Les Canadiens

Our family never owned a television when we were growing up. My father was convinced television was an evil, corrupting force that rotted one’s brain. A fairly common reaction middle-class intellectuals had to the birth of television and the Global Village. (I wonder what historians will say, fifty years from now, about the powerful effect TV, cassette recorders, video, then computers, social media and live-streaming had on the history of society. maybe dad was right?) If ever, as children, we looked to be having an idle moment, he would bend his ear over our heads, “I can hear your brain mold growing”, he would say. OK, with a smile. As a ten-year-old on a Sunday night, I would sneak over to the neighbours to watch Bonanza or the Ed Sullivan Show. Saturday nights I knocked on my other neighbour’s door, as if by accident, “Can Michel come out to play.” “Oh,” Mdm Côté would reply, “Il est en haut. Il regarde le hockey avec son père. Would you like to watch too?” I would feign indifference, “Yes, OK.” “Michel, c’est Guy-Guy” (First French, then English pronunciation, Mrs. Côté gave me a nick-name for life.) Then I’d scramble excitedly up to the attic, which was as far as the television had breached the Côté household in the late Fifties. Out of politeness to me, they would switch from the French to the English station. The Hockey Night In Canada broadcast would only join the game at 8:30 in those days, late in the first period. And the TV audio reception was inferior to the radio broadcast, so the ritual was to watch the TV with audio muted while listening to the radio play-by-play. The dying days of the Rocket with Béliveau at the height of his game at centre. Thus began my life-long obsession with the Habs.

I arrived for a visit to Canada in the Fall of 1975 armed with a small Canada Council travel grant to get acquainted with theatre across the country. My first stop was with Maurice Podbrey at the Centaur. I knew him of course, back in ’70-’71 at the time of the founding of the Centaur. Even wrote about him for the Montreal Star. I had hired his wife Elsa Bolam, co-founder of the Centaur, to direct Loot for Theatre XV. Our meeting took place at his home in Westmount, he was watching an Expos baseball game. While impressed with my fist-full of nice notices from the British mainstream press, he was more interested in the ball game than in talking to me. I pitched an idea to create a show about the history of the Habs as a kind of window/mirror on Québec’s nationalistic journey to self-identity. My concept was a total rip-off of the concept of the play, Hammers, about the iconic East London, West Ham football club that Pam had directed, with great success, for the Half Moon. Hammers followed the history of the club’s fortunes and related them to partisan, almost patriotic, East London pride in it’s working-class history and identity. I was proposing depicting the history of the Montreal Canadiens as a window on the rise of Québec’s sense of identity and nationalism. After I made my pitch, Maurice looked over briefly from his baseball game and nodded, “ I like it. You’ll have to find a writer.” So I did. When I got to Toronto on my cross-Canada theatre trek, actors like Janet Amos recommended Rick Salutin who had been the writer on the very successful Passe Mureille show, 1837. Despite working on material, The Habs, that has been a life-long obsession, the working relationship did not end well.

Polished aluminum was a simulacrum for the ice surface. It was the era of the invincible Habs, four Stanley cups in a row. Ken Dryden, who was a Centaur subscriber, believe it or not, provided background in our research stage. I met a lot of Hab legends before we started rehearsals. Bob Gainey came to the opening.

Balconville by David Fennario

After our tension during and around the rehearsals for Nothing To Lose, David F. told Maurice that he did not want me directing his next play, Toronto. So Maurice hired a Toronto director to direct. This was ironic as the play had to do with our auditions in Toronto for the production of Nothing To Lose, and one of the characters in the play was the director doing the auditions. I.e. me. (Tom Butler was cast as me in the play. We’ve shared a few laughs about that.) Production was a bit of a dud. Even David admitted it. For his fourth play, David reluctantly agreed to go back to me as his director. Again Maurice was watching television when he invited me over to make the offer, handing the draft of the script with the discouraging words, “Well it is not very good, but I suppose we have to do it.” Then Maurice went back to watch the Expos on TV. Peter McNeill was a fit for the Johnny character, essentially the same character he had played in NTL. Jean Archambault had the part of Thibault written for him with great sensitivity by David. One of David’s great strengths is understanding the guts of his actors and how they could shape-shift into his characters. The quality of the show was assured when Marc Gélinas turned up to audition. A well known Vedette, Québec singer who, after a few bouts of alcoholism, was reduced to working on the English side of town.

Wings

Paper Wheat

With the success of Nothing To Lose and Les Canadiens I was getting a national reputation as a political director. Out of the blue I got a phone call from Andy Tahn, Artistic Director of 25th St House in Saskatoon. Would I like to direct the provincial and national tour of a collective entitled Paper Wheat. It proved to be another learning journey. I knew nothing about the settlement of the Prairies and the Co-op movement, even though my grandfather had owned a section of land in Saskachewan. The cast members in the original version were all uniformly white-bread Anglo-Saxon. It blew my mind that a show about the settlement of the Prairies could be conceived without any immigrant content. So for the reworked version I insisted that Andy find the best damn Ukrainian fiddler in the West. To his credit, Andy found me Bill Prokopchuk, the very best. And I cast Lubomir Mykytiuk and Skai Leja for the remake of the show. Below is an excerpt from Alan Filewood’s book, Collective Encounters -Documentary Theatre in English Canada. He nails in great detail the extensive changes to the script we introduced for the national tour. I thought I was being “inclusive” and representing “diversity” at the time. Today it is unbelievable that in 1976 we created a show about the occupation of the Prairies with absolutely no Indigenous references or content at all. Talk about Settler blindness.

Tempest

Quiet in the Land

Circus Gothic

The Leonard Cohen Show

Something Red