Ambitious show
70 years of making music and memories
KITCHENER — Playwright Stephen Young has never shied away from big projects, so it wasn’t a surprise that he volunteered to write a special show celebrating K-W Musical Productions’ 70th anniversary.
Young might be one of the most prolific playwrights in the region and he certainly is a bundle of energy but this was a project that surprised even him, given the seven decades of presenting musicals in Waterloo Region.
“I wanted it to be a mixture of the history and all the different shows they’ve done over the decades,” said Young who also directs this show, KWMP 70th Anniversary Showcase opening Thursday for five performances at the Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts.
The production includes all the highlights, a medley of 50 songs from 33 Broadway musicals, and performed by alumni as well as current dancers and actors in the community theatrical group.
Young started out thinking he could put together a simple medley of the music but once he started digging through boxes of material and chatting with members old and new, he had to adopt a new strategy.
“I started to think how thick the history is,” he said. “That changed my whole vision, I have a ton of history.”
Young decided to open the show with a little vignette that tells the story of how this organization was formed and how, despite being a community theatre group, ended up attracting professional performers as well as launching the career of musical theatre actors, the likes of Drayton artistic director Alex Mustakas and actor Terry Doyle.
“They will have done 100 productions as of this show,” said Young, surprised just how many shows this ambitious theatre company has produced over the decades.
But how did this all get started?
In the 1940s, Elizabeth Johnson and her husband David, a newly ordained minister, moved to Kitchener when he was assigned to the Church of the Good Shepherd.
The couple had previously performed in operettas and Elizabeth felt confident postwar Kitchener was ready for some lighthearted musical experiences.
Elizabeth already had a church choir at her disposal, she just needed to beef up the numbers and asked the choir members to call in their friends. Sixty singers showed up, eager to get started.
Elizabeth was able to provide a hefty budget of $1,100, so they were able to purchase the script for the 1908 operetta “The Chocolate Soldier.” Despite the naysayers suggesting no one would come out to see a bunch of locals, that first production in 1948 sold out all three nights. And so the Twin City Operatic Society was born.
A decade later, when they decided to produce their first Broadway musical “Brigadoon” the organization was renamed K-W Musical Productions. The company was lucky enough to purchase an old schoolhouse out in the countryside near Kitchener, a place surrounded by cows and where it was often so cold in the winter, costume makers would have to stop work-
ing once their fingers went numb.
Today, that old schoolhouse on Shaftsbury Drive, near Ottawa Street North, hasn’t seen a cow wandering by in several decades. Improvements have made the building more comfortable.
For Young, it was a challenge to figure out how to present the music.
“I’ve been trying to bring people back but it’s been tough, a lot don’t sing anymore,” he said. He did manage to attract alumni though, several of whom have gone on to enjoy professional careers.
Some of the highlights in the show include Kirk Lackenbauer performing Tevye from “Fiddler on the Roof” and Lynn Scott singing “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” a role she performed as a teenager in “The Wizard of Oz.”
Amanda Kind will sing “Hello, Dolly!” in tribute to leading lady and charter member, Mary Archer Smith, who died in 2001 and was credited with raising the bar, helping make K-W Musical Productions into a successful theatre group. She was also credited with bringing musical theatre legend Alan Lund to direct local productions which was quite a coupe.
Smith’s mantra “Fill the seats, make them laugh, put a song in their hearts and send them home smiling” remains at the core of this company’s success.
The same is true for the performers, who often joined as family such as Rob Bridel and his now-famous daughter, A.J. Bridel.
“You often hear ‘that was the show I decided I wanted to be a performer,’ ” said Young, himself a long time member of the organization. “You hear that over and over.”