Miss Caledonia lives out mother's dream of becoming a starlet
In the 1950s, Peggy Ann Douglas was an Ontario farm girl with a dream. She wanted to be a movie star like her idol Debbie Reynolds, who often recalled in magazine articles that her ticket to Hollywood was winning a beauty pageant.
When Douglas was 16, she won her first beauty pageant, becoming Miss Hunter and Angler, and she never looked back.
“In our basement were all my mother’s sashes, trophies and cups and she had scrapbooks galore about her beauty pageant days. I grew up with my mom’s story,” says actor and playwright Melody Johnson, who turned her mother’s dream into a high-spirited solo show called Miss Caledonia.
The show has toured Canada and the United Kingdom for the past six years, but somehow it kept bypassing Calgary. That unintentional slight will be rectified when Johnson’s comedy plays Lunchbox Theatre April 2-21.
Johnson is busy working on her newest solo show, Person of Interest at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, so the character modelled after her mother will be brought to life by Jamie Konchak.
“Jamie and I have crossed paths several times during summers at the Two Planks and a Passion theatre in Nova Scotia. I couldn’t be more excited to have Jamie play mom. She embodies the spirit of my mother.”
Johnson began writing Miss Caledonia with her mother’s blessing and help in 2007.
“It started with us just talking about those days and then I started taking notes and we’d phone and email each other.
“We did a workshop reading for the Lighthouse Theatre in Port Dover, (Ont.), because they had given us some development money and we were able to do four shows at the Blythe Festival.”
These early shows led to Johnson performing at the 2010 Summer Works Theatre Festival in Toronto, which caught the eye of the artistic staff at Tarragon Theatre.
“Tarragon gave me a space and a dramaturge to keep working on my script and then I presented it.”
That performance earned her Johnson Dora award nominations for best new play and best solo performance.
Douglas died in 2011, but she once showed her daughter a letter she received from Bing Crosby. She had written to the crooner telling him she was thinking about getting into acting and asked for his advice. His letter encouraged her to pursue her dream and, because of Reynolds’ experience, that meant participating in as many pageants as she could.
Johnson points out that Miss Caledonia is not really a solo show because it requires an onstage musician, who will be played in Calgary by Aleksandra Danicic.
“The fiddler is essential because she is the one who keeps prodding my mother to follow her dream and she provides the music for mom’s flights of fantasy.”
In Calgary, Miss Caledonia is being directed by Karen JohnsonDiamond. After its Lunchbox run and in conjunction with Toronto’s Smile Theatre, Miss Caledonia will visit seniors’ care facilities in the city and will be presented at the new Rocky Ridge YMCA.
Tickets for the Lunchbox run are on sale at tickets. lunch box theatre. com or by phone at 403-265-4292, ext. 0.