Theatre Review

Vaudeville - The Musical

by Alvina Ruprecht, CBC Radio One/Ottawa Morning - Monday, October 20, 2003

ALVINA : Morning Rob.

HOST: First of all what was your general impression of this....?

ALVINA : This is a musical that takes us back to the 1930s. It is a wonderful nostalgia trip because it concerns a dying, if not dead art form. We are in the Adelphi Theatre in Buffalo- an old Vaudeville theatre. You asked me if I liked the show? Well, the Music is good...it is in fact a medley of songs from the 1930s. But, it also has a beautiful piece written and arranged by Gord Carruth called Those Were the Golden Years. Carruth is a very talented composer of songs and especially good for this kind of musical theatre. The arrangement with lots of strings, sent waves of nostalgia sweeping across the theatre so that it embodied the spirit of the whole performance. The concept was potentially very entertaining. It was based on a series of small performances, like a real Vaudeville show and the music, directed by Theresa Cillis-O’Meara sounded just like a Vaudeville theatre band.

HOST. And this was local production., with local actors?

ALVINA : Yes it was . And as a local show, it gave a great opportunity to a lot of people from the Centrepoint community. Young and old could get on stage, and there was an enormous cast, between 40 and 50 people. I stopped counting after a while. That was the biggest virtue of this production. One got the impression that EVERYBODY was on stage..But of course that also had its drawbacks because the production couldn’t sustain the quality. But, you know, they brought in a real professional magician.: The Great Pilsworth !!!

HOST: Not an actor !! The real thing??

ALVINA : Oh yes. This was Chris Pilsworth, The Great Pilsworth himself. Such a charming man with a gorgeous smile. He gave us about 15 minutes of a real live magic show that was phenomenal!!! He made things disappear and reappear, his slight of hand created perfect illusions. There is also a very attractive and off beat kind of actor and singer called Ron Clarke. He has a deep bass voice and a big lumbering stage presence that places him somewhere between a lonesome cowboy and the Pirates of Penzance.. He played, Dan McGee, a character out of a Robert Service poem and he sung his way across the stage as a Bavarian lover, among other things. .. But that just gives you an idea of the mixture of characters here.

HOST: This then is about putting on a vaudeville show in Buffalo right in the middle of the depression..?

ALVINA: And it is held together by those two seasoned performers SAM Goldstein and BJ Gallagher, played by Bob Lackey and Al Baldwin. They tell us how Vaudeville is dying, because it cant compete with talking films. They want to realise their dream and bring back this dying art..so they decide to prepare a show. In Act 1 we see the auditions for that show and Act II becomes the show.

HOST: So now, after the music and the magician, what about all the other performances that really made up the vaudeville acts. ??

ALVINA: It was very mixed. For example. There were a lot of stereotypical characters so you could guess what was going to happen. . Even the 2 main characters Sam and BJ ..were old hat. , There is Kitty Larue, the nasty showgirl who wont let the younger prettier girl into the show, There is the old time star who tries to return and who epitomizes the golden years of Vaudeville. . There is the naive young thing coming to try out for the part- Here we discovered Leah Cogan as Ruby Harrigan. Cogan has a very pleasant soprano voice but she needed a lot more acting coaching. That was the big problem here. The actual story line was not particularly important; what was very important were the staging and the vaudeville acts. And in general they were very amateurish. Although it is true that Vaudeville was not a totally “polished” form of performance. The distinction still must be made between the character who is unpolished (which is what we are looking for) and the actor who is unpolished, which is what we don’t want to see.

HOST : Did any of the acts strike you particularly?

ALVINA : Well yes. They did a good spoof of Shakespeare..Which strung together lines from all his plays! I thought of Company of Fools- perhaps they should have been invited to take part! It all took part in a pub run by Henry Quince and his wife with the screechy voice..(fifth). There was a sweet group of dancing children called The Rhythm kids which were ok...especially in act I.

HOST: So basically this was a fun community project...

ALVINA ; That’s it. And it was obvious that everyone had a ball...but I’ll bet a professional production would have given us something really breathtaking here..this show has a lot of potential.

HOST : VAUDEVILLE runs all this week at Centrepoint Theatre. Curtain at 8pm. There is a 2pm matinee on Saturday, the 25th. And should one bring the children?

ALVINA Yes...there were a lot of young people in the audience.

[ Source: http://www.ottawa.cbc.ca/ottawamorning/archives/theatre/vaudeville.html ]