Upper Canada Christmas
Michael Peterman enjoys Westben’s musical celebration of a pioneer holiday
A captivating Christmas event this year was Westben’s new production, Upper Canada Christmas, written and arranged by Brian Finley. It offered, as advertised, “Music and Stories, Pioneer Style,” drawing on the parallel emigration stories of Susanna Moodie (Roughing It in the Bush) and Catharine Parr Traill (The Backwoods of Canada) who came to Upper Canada--Ontario, after 1867--in the early 1830s. The concert’s special focus was on the lives of these early pioneer writers and how they spent their winters and Christmases in ‘the backwoods’ or ‘the bush.’ Winnowing down a large body of published and unpublished writing by and about the sisters, Brian Finley did a hugely commendable job in creating a lively narrative by means of prose and song. An added element was interpretive dance.
Westben, with its 80-voice choir ably directed by Donna Bennett, put on four performances of Upper Canada Christmas in early December. The first two were staged at the barn at Westben and the final two in Norwood and at Peterborough’s Northminster Church. We caught the Norwood United Church matinee performance on Dec. 2.
I came away very impressed by the liveliness and accuracy of Brian Finley’s script. It is not easy to take two separate, sometimes contradictory stories and make them one; nor is it easy to make those different narrative threads march forward in a compelling manner. Finley met the challenge with plenty of skill and gusto.
That said, I did detect certain problems. When the two stories and their distinctly different points of view were at odds, Finley’s solution was to run the two voices together, as if in verbal opposition to each other. This strategy struck me at first as brilliant, but only for so long. To continue that vocal discord, and then to return to it, was unsettling for the audience. I suspect that many didn’t appreciate the nature of the discord and, soon enough, wearied of the vocal cacophony.
Another challenge was to adapt the movements of certain members of the large Westben choir to different interior settings. In Norwood some of the actor-singers had to move quickly from a microphone in one area to their choral positions in another, thus hurrying their movements and delaying their cues. As well, the stage business of ageing our two literary foremothers led to passing confusions of representation in all the stage bustle. The strategy of giving the Moodie characters, both young and old, red scarves and the Traill actors yellow ones helped a great deal; however, the daunting challenge of taking the two Strickland sisters from their girlhoods at Reydon Hall in Suffolk into the difficult world of the Upper Canadian backwoods and finally into the realities of their old age put strains on the cast and the production.
Nevertheless, such problems are hardly worth quibbling about in the light of what was so movingly achieved on stage. It needs to be said that this very ambitious musical undertaking was not only highly successful but also genuinely creative. As Brian Finley acknowledged in his opening remarks the “excellent” writings of Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie about their pioneering adventures and struggles positioned us as audience members in “pretty lofty company.” But Finley’s special genius was to make their lives accessible and interesting to us so many decades and cultural shifts later—he made their domestic challenges, their attentiveness to the new world around them, and their heroic staying power come alive for us.
But beyond the script it was the music that made the concert; dialogue blended seamlessly with song as the concert pressed on. As a long-time student of the writings of Moodie and Traill, I was very impressed by Finley’s musical arrangements of some of their poems—in Traill’s case, her poem The Graves of the Emigrants’ and in Moodie’s The Strains We Hear in Far Off Lands, as well as her popular ‘song,’ The Sleigh Bells. Donna Bennett sang all these pieces beautifully, catching the backward-gazing moods of these sensitive women who not only despaired of losing their English home and family and personal connections but were equally excited to meet the challenges they faced in their new land. It is worthwhile to note that Moodie’s sprightly Sleigh Bells (‘Tis merry to hear at evening by the blazing hearth the sleigh bells chime’) enjoyed a strong wave of popularity in the nineteenth century. It is now long forgotten, given our contemporary enthusiasm for such durable seasonal standards as Jingle Bells. Happily, however, Finley’s adaptation brought her version of sleigh bells back to us in its own vivid setting.
At the same time the Westben Festival Chorus, along with the Youth and Teen Choruses, made the music come alive for the audience. I was especially impressed by the Youth Choir who sang all their words from memory and took their cues from Donna Bennett with scarcely a hitch. Indeed, Bennett was quietly masterful in conducting all three choirs.
Having adapted the three aforementioned poems by Moodie and Traill to song, Finley completed his script by adding songs of his own creation, inspired by the sisters’ words. Among these I especially enjoyed I Wonder as I Wander (descriptive of Traill’s penchant for rambling thoughtfully through the woods) and Walk Me Through a Cathedral of Trees (inspired by Moodie’s description of her first trip into the bush). As well, he added a number of winter and seasonal standards to complete his musical score. The Norwood audience particularly enjoyed The Huron Carol and Ian Tamblyn’s Woodsmoke & Oranges as part of the narrative in which the sisters Meet… the Indigenous Neighbours. Wisely as well, he did not omit songs about the scourges of backwoods living that they came to know all too well. That pestilent side was amusingly rendered in Wade Hemsworth’s Black Fly Song.
Finally, in drawing the concert to a close, Finley juxtaposed the deaths of Thomas Traill and John Moodie, with seasonal pieces like Away in the Manger and O Holy Night. Both were movingly sung by Donna Bennett. She also sang Brian’s own composition, Canada Dreams, a song so evocative that it could well take on a life of its own. Audience members near me responded to it in hushed tones of admiration, acknowledging its verbal and musical beauty.
Such were the warm and stirring effects of an Upper Canada Christmas. I hope that the Westben team and chorus will reprise it next year or perhaps in a year or two. It makes a wonderful seasonal event even as it reminds us of two kinds of creative energy and vision—that of our pioneer authors, Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie, and that of the extraordinary Westben team of Brian Finley and Donna Bennett.