Wave of new musicals a sign of In Tune’s success
Theatre artist Amiel Gladstone remembers a moment of “clear liftoff” at the last, biennial In Tune event, in 2015. At the event aimed at kickstarting new Canadian musical theatre, he was at a showcase where actors were performing excerpts from Best Laid Plans and Onegin—the latter of which he cocreated with Veda Hille for the Arts Club.
“Andrew Wheeler was in both, and I thought this was the greatest indevelopment showcase in Canada I’ve ever seen,” Gladstone, the Touchstone Theatre interim artistic director and In Tune producer, tells the Straight over the phone. “It made me think that Katrina’s idea of musical theatre is actually working,” he adds, referring to Katrina Dunn, the former Touchstone artistic director who launched the conference in 2011 with the Arts Club Theatre Company’s Rachel Ditor.
Onegin went on to sweep the Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards and has just wrapped a run in Toronto. Best Laid Plans joined a roster of other critically acclaimed new musicals, like Love Bomb and Elbow Room: The Musical, that enjoyed full houses. In Tune began because visionary Vancouver artists saw a big audience demand for more musicals, and the need to create more of them at home, rather than just bringing in work from Broadway. It also recognized that the musical, with so many elements, resources, and people needed to create it, had to have a special developing ground. And the creative hothouse that In Tune became—with showcases, workshops, speakers, and visiting presenters—seems to finally be having a big payoff.
“That’s been the really exciting part. Because In Tune has provided a launching pad for so many careers, it feels to me hopefully that in this next round we’re going to see the next crop of new musicals,” Gladstone says. “It feels like we’re going to take the next step forward. And we need the audience to come with us—we need them to take part and give feedback.”
What’s most striking about the “next round” of promising new musicals at this year’s In Tune is the sheer breadth of stories and subject matter they’re taking on, and the different generations represented. At this year’s by-donation public showcases, watch for a sneak peek on Monday (June 12) at The Mysteries, by Vancouver stage veteran Ann Mortifee, an Arts Club collaboration with David Feinstein and Edward Henderson that looks at the Persephone myth. At the other end of the spectrum, you have excerpts from The Preposterous Posthumous Predicament of Paulie Peel, Julie Tepperman and Kevin Wong’s new musical based on a painting; young Vancouver composer Daniel Maté’s The Longing and the Short of It, about six people searching for lasting connection; and What’s on Your Mind, Tracey Power and Steve Charles’s exploration of high-tech screens’ effects on the brain.
“That breadth is totally on purpose, partly because of my own desire to push the form,” Gladstone says, pointing out successful local musicals in the recent past that have been based on everything from online classifieds (Do You Want What I Have Got: A Craigslist Cantata) to indie songs (beloved Vancouver troubadour Dan Mangan’s music in Are We Cool Now?). “Everything feels ripe for exploration now. It’s the idea that it doesn’t all have to sound like Rodgers and Hammerstein or doesn’t have to come from one kind of culture.”
And for local content, check out Leslie Mildiner and Bob Buckley’s The Sweet Life on June 17: it’s based on a real-life 1947 strike by teenagers in Ladysmith over a hike in the price of chocolate bars—a protest that managed to cross the country, decades before the Internet.
Elsewhere, Gladstone and his team have scored a coup by bringing in Broadway veteran Jack Viertel as the keynote speaker. The veteran New York City musical producer is senior vice-president of Jujamcyn Theaters, which owns and operates five Broadway theatres, where he’s been involved in productions ranging from City of Angels to Angels in America. He also teaches musical theatre at the Tisch School of the Arts and has written The Secret Life of the American Musical, a bible of musicaltheatre structure that Gladstone himself used in writing Onegin.
In Tune also hosts a range of panel discussions and master classes for its participants. But for Gladstone, the main attraction is still the showcases. He should know: presenting an early excerpt from Onegin at In Tune was crucial to the success it went on to have, and he emphasizes the role In Tune audiences played in that.
“For us to watch and listen to a show with an audience—that is the most important part,” he says. “We can feel where they’re responding, and that’s a key component to writing it and moving it forward. For me, that’s the most useful part: sitting and what I call breathing with an audience.” -
In Tune 2017 takes place from Thursday (June 8) to June 18 at the Waterfront Theatre, Studio 1398, the Post at 750, and the Goldcorp Stage at the BMO Theatre Centre.