynard Morrison, Jo-Anne Rolls, Kathy MacGuire, Ronnie MacEachern and Max MacDonald. The group received a Local Initiatives grant and made plans to mount three productions over the summer. The Rise And Follies was not one of them.
Instead, as Max MacDonald recalls, they were going to do a work called Stepdance by PEI songwriter Tom Gallant, but “at the eleventh hour we couldn’t negotiate a deal”. The loss of Gallant’s play left the group with a hole in their schedule.
MacDonald credits the influence of the Boardmores with giving the group the courage to go ahead and create their own show. “We just asked anybody in the troupe to bring anything in.”
The show “wasn’t going anywhere for a while “and there was even” infighting about political material “and that some of the group wanted to” do a more classic book piece rather than doing a show about Cape Breton.” But the view that “we wanted it to be funny, songs we wanted to sing, and all of it to be about Cape Breton” eventually prevailed.
MacDonald says the Follies was a “proscenium piece until a week before it opened,” and despite efforts to link the various bits, it wasn’t working. Then Gary Walsh, the show’s director, had the idea to do the play in the “round” so that the cast would be right in with their audience and would pop up in different parts of the theatre. The new staging gave the show the necessary momentum to kick start the material.
Even so, “we were terrified,” MacDonald chuckles. There were still people in the company who thought the idea for the show was stupid and almost everyone was apprehensive about how their audience would react to a show that seemed to be making fun of them.
Their fears were quickly dispelled on opening night and the rest, as they say, is history.
The next night, not only was I in the audience having my own private epiphany, after the show I ended up at the old College Pub (a refurbished garage bay in the old Logue Building, now the MT&T parking lot at the corner of Pitt and George streets.) Most of the people there had also been to the Follies and they too were energized by the show as they drank into the night and sang dimly remembered songs from old John Allan Cameron records (“Rise and follow Charlie!”)
That first Follies played for at the most, four thousand people over two runs of ten shows each. Then, within a few months of the end of the show, the College of Cape Breton Press released an album of the show and that sold over 10,000 copies. Besides earning a lot of local airplay, copies of the album flew out to wherever Cape Bretoners had wandered to find a job that would earn them enough money to return home someday. Everybody has a tale of some late night phone call from a brother or cousin or high school buddy in Halifax or Toronto or Ghana who had no real reason for calling except that they had a couple of beers and put on the Follies record and, jeez bye, they just had to call somebody from home while in the background, the stereo could be heard blasting out “We are an island, a rock in the stream.”
A second Follies show came in 1978 followed by new shows produced every couple of years or so until the mid 1980’s. After the last Follies in 1985, many in the cast wanted to mount another new show the next year. Others thought more time would be needed to create enough material of sufficient quality to fill a new show. The first group thought that if there was a show, that would provide the incentive for artists to create the new material necessary. By now, The Rise And Follies Of Cape Breton Island was a copyrighted title and because the group pushing for a new show did not have access to the copyright, their plans might have ended there.
As Max MacDonald recalls, “Steve MacDonald, Maynard Morrison, Leon Dubinsky, Luke Winterman and I had a little summit at Leon’s home at Englishtown.” MacDonald stops and smiles with pleasure at the memory. “It was a beautiful, sunny day and we were just walking and talking when we just stopped in a circle in a field.” That was the moment they decided to do the show that became The Cape Breton Summertime Revue.
“We wanted a show that we could do every year and maybe provide an opportunity for artists to create new material for,” MacDonald says. “We wanted a show that would generate energy. We didn’t know how, we didn’t know . . . , we didn’t have any organization – but we decided to just go for it.”
Stephen MacDonald produced the first show, Leon Dubinsky was the musical director, Max MacDonald and Maynard Morrison wrote and performed onstage, and Luke Winterman served on the board of Summertime Productions, the non-profit society formed to produce the show.
The first production in 1986 had just seven performers including Rita MacNeil. It had a limited run because they had to work around Rita’s touring schedule. The show played twenty-some performances around Cape Breton and Halifax and brought in almost ten thousand people.
Meanwhile, I had graduated from Sydney Academy and enrolled at College of Cape Breton. I kept writing songs and had the occasional gig at the Student Union Pub in the Lyceum, one floor below the theatre where I saw the first Follies. I wrote bad rip-offs of Follies tunes and laboured pastiches of traditional ballads. I also began to perform in plays and worked with both Liz and Harry and many of the people I had idolized for being in the cast of the original Follies. In the early to mid-eighties, the dramagroup also included Bryden MacDonald and Audrey Butler ( both to be nominated in later years for the Governor General’s Award for their plays), Bette MacDonald and her brother Ed, Duncan Wells, Kelley Edwards, Ron Jenkins and many other talented young people. They took on big projects, big roles and big themes. Everyone worked on everyone else’s plays. Everyone supported and encouraged their friends’ effort, even at the same time they were trying to upstage them.
Eventually, besides performing and writing, I also fell into being a play reviewer (which, as much as I like the work, is like being the grape inspector at the orgy), so I was at the dress rehearsal for the last Follies (one of the few times the Post paid me for my efforts) and I can still remember the goosebumps when Raylene Rankin hit the first high note in Rise Again (“As if a chi-i-ild could tell us why”.)
By this time as well I was creating children’s plays with Duncan Wells (WGO # 31). We had a monthly series of shows called The Full Moon Cafe which we barnstormed around the island. The show had a song and skit format, intentionally copied from the Follies. For one show I had written a skit for two Smothers Brothers like characters called Cowboy Dunc and O.K. Ken but I needed a song to finish the act. Time was short, so I decided the easiest course would be to write a new song. Nothing special, since the show had only four performances booked and nothing too fancy since Duncan and Dave Colson our bass player had only a couple of days to learn it. The song I ended up writing was “Brothers In The Saddle” and it took me all of twenty minutes (fifteen of which, I joked, was spent working up the guts to put the “yippie-yi-yo’s” in the chorus). That weekend there was a Load of Wood at the Gaelic Society and, because the usual gang of performers were late in arriving, Dave and Duncan and I were kept onstage until we ran out of material and began singing our children’s show songs. We sang “Brothers” and got a surprisingly good response. Maynard Morrison and Max MacDonald who were also there, took note of the reaction and asked me to submit the song for the 1987 Revue. Along with “Brothers”, they also took two other songs, “Simple As Geography” (another children’s song) and “Company Town” (which was a self-conscious effort to write something that would never be accepted in the Follies.)
That summer, the troupe that Duncan and I had started producing a kids’ show and received ample grant to tour the show around the island. (Bill Marsh, who wrote the script, and directed the show and I sat at my kitchen table the night before the proposal deadline and pulled numbers from the air for a budget that was more whimsical than our play about street cats.)
But because of this we were invited along with the heads of other performing groups (including The Revue) who had received DEVCO money. The buzzword at these meetings was “signature show” as in the sentence “Anne of Green Gables is the signature show of Prince Edward Island.” As a selling point for promoting tourism a signature show could be a big draw. Since I held no ambitions that my show, Mid-Town Meow, would do for Cape Breton what “Cats” did for New York, I was more of a spectator than a participant. The impression I had was that nobody thought highly of the idea of a signature show, but if one had to be chosen, each group was ready to bite the bullet and suffer the funding and steady employment. But, the Holy Grail of a marketable “signature show” was never achieved.
The year the Revue first featured my songs, they produced a double audio cassette of the whole show in the interval between the show’s first run in June and its second run in August. They also released a vinyl single of “Boys Be Happy” and “Brothers In The Saddle” and both songs received considerable airplay both on-island and off. Twelve years later, at least once a year, I get a McHappy Meal sized royalty cheque for airplay from “Brothers”.
Like the first Follies album, the Revue recordings were almost as important to the success of the shows as the shows themselves. Actor Michael McPhee admits he never actually saw a Revue show until he was in the 1996 show, but “we had all of the tapes” and they were regular summer listening at his family’s bungalow (“Everybody’s going to the bungalow – the bunga – bunga – low”)
Nigel Kearns remembers hearing the first Follies album when his family took their summer vacation on Cape Breton in the late 1970’s when he was sixteen years old. Some of the local kids he hung around with put the Follies album on and excitedly told Kearns he had to listen. The Cape Bretoners knew every lyric and every punchline by heart but still giggled at every bit. Kearns, on the other hand, “couldn’t figure out why people would go to that much effort to make fun of themselves.”
McPhee became involved in community theatre, performed with the UCCB Dramagroup (like many of the Revue founders). Then, he recalls, one rainy Sunday, “I went to a script-writing workshop, the producer talked to me there and the next thing I knew, I was onstage dressed like an elf.”
When the Revue hired him as tour manager of the 1997 show, Kearns says it “rescued me from the basement of a local music store.” Kearns was responsible for moving from venue to venue two one-ton trucks full of gear and the four vans packed with the seventeen person cast and crew. While Kearns had dealt with various aspects of his new job before, this was the first time he had them all under “one hat”.
For both McPhee and Kearns, their association with the Revue has benefited them in their subsequent endeavours. When McPhee moved to Calgary for a year, he discovered that everyone in the theatre community there had heard of the Revue. McPhee also says that his time with the Revue gave him “confidence that the work that I do is on a par with anyone else.” Before his first stint with the Revue was completed, Kearns already had lined up his second job as tour manager for J.P. Cormier.
And as Kearns points out, besides all of the well known names that the Revue has showcased, there are the up and comers, like Bemus Tun drummer Brian Talbot, who have found a place in the show. Kearns said the then 19 year old musician, best known for his remarkably “non-traditional” band, fit right in and the professional profile Talbot gained from the Revue helped land him touring gigs with Slainte Mhath.
Along with the performers and stage crew, the Revue provided a showcase for songwriters and comedy writers like Duncan Wells, Wally MacAulay, Buddy MacDonald and Ronnie MacEachern.
We, in the Metro Cape Breton area, tend to think of the Revue as a local show, but the bulk of the Revue’s performances were tour dates – around the Island, but also around the Atlantic region. Eventually the Revue expanded its road show and followed the caravan trails of the Cape Breton diaspora to Ontario, the Prairie Provinces and British Columbia. In this way, the Revue turned the concept of a signature show on its head. Instead of a subsidized show with a fixed script that performed in a permanent showcase venue that was designed to draw an audience to a specific locale so that they would spend their dollars in that area’s hotels, bars and gift shops, the Revue (weakly subsidized compared to other similarly sized performing arts enterprises) came up with a new show every year (since its core audience expected fresh material) and went to where its audience was. And these audiences were loyal and supportive, as Nigel Kearns remembers the off island audiences “exploding with enthusiasm”.
But touring is expensive. The 1995 tour across the country, despite its huge audiences, bit into the Revue’s revenues. That same summer, Summertime Productions Society produced a second show, Cape Breton Gold, that toured regionally but encountered tepid reviews and indifferent audiences.
The 1996 show, produced by Douglas Arthur Brown and directed by Bryden MacDonald, departed from the Revue’s cozy and upbeat format. The show was angry and dark and scathingly satirical. The audience reaction divided along generational lines. The younger the audience members, the more they seemed to like it because it spoke more to the frustrations they felt about the Island’s future. But the older audience members, the majority of the show’s ticket buyers, felt alienated by the show’s harsh tone. And they missed the familiar faces like Mary Morrison who was notably absent from the cast. This divided audience appeal, and combined with the losses from the 1995 season, left the Revue organization with a huge debt.
As a song and comedy contributor to the 1996 show I (and my fellow writers) were offered this deal in lieu of payment for our services: I could wait until the Revue had enough money to pay me (and that day might never come) or I could take merchandise (i.e. old Revue tapes, but not CDs) in an equivalent amount to what I was owed. Since all of the show’s writers were offered the same deal and faced with the image of me and Duncan Wells and Wally MacAulay flogging our wares at adjacent tables at the flea market, I chose to wait.
Summertime Productions Society hired Brooks Diamond and Rave Entertainment to produce the 1997 show which returned to the folksy friendly tone of years past. The show was successful and brought in enough revenue to pay off most of the Revue’s debts (including the writers of the 1996 show who didn’t opt for the tapes.) Diamond and Rave also produced the 1998 show which continued to win back the Revue’s core audience and solidify the show’s financial base and they were ready to produce the 1999 show when the board of Summertime Productions Society decided to end the show, citing among their reasons, the desire to open the field to other new shows.
On CBC Radio One’s Mainstreet, Joella Foulds, a partner in Rave Entertainment, discussed the Revue’s perpetual funding woes. J.P. Cormier talked about it as a showcase for performers. Maynard Morrison and Bette MacDonald remembered the fun they had performing. I sang “Brothers in the Saddle” and “Catholic Boys”. Mainstreet’s host, Wendy Bergfeldt wondered, now that Liz and Harry Boardmore had retired, what would be training ground for the next crop of performers.
The funding issues, as elaborated by Foulds and in a Daily News article by Parker Dunham, are important but they were obstacles the Revue had conquered in the past. It will be missed as an economic force and an employer but, this is showbiz and there will be other shows. Bette MacDonald has moved up touring plans for her solo show. The Accents will have an extended run at the Savoy this summer. Mike McPhee and writer/director Wayne MacKay are going to produce a new show on their own the way they did last summer with With A Strong Hand (wgo # 27). Nigel Kearns is the tour manager for the Mulgrave Road co-op’s new show.
But will there ever be a showcase for Cape Breton talent as big as the Revue was? As Max MacDonald says, the Revue “always had its ear to the ground. The development of writers and actors and singers and technicians was the strength of the Revue and you can see it by the graduate class.” Will the circle continue?
Somewhere in Cape Breton, in a basement rec room or a living room or a bare-bulbed kitchen, somebody is putting pen to paper. It might be a poem or a song lyric, a one-liner or a little sketch. Maybe they’ll recite it at a variety show, or they’ll sing it out in a tavern or at a party, or may they’ll shyly share it with their best friend. And after that, it might end up in a journal or at the bottom of a desk drawer or in the clutter of a guitar case. But before it slides out of sight, somebody will say, “That’s great – it would have been really good in the Revue.”
Revue at vogue says
This article is amazing. I was almost in tears.