Play visits Golden Age of Hollywood.
Crew shoots Hollywood musical to be featured in Citadel play
In a room deep inside the Victoria School of the Arts, a young hip Vancouver film crew is preparing to shoot footage of a fictional 1938 Hollywood movie musical called Make Mine Love. That’s the “vintage” movie that you’ll see getting shot in the course of a new stage play, also called Make Mine Love.
Resplendently cleavaged in a long red-sequin gown and draped in diamonds, the first full-colour costume in the show, Rebecca Northan as Golden Age star Lily Arlen is singing the seductive title track (by Lynn Miles and Keith Glass), or rather lipsynching her own recording into a period microphone in front of a green screen. Over and over again. That’s when director Bob Baker objects, and everything stops.
Cut! Lily’s red lipstick is under the gun. Like so many things in life and art, much depends on the lipstick. And the shade is found wanting, scarlet reinforcements are brought in, tested under the lights, adjusted. Then life and art go on.
It’s four months till Make Mine Love premières on the Citadel mainstage. The black-and-white movie and newsreel sequences embedded in Tom Wood’s screwball romantic comedy are being shot by Skyward Motion Pictures way ahead largely because in the interim Northan, who co-stars with John Ullyatt, has gigs across the country — including her improv hit Blind Date and the première of Legend Has it, with Mark Meer, at Alberta Theatre Projects’s PlayRites Festival in Calgary.
Except for Northan, it’s a jeans, boots and hoodies crowd, including playwright Tom Wood. In a curiously intricate proliferation of the movie-within-a-play/ life-fiction/ onstage-backstage frames, he’s looking at the dailies of the dailies — of the newsreels over which Clifton Keeler (a slimy gossip-hound reporter played by Meer) presides. “We think we’re watching a movie, then, we pull away the curtain, and we watch them filming the scene,” explains Baker. For the newsreel footage of the stars on a publicity junket, playing tennis or golf, shopping or bowling, costume designer Cory Sincennes has put together 50 looks, with wigs to match, says Baker.
There are other loops in the space-time continuum here, too. Skyward’s Jordan Dowler-Coltman, who codesigned the projections for
“Projection has to be a character; it has to play a role. Every time we use it, it’s part of the storytelling. ...
Jordan Dowler- Coltman
Make Mine Love along with fellow Edmonton ex-pat Owen Brierly, finds himself back in his home town at his highschool almamater, along with three of his Vancouver cohorts. And he’s working for the Citadel, “so it’s come full circle,” as he says. The Citadel is where, at 12, he played Peter Cratchit in A Christmas Carol, then one of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan, then a Nazi in The Sound of Music. “I ended up in video because of theatre,” says Dowler-Coltman, a grad from film at Vancouver’s Emily Carr University.
The Skyward team has brought the latest in projectors and media servers (into which cues are programmed). Dowler-Coltman calls them “the fighter jets of the projector world,” the technology you might find in a Vegas show or a Nickelback tour. They’re bringing into the world of theatre, too, the Red Epic camera, the kind used to shoot, say, The Hobbit.
“We’re bringing movies and theatre together,” says Dowler-Coltman. “Projection has to be a character; it has to play a role. Every time we use it, it’s part of the storytelling. … It’s part of the set and lighting, the design. We’re not just adding scenes from the movie. The worst thing you could do is that video comes on, and you stop looking at the actors.”
Make Mine Love runs May 10 to June 1. Tickets: 780425-1820 or citadeltheatre.com