Theatre at UBC Blog

Billy Bishop Goes to War was first written and performed by alumnus John Gray and Eric Peterson in 1978. Our alumnus are still soaring 30 year later as Billy Bishop wings his way back to Toronto’s Young Centre with Soulpepper Theatre! Creators John Gray and Eric Peterson have returned with the beloved story of the celebrated and irreverent Canadian World War One flying ace.

Photo: Michael Stuparyk - Toronto Star

The play premiered originally at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre in Vancouver with Peterson playing 18 different characters, and Gray accompanying him on piano and vocals. This original production toured across Canada, and also was staged in Washington, DC, both on Broadway and off-Broadway in New York City, at the Edinburgh Festival, in Los Angeles and at the Comedy Theatre in London. The libretto was published in 1981 by Talonbooks. The show was produced on Broadway at the Morosco Theatre and afterwards moved to Off-Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. The play won the Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Award in 1981, the Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award in 1982 and the Governor General’s Award for English Drama in 1983.

In 1998, Gray and Peterson revised the show, presenting events through the eyes of a much older Bishop recalling his wartime exploits. They again toured the new production across Canada. This revised show was produced with the original actors at Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre in 2009 and again in 2010 after a second revision was made. Due to the phenomenal success of the show it’s back for the third year in a row as Soulpepper’s entry in Toronto prestigious Lumniato Festival.

Theatre at UBC staged our own highly successful production of the original script a few years back with alumnus Ryan Biel in the Eric Peterson role as “Billy” and John Gray’s son Zachary Gray replacing his father behind the piano and on vocals. [Visit the show site for a look at our handsome production: http://www.theatre.ubc.ca/billy_bishop/index.shtml]

Photo: Tim Matheson

In an interview about the revised version of the script, Eric Peterson stated: “We’ve gone through radical recasting! From a 32 year old to a 62 year old as the actor who’s going to be narrating the show. In a two man play like this, it has incredibly different resonance depending on who’s telling that story. In many cases, we’ve taken some minor rewriting for the production we did when we were 52 and updated them and changed the ending. Now at 62 we’re older than Bishop ever was in the play before.”

We wish these high flyers continued success!

Editor’s Note ~ This month’s guest blog post is by our Head of Properties Janet Bickford who is retiring this spring after 19 seasons with Theatre at UBC.

“I got interested in theatre during high school, inspired by a charismatic teacher called Maurice Gibbons.  My other love was writing.  So at UBC in the sixties I did a BA in Theatre and Creative Writing.  Perhaps I’d become a playwright.  Afterward I needed some experience in the business to get me going.  Mustering all my nerve, I applied for the costume job at Holiday Theatre, a children’s theatre group that ran out of the old Metro Shop.”

“There I met Cameron Porteous, a set and costume designer who was to become a big influence on my career.  He convinced me to apply to Wimbledon College of Art in London England for their costume-cutting program.  I was accepted and soon found myself sharing a cramped flat in Camden Town with my boyfriend David, his sister and her boyfriend. David was also going to Art School in London but he decided his program was rubbish and headed to Morocco with a friend from Vancouver.  They didn’t want a woman with them in a Muslim country, so I was left in London where I freaked out. My course hadn’t started yet, so I took what money I had left and returned to Vancouver.”

Photo: Martin Dee

“Broke, I called up Allan Wallis, then production manager at the Vancouver Playhouse, and asked for a job.  He told me he had no openings in the costume department but if I’d work as a props apprentice, he could hire me.  This was a turning point for me. I was working under the late Jack Simon and the designer was my old mentor, Carmeron Porteous.”

“I fell in love with prop making.  Jack was an amazing teacher.  Cameron’s designs were always an inspiration.  When Jack became a fully-fledged designer, I took over as Head of Props at the Vancouver Playhouse.  I have fond memories of my years as a member of the Playhouse team.”

“In 1979, I did the summer Opera Festival at the National Arts Centre and, in 1983, I joined the Playhouse migration to the Shaw Festival, again working with Cameron. But I missed Vancouver and so I returned. From my base in Kitsilano, I branched out into film work as a sculptor in the Construction Department of IATSE and joined All Set Design for the big push toward Expo 86. Here I learned model making skills and some of the tricks of the display trade.”

“After a few years of free-lancing, I found my way to the Freddy Wood in 1992 working with Sherry Milne.  I’ve been here ever since.  It seems fitting to retire after giving something back to my Alma Mater.”

“I’ll never forget being called into Professor John Brockington’s office upon my graduation from the UBC Theatre Program.  ‘You haven’t really distinguished yourself during your time here,’ he said.  ‘ I wouldn’t suggest you go knocking on the door at the Playhouse asking for work.’ Little did he know.”

Editor’s Note ~ This month’s guest blog post by Professor Stephen Heatley is an adaptation of his notes in the show program for Wild Honey which runs to March 26 :

As you may know, ours is a wide-ranging and diverse department. We feature three different BFA degrees, two BA streams, four MFA specialties, two MAs and a PhD plus two certificates. Our students are scholars and practitioners. As usual, tonight’s production is led by student initiative. All four design elements are created by students, the actors are part of the Bachelor of Fine Arts Acting conservatory program, and the production is managed and crewed by students in our theatre production stream. Here, I would like to focus on the Master of Fine Arts in Directing for Theatre and the graduate student who leads the team for Wild Honey, Brian Cochrane.

Actors: L-R (Back): Claire Hesselgrave, Mishelle Cuttler, Sarah Goodwill, Christine Quintata. (Front) Ben Whipple Photo Credit: Tim Matheson Photo Credit: Tim Matheson

Directing Wild Honey is part of Brian’s MFA thesis. A student in directing undertakes a certain amount of course work during their two-year residency at UBC and the work culminates in directing a full-length play in the Theatre at UBC season. What follows the production is a document outlining the preparation for and reflection on the production, which will eventually be placed on record in the UBC library and remain a permanent testament to this ephemeral event.

Director Brian Cochrane steps into our publicity photo shoot to see what it's like to be Platinov! In Photo ~ Actors: L-R: (Kneeling) Christine Quintata, Sarah Goodwill, Mishelle Cuttler, Brian Cochrane (Director), Ben Whipple, Claire Hesselgrave Photo Credit: Tim Matheson

We are really proud of the students who complete this program and become leaders in their field. UBC directing grads are ubiquitous in the theatre; one leads Theatre Calgary, one leads the Sudbury Theatre Centre, one leads Vancouver’s Pi Theatre, one leads Vancouver’s only professional Francophone com- pany, one co-directs the city’s Leaky Heaven Circus, one is Associate Director at the Richmond Gateway, one is currently teaching and directing at Bishop’s University in Quebec, one has recently directed for the Arts Club, another for the Vancouver Playhouse, one is the resident dramaturg at the Arts Club, another is full-time faculty at the University of Victoria, one is full-time faculty at Thompson Rivers University, one stars in Little Mosque on the Prairie, one stars regularly at the Stratford Festival, another runs a company in Seattle, another is a faculty member at Perdue University, another at Trinity Western University, many are working free lancers and Jessie and Leo Award winners, one is a UBC faculty colleague. And there are many more!

This litany of talent is listed only to underline that our current production of Wild Honey is the work of a director and an artist who will go on to have a major impact on the theatre as we know it.

I hope you’ll take the opportunity to attend Theatre at UBC and support the emerging talent we are so proud to nurture. The last piece of the Theatre at UBC puzzle this year is the always surprising Brave New Play Rites Festival in the Dorothy Somerset Studio, March 30 to April 3. See you there!

Stephen Heatley Interim Head, UBC Department of Theatre and Film

In anticipation of our opening next week for Sarah Rhul’s biting satire Dead Man’s Cell Phone here are a few heady facts about the evolution of mobile phones:

The first mobile telephone call was made from inside a car in St. Louis Missouri on June 17, 1946, but it was far from what we think of as a portable handset today. The car mounted equipment weighed 80 lbs, and the AT&T service, basically a massive party line, cost $30 per month plus 30 to 40 cents per local call.

Father of the handheld

The first handheld mobile phone was demonstrated by Dr. Martin Cooper (Born 1928) of Motorola in 1973, using a handset weighing 4.4 lbs. Cooper, then general manager of Motorola’s Communications Systems Division carried the hefty cell phone through New York City and placed a call to his rival, Joel Engels at Bell Labs via a connection to Engels’ land line. Dr. Cooper later revealed that watching Captain Kirk talking into his communicator on the tv show Star Trek inspired him to research the mobile phone.

Producing that first phone in 1973 cost Motorola the equivalent of $1m in today’s currency and the battery lasted 20 minutes, after which you needed to recharge it for 10 hours.

Ten years later Motorola released the first commercially available mobile phone, the DynaTAC 8000x. The cost was equivalent to more than $10,000 today and the phone weighed in at 2.5 lbs. Luckily yuppies had shoulder pads on which to rest the hefty devices.

Today 71% of Canadians either own a cell phone or plan to buy one in the near future.

“The cellphone in the long range is going to be embedded under your skin behind your ear along with a very powerful computer who is in effect your slave”. – Martin Cooper, inventor of the mobile phone

Re-use, Reduce – and please Re-cycle

40,000 cellphones are thrown out across Canada every day, according to the Recycling Council of B.C. Only 12% of used mobile devices in Canada are currently being recycled; the rest are stored, sold, gifted or thrown out.

Mobile phones contain toxic substances that need to be disposed in a safe manner. Some dangerous components include cadmium, copper and nickel, which should not be normally disposed of as trash. Each phone contains about a dollar’s worth of precious metals, mostly gold. More than 95 per cent of the materials in an average mobile device are recyclable.

If you want to know where to recycle your phone go to RecycleMyCell.ca and enter your postal code to find the closest drop off centre, or call 1-888-797-1740 for more information. Nationwide this re-cycling program collected 345,694 cell phones collected in 2009 alone (its first year) – that’s 69.1388 tonnes of cell phones.

—

Note: Dead Man’s Cell Phone opens January 20, 2011. To see production photos, designers’ portfolio and more go to the Dead Man’s Cell Phone show site. Tickets are Reg. $22/Senior $15/Student $10 and are available online.

A Guest Blog post by MFA Design student Mandi Lau who’s set designer for our upcoming production of Sarah Rhul’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone ~

The use of the arena configuration in the Telus Studio Theatre is an honest and direct response to the existing architecture. From my recent lighting design experience in the space for The Madonna Painter, I noticed a lot of great qualities, as well as unique design potentials that set apart the Telus from all other black box or conventional proscenium style of theatres.

The Telus has quite a few flaws as a theatre in terms of practicality (ie. the lack of an overhead grid and efficient rigging system etc.), but nonetheless, it is a very interesting and special piece of architecture. For example, the unique “flexibility” of the Telus comes from the 12 movable towers that hold the audience seating, but such quality is only true to the extent that half of those remain attached to each other to form a semi-arena of box style seating, which there is no escape from.

The fact that there are three separate floors of seating in each tower creates an enormous sense of height and closure within such a small space. This imposing sense of height is not only to be felt by the performers but most importantly impacts greatly on how the audience perceives the space for the duration of the performance.

Most often for the audience members on the towers, they have to sit on the edge of their seats and lean on the ledge that surrounds the seats (in groups of 4) for the entire show in order to be able to see what is happening down below on “stage”.

If those unique spatial features of the theatre are appropriately utilized and appreciated, it could reward any production with a great theatrical experience rather than imposing a rigidly fixed set into the already limiting space. For this reason, I want to take this special opportunity and emphasize designing on the ground, embracing the floor that is already existing as the central focal point of the space.

This, in turn, will create a theatrical experience that is unique to the Telus. It is also an exploration and experiment to challenge the conventional “forth-wall-picture-frame” perception of theatrical spaces with a minimalist set and projected stage floor. The use of light and multimedia imagery from multiple projectors will morph and sculpt the space into different locales as the story unfolds. The design of the set and the stage itself only exist for the duration of the play, making all a temporal experience just as any live performance. ~ Mandi Lau

Note: Dead Man’s Cell Phone opens January 20, 2011. To see production photos, designers’ portfolio and more go to the Dead Man’s Cell Phone show site. Tickets are Reg. $22/Senior $15/Student $10 and are available online.

A guest post by BFA Theatre Production and Design student Ling Zhong

As a 3rd year student with Theatre at UBC, I was really looking for an opportunity to find work experience outside of UBC that would help me further my studies in theatre. I found out about volunteer opportunities with the Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre through UBC Careers Services.

As I’m Chinese, I really wanted to help an organization that allows me to work with other Asians and put on different types of productions. VACT puts on plays, musicals, comedy events, and much more. Their mandate is to showcase Asian-Canadian talent in artistically significant roles, and to engage mainstream audiences with Asian-Canadian stories and cultural themes.

I am currently volunteering on ‘VACT’s’ marketing team for its first original musical production, Red Letters. Red Letters is an original Canadian musical written by Alan Bau and Kathy Leung with music and lyrics composed by Alan Bau. Set in 1920s Vancouver, it is the moving story of Shen, an immigrant from China who leaves his wife Mei to come to Canada seeking his fortune.

Once established, he hopes to bring her over to join him. With the enactment of the $500 head tax and the Exclusion Act in 1923, the promise of Gold Mountain is betrayed. Harsh realities of life in Vancouver Canada force Shen to take drastic action if he is ever to see his dreams fulfilled.

I found this musical to be highly relevant to the history of the Chinese Canadian community. This production is being shown in Vancouver at the Roundhouse and then touring to Richmond’s Gateway theatre and Victoria’s Metro Studio Theatre.

My marketing duties at VACT involve helping to find advertisers for the Victoria show and organizing school groups for the Victoria show. It involves a lot of phoning, which I gained experience in from working at the UBC Call Center. I’ve already been successful in booking in a few advertisers for the Red Letters show program.

This volunteer position is quite different than the role I’ve had working on Theatre at UBC productions, but allows me to understand the administrative side to theatre, including marketing. I’ve also been able to meet a lot of new people including other UBC students, local working professionals in the industry, other actors/actresses and the opportunity to work directly with the producer of the show, Joyce Lam – who is also VACT’s Artistic Producer, President and Founder.

Please come out to watch Red Letters and see what my hard work is about – you won’t be disappointed! Student and senior tickets are only $16 + HST and you can buy them online here: Red Letters – Tickets. The Vancouver run is November 26 to December 4 (Discount preview: November 25) and the Richmond show runs December 30 – January 8 (Discount preview: December 29). Find out more at http://www.vact.ca

A guest blog post by BFA Acting candidate Christine Quintana

After 8 intense months of training, rehearsal and performance, most theatre students are grateful for their summer holidays and see them as a brief break from their theatre lifestyle.  Not me, apparently.  In September I’ll begin my final year of the BFA Acting Program, but all this summer I’m working part-time for Bard on the Beach and the Arts Club Theatre Company, and I’m also working full time at Carousel Theatre, and loving every minute of it!

This year marks the 20th year of the Carousel Theatre’s Teen Shakespeare Program, and I’m here working as the Marketing and Audience Services Coordinator for their summer production of The Taming of the Shrew. In the Program, 16 teen actors undergo an intense 4 week rehearsal process culminating in a fully staged production which runs for 2 full weeks free to the public.  It’s my job to do everything from getting posters and fliers printed, writing and pitching the press release, taking press photos, to eventually acting as House Manager as we welcome over 3000 audience members to our show over the two week run.  It’s hard work, but it’s the best experience a theatre student could ask for!

Christine works behind the scenes at Carousel Theatre

I work with the incredible Carole Higgins and Jessie Van Rijn, who run Carousel Theatre as the Artistic and Managing Director and General Manager respectively. I feel lucky to go to work every day and learn from such talented women who are leaders in the Vancouver theatre community. I’m so glad to be working behind the scenes because I feel it will make me a better and more professional actor – the things that don’t seem like a big deal (“Oh, sorry, I’ll get my program bio in on Friday…”) can cause massive delays in important administrative or stage management projects!  A successful production means all hands on deck, and I’m so thrilled to be on board with Carousel Theatre for their summer show.

Christine does the photo shoot for Carousel's free outdoor show "The Taming of the Shrew"

I’m blogging and tweeting all summer leading up to the run of The Taming of the Shrew from July 30 to August 14.  I hope you’ll come out and see our show – bring your friends, it’s completely free!  I am excited to be back at UBC come September, but I’ll miss my Carousel Theatre family when I go.

In the second of a series of guest posts from the Arms and the Man company professional Set Designer Ana Cappelluto shares her inspiration for the Arms and the Man set design:

In the summer of 2009, when I was finally getting down to reading Arms and the Man, the BBC news announced that that a researcher had discovered a joke written by George Bernard Shaw in honour of the opening in 1930 of the Hall at William Morris House in Wimbledon. The joke was found written in Shaw’s hand on a photograph of himself, and read as follows: “William Morris and I preached the gospel of Labour together on many occasions. Many respectable persons thought we deserved hanging. I am proud to hang in a hall dedicated to him.” As a joke it was a little disappointing, but it did trigger a thought which led to research that incorporated photography, William Morris’s idiosyncratic textile designs and socialism. Because many of the characters in Arms and the Man are posers, I decided that I wanted to play with the posed photo. I began by immersing myself in the extensive slide collection at Concordia University. Like all research, it’s the serendipitous find that often makes the searching most exciting. In the collection, I found original slides from the Notman Studio in Montreal.

William Notman was a photographer in the 1800s who became famous for his group portraits of athletic clubs, social gatherings, and prominent families. These composite photographs were created by photographing each subject individually in the studio, with a posing stand at the head to prevent movement. The negative was developed and then printed on photographic paper. The subject was then carefully cut out; the edges were feathered, and placed on a canvas. After fixing, washing, and drying, the canvas was attached to a wooden stretcher, coloured in oil by artists, and then rephotographed to make the composite appear seamless. Early Photoshop mixed in with scene painting: I was inspired. And more so when I read the description of a large-scale reproduction of a fancy dress skating party planned in honour of Prince Arthur. Notman declared his intention to make a record of the event, and invited those who planned to attend to bring their costumes and skates to his studio for a composite photograph:

One hundred and fifty people came in answer to the advertisement to don their brightly coloured costumes representing various themes and epochs. They included Scottish couples in Highland costume, Elizabethan ladies and courtiers, several soldiers and sailors, a voyageur, a pilgrim father, “Diana”, goddess of the hunt, with bow and arrows, a scattering of young women in peasant costumes, a woman dressed as Night, another as the morning star, a man arrayed as a counter bass, another as a giant head and an “Indian” who appears to be aiming his arrow at a woman smoking a cigar.

In Arms and the Man, the characters that inhabit the “house” have more money than sense, and spend much of their time posing and romanticizing the war. I began to cut and paste, as needed, elements for my own composite photo. And so what began with a joke at the back of a photograph, ended up as a photographer’s backdrop for the actors.

Ana Cappelluto
Scenic Design

Works Cited
Triggs, Stanley G. “The Composite Photographs.” Mccord-museum.qc.ca. McCord Museum, 2005. Wed. March 10, 2010.

Note: See more set design renderings on our show site!

In the first of a series of guest posts from the Arms and the Man company, second year BFA Acting Candidate Ryan Warden weighs in on the question “Is theatre dead?”:

Depending on what circles you’re in the answer will invariably vary. If you’re reading this your answer is probably “no”, but for the vast majority of the population, theatre is just a class they took in high school.

Even many in the theatre community are heralding the death of theatre due to the recent cuts in arts spending. Despite the recent resurgence in arts and culture awareness during the Olympic games, it doesn’t look like things are going to get any better. In fact, yesterday’s budget lockup at the BC Legislature revealed that arts spending will continue to drop to record lows.

High octane warm ups in rehearsal for our upcoming production of Arms and the Man reveal definite signs of life. Photo Credit: R Warden

So, for those of us who are investing years of our lives in theatre school, not to mention the years after paying off student loans, it begs the question, “Are you nuts?” Well the simple answer is “yes” and to be honest it’s a question I ask myself far too frequently.

However, all I have to do is look over the past couple years that I’ve been in UBC’s BFA Acting program and it’s plain to see that it would be nuts NOT to do this. It’s way too much fun! And I’ve achieved an awareness of myself and those around me in a way I never thought possible. I’ve managed to break out of my skull and inhabit my body as a whole, fully-functioning person, which is quite a feat in today’s world.

As social interactions and relationships become increasingly web-based, theatre is one of the last strongholds of good old fashioned human connection in its truest form. So those of us here in the Alamo might be committing suicide, but we’ll fight to the death nonetheless.

~ Ryan Warden

Bio: Ryan Warden’s production credits include UBC’s Mother Courage, The Rez Sisters, and A Dybbuk as well as lighting operator for Werewolves (Pi Theatre). Acting credits include The Collector and Weeding the Flowers (Brave New Play Rites), The Dining Room (Director Sarah Rogers) and The Laramie Project (Director Nicola Cavendish). His most recent work was in Romeo & Juliet for Theatre at UBC. He is most proud of his role in David Savoy’s Diary of a Madman, which was chosen for admission to Setkani/Encounter International Theatre Festival in Bruno, Czech Republic. http://www.wardenfilms.com

In the second of a series of guest posts from the Romeo & Juliet company final year BFA Acting Candidate Moneca Lander talks about the BFA Acting program:

Before UBC, I attended various acting schools and programs to further my education and training. As soon as I began my journey here at UBC I realized that this is where I needed to be in order to fully explore my potential as an actor.

Professor Gayle Murphy coaches BFA acting Candidate Moneca Lander.

Throughout my years here at UBC I’ve been involved in many productions. The specialized training in my classes has broadened my range as an actor and exposed me to a variety of stylistic acting techniques – one of the most memorable, being the Commedia dell’arte mask work introduced in my Intermediate year. This stylistic training gave me a foundation for my work in full-scale productions, such as Servant of Two Masters in which I was given the opportunity to play the role of “Smeraldina” the lady’s maid. I was able to transform myself physically, vocally and mentally into a character, a task that would have been extremely difficult to do had I not been given the stylistic training.

I’ve developed a strong appreciation for the classical training this program has offered. I believe that a strong well-rounded foundation is crucial in the development of a young actor.  The specialized training in a wide range of stylistic genres such as Shakespearian, Renaissance, Commedia dell’arte and Modern/Contemporary has absolutely made me a well-rounded actor.

"...and playing is what i am here to do."

Romeo and Juliet will be my final performance before graduating the program – and what an amazing experience it is turning out to be! The amount of professionalism that I am experiencing in UBC’s academic learning environment makes me confident and ready to accept any new challenges in the “real world.”

Working with and observing actors from the various class years of the program has proven to be a fantastic way for me to expand my own skills. I often find myself more open to ideas and suggestions when surrounded by such an inspiring group of talented actors.

Moneca Lander backstage in rehearsal for Romeo & Juliet.

The rehearsal process for Romeo and Juliet has been extremely organized.  The expectations are always set out by the director, and we are able to come to rehearsal with our work done, and just play! And playing is exactly why I’m here. I can’t think of anything else in this world that would ignite as much passion within me, as the satisfaction of bringing a written character to life and watching us both grow together.

– Moneca Lander