Plain Jane Theatre’s production of Wish You Were Here – The Ultimate Traveller’s Guide to the Globe runs March 4-12 at Varscona Backstage Theatre. The brand-new Noel Coward revue’ features Kendra Connor, Chris W. Cook, Cathy Derkach and Oscar Derkx.
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Please do not believe that I criticize or cavel at a real urge to roam
But why oh why do the wrong individuals travel as soon as the right individuals continue to be Spine home?
— from Sail Away by Noel Coward
Why is it much easier to be motivated as soon as you’re somewhere else? as soon as you’re dislodged from home, hailing cabs or camels in foreign cities, meeting exotic strangers in hotel bars, accepting impromptu invitations to unexplained galas?
When Kate Ryan was casting concerning for a song list for a brand-new revue, a salute to wanderlust, she believed she may pry a few numbers from the vintage repertoire where her musical theatre company, Plain Jane Theatre, loves to hang out. Throughout the Jazz Age, the Gershwins and Cole Porter didn’t continue to be put in America. Neither did Irving Berlin.
“I wondered if we’d have actually to (venture) in to the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s,” says Ryan. Stephen Schwartz? Sondheim? Lloyd Webber? Then, “350 songs later,” Ryan came to understand that Noel Coward, the last century’s Jazz Baby extraordinaire, was the quintessential traveller. Under the influence of wanderlust, the man wrote whole plays, operettas, revues, screenplays, cabarets, music-hall entertainments, not to mention song after song. You’ll hear lots of in Wish You Were Here: The Ultimate Travellers Guide to the World, “a brand-new Noel Coward revue” Ryan sets in the 1930s because “individuals went by ship then, not air, and there was time.”
“He wrote concerning what, that he saw,” says Ryan. “He was a writer that called for his wanderlust.” In the ’20s the young Englishman made his very first trip to brand-new York, fell in like along with Broadway and was motivated by Broadway to write the comedy The Young Idea, his very first big success. And so it went, in a life full of exotic destinations and improbable connections, and writing inspirations that happened on location.
Recuperating from the weariness of having four plays operating the West End in the mid-’20s, he recuperated in Hawaii, and wrote a couple of songs including one of his biggest hits, A Room along with A View. Driving from Hanoi to Saigon in 1931, he wrote Mad Dogs and Englishmen, a cheeky cabaret song that has actually a go at colonialist attitudes. Laid up along with the flu in 1930 at the Cathay Hotel in Shanghai, the English-language theatre’s biggest earner at the time knocked off the frothy Private Lives in four days.
Nina From Argentina that refused to dance, A Bar On The Piccola Marina concerning a woman moving on from her husband’s death, a high-society bash on the grand canal in Venice. As Ryan points out, so lots of Coward songs, from dreamy ballads to spirited satirical ditties, were “concerning individuals he’d met, in actual places” where his wanderlust had taken him.
Wish You Were Here isn’t the very first time a Ryan has actually tackled the subject of wanderlust. Fifteen years ago, her sister Bridget Ryan developed Mile higher Madness, a free-wheeling cabaret that assembled all the aggravations and absurdities associated along with air travel; Kate joined the cast. “We closed the day prior to 9-11,” she remembers of that turning point in history as soon as air travel got a lot much more aggravating. No wonder she’s set Wish You Were Here in an age as soon as individuals tended to float their method across the Atlantic, foxtrotting along with strangers and drinking Veuve champagne as opposed to sitting on the tarmac in Calgary contemplating the prospect of squeezable cheese.
What Ryan loves concerning Coward’s songwriting, as she’s discovered in the course of her Plain Janes research, is “his amazing musicality, his sense of ease along with the lyrics he wrote simultaneously to the music … It’s conversation. It’s personal. The natural inflection is a gift for the actors, in phrasing and emphasis, in tension and inflection. And he’s such a master of rhyme.”
After her cast has actually rehearsed an intricately multi-syllabic showstopper such as Mad Dogs and Englishmen, “the actors feel love they’ve done mouth gymnastics,” laughs Ryan. “They’re so difficult to execute … Words were his weapons.”
In the revue, Ryan’s quartet of actors play four characters, that represent four aspects of the deluxe multi-faceted Noel himself: “adventurer, writer, performer, lover/playboy.” Says Ryan, “we let the songs tell the story … His text is so strong, I didn’t hope to compete.”
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PREVIEW
Wish You Were Here: The Ultimate Traveller’s Guide To The Globe (a brand-new Noel Coward revue)
Theatre: Plain Jane
Directed by: Kate Ryan
Starring: Kendra Connor, Chris W. Cook, Cathy Derkach, Oscar Derkx
Where: Backstage Stage, ATB Financial Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.
Running: Friday through March 12
Tickets: TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca) or the door
“We have actually hockey, we have actually music, we have actually film and television production. And we hope to distribute our content across all platforms.”Likewise on the horizon: ShrEdmonton Metal Festival and Conference, and Plants and Animals.There was lots to do on Saturday, Feb. 20 in Edmonton, and Postmedia photographers were out in the community catching the action. Here is a selection of photos from the …A $45-million festival park? Why spend taxpayer dollars to undercut public facilities we already have?
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