Happy talk, keep talking happy talk.
Talk about things you'd like to do.
You gotta have a dream
If you don't have a dream,
How ya gonna have a dream come true?
It was 65 years ago when the now-famous lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II burst onto the Broadway stage in the hit musical South Pacific.
But he might well have written them about the movers and shakers of the local theatre community in 2014. Because, if there's a thread that connects all of the people who sat down to talk to The Record for this series, it's exactly that: They're all dreaming big. And they're all making those dreams happen.
Enter the dreamers
The earliest of the city's theatre dreamers have long since left our midst. They began dreaming back in the 1920s when a group of young people at St. Aidan's Church set up the Unity Club, with a goal to raise money for the church by putting on plays.
That's the group that formed the basis of today's Vagabond Players - which, in its current incarnation, has been operating in New Westminster since 1937. They've been dreaming big ever since, seeing the potential in an old fisheries building in Queen's Park that was handed over by the city in 1950 and working, year after year, to turn it into the space that is today's Bernie Legge Theatre.
"Everything that's turned that old shell of a building into a theatre has been done by the Vagabond Players," said Elizabeth Elwood, president of today's Vagabond board.
Having its own home allows the Vagabond group to be that rare breed of community theatre that is still producing a full, five-play theatre season.
While the Vagabonds' history has unfolded in Queen's Park, other groups have sprung up in the city. In 1990, the city was witness to the first musical produced by the then-brand-new Royal City Musical Theatre: Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. This April, Annie will take to the stage at the Massey Theatre to mark the group's 25th annual production.
The group provides a bridge between the non-professional and the professional theatre worlds, giving emerging talent a chance to take part in producing a large, professional-quality musical.
Then we have the new generation of dreamers - envisioning a future of providing paid professional opportunities to performers and high-quality professional theatre for audiences.
There's City Stage New West, with artistic director Renee Bucciarelli working alongside a volunteer board to provide professional theatre in the city. The group grew out of the former Burr Theatre, forming in July of 2005 with a mission to fill the cultural gap left by the closure of the downtown theatre.
Since its first staged reading of T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral at Holy Trinity Cathedral, it has been working to fulfil its mission. That mission has now grown to be, in Bucciarelli's words: "providing professional theatre that entertains, enlightens and educates while strengthening respect for Canadian diversity."
Then there's Patrick Street Productions, in the persons of its founders and co-artistic producers, Katey Wright and Peter Jorgensen. Formerly of Burnaby - where their Patrick Street home gave the company its name - they now live in and run their company out of New Westminster.
They're a married couple with one small child and one big mission: to provide professional opportunities for musical theatre performers in the Lower Mainland. The company was founded in 2007, with an emphasis on producing professional musicals that have yet to be seen in the Vancouver region. They've since staged four full-scale musicals and are currently in their first two-production season.
Together, these dreamers are at the core of what has become, for New Westminster, a thriving theatre scene.
Enter the reality
There's one major trouble with dreams, of course. Sometimes they run up against the cold hard wall of reality.
When the world economy tanked in 2008 and belts started to tighten, the theatre community was faced with the realization that you could produce all the high-quality shows you wanted, but if you couldn't fill seats, there was no future in it.
Government grants shrank. People stopped spending what used to be their "disposable" income. And theatre, as with the rest of the arts, became a "frill" people couldn't afford.
So what's a theatre company to do?
In the case of City Stage New West, it did exactly the opposite of what you might have expected - it produced a professional staged reading of King Lear.
Ditto Patrick Street Productions. That very intimidating year, 2008, marked its first professional musical production, Into the Woods, at the Cultch.
It found an audience of people eager to see a musical that hadn't yet been staged professionally in Vancouver, and it followed that up with three more successful musicals: The Full Monty, Bat Boy and The Light in the Piazza.
Each year, Jorgensen said, they see signs they're continuing to grow: they get new patrons, new donors, a bit more "buzz" about their work.
"Audiences have stayed consistent," Wright said, adding that, in today's economy, consistency is a big deal.
"If we saw support start to dwindle, we would have to ask the hard questions," Jorgensen added.
But he knows they can't rest on "consistent" - they have to get those numbers up, and that's a challenge in today's market.
As for the city's more established theatre companies, the economic decline of 2008 wasn't the first challenge they'd encountered.
For the Royal City Musical Theatre Company, financial troubles had been faced head-on two years before, when ongoing renovations at New Westminster Secondary School forced the temporary closure of the Massey Theatre, and RCMT was forced to move across the river to Surrey for its run of Peter Pan. Audiences were down, and finances were dim.
But the society regrouped, fundraised and returned to the Massey the following year with a successful run of 42nd Street.
For the Vagabond Players, reality had already bitten hard in the early 2000s, when the company found itself struggling to get audiences - and, as a consequence, to pay the bills. The issue? The fact that the Burr Theatre was operating at the time and also running a full theatre season. There was, it seemed, enough appetite to support one theatre company in town. But two? Maybe not.
"We did go through a tough period in those years," Elwood admitted.
But the players made it through - only to find themselves facing tough financial times again just recently. In part, the company was a victim of its own success, since last year's season - including a run of Fawlty Towers - was so popular that it made too much money to qualify for its usual grant. And, at the same time, it's facing the same economic reality as everyone else in theatre.
"Today's economy is such that a lot of people are feeling the pinch," Elwood noted.
Enter the solutions
So what gives? If the economy is bad and people aren't spending, how is a city the size of New Westminster supporting a thriving local theatre scene?
There's no one magic formula. But there are a few ingredients that are part of the mix.
Key among them, not surprisingly, is affordability. While a big Broadway touring production in downtown Vancouver can easily run for $100 to $150 a seat, local companies are charging a fraction of that. Vagabond sets its prices at $15 ($13 for students and seniors). City Stage's last production ran for $20 and $25. Royal City Musical Theatre offers seats in the $29 to $45 range, and Patrick Street's current season includes a two-shows-for-$60 deal.
"There's only so much disposable income you're trying to come after," said John Davies, president of the Royal City Musical Theatre board. "You want to make sure you give them an offer that's too good to resist."
That means not only affordability but quality, too. (For a more in-depth look at the issue, check out our web-extra story here.)
For Vagabond, that means consistently good-quality community theatre - with an emphasis on audience-favourite comedies and mysteries, but with at least one show per season that offers up what Elwood calls the "actors' and director's challenge." This season, that's the upcoming production of Ann-Marie MacDonald's Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), which will be the company's Theatre B.C. festival entry this year.
For Royal City Musical Theatre, it means going all-out with its annual spring musical - lavish sets and costumes, a full orchestra, a large cast with a couple of professional leads and a slew of emerging talent, all in the beautiful setting of the Massey Theatre.
For City Stage New West, it means continuing to offer up professional productions that are challenging and thought-provoking - such as the just-closed Freud's Last Session.
"You won't see us doing the same material that other groups do," Bucciarelli said. "We really want to fill a niche that's not filled."
The same is true for Patrick Street, which goes out of its way to find musicals that challenge the accepted notion of what musical theatre can do.
"There's lots more commercial things we could be doing," Jorgensen said. But for him, finding less familiar offerings is part of the Patrick Street mission. "There's so many fabulous, interesting musicals that people don't know, or won't know until we bring them to Vancouver."
And so far, they say, it's working.
"One of the things we love is when we hear from patrons, 'I thought I hated musical theatre, and then I saw your show,'" Jorgensen said with a smile.
Coming up in the next instalment: Building community, trying out new ideas - more secrets to theatre success.
