Coming-of-age epic ends Teatro season
“His name is a patter song in itself!” laughs Luc Tellier of the character he plays in The Hothouse Prince, the dark-hued and strangely epic Stewart Lemoine adventure comedy that closes the Teatro La Quindicina season at the Backstage Theatre.
That would be Grand Duke Dmitri Romanov-Orsk, 78th in line for the throne, a naive teen aristocrat launched precipitously out of his entitled hothouse existence into the big wide world when the Russian Revolution breaks out.
Did someone mention a revolution? Young Dmitri and his sister Sophia are genuinely perplexed. “Why are they having it?” they wonder. “I love the blissful ignorance he shares with his sister,” grins Tellier.
Dmitri may be spoiled, but he’s likable, as even the Bolshevik guards recognize. “He’s open and earnest. … That’s what attracted me the most, from the start,” says Tellier.
Just 22 himself and 18 months out of MacEwan theatre school, Tellier knows something about being young, brave and getting launched into the big wide world. Since he graduated in 2014, and even before, directors have had an eye on him. Long before Dmitri, his biggest role to date and his Teatro mainstage debut — “Dmitri’s onstage the whole time, on every continent!” Tellier says, laughing — he’d been spotted by Teatro playwright Lemoine and artistic director Jeff Haslam.
Tellier was Flute, one of the comical ‘rude mechanicals’ led by John Ullyatt’s Bottom the weaver in Freewill Shakespeare Festival’s very funny 2014 Midsummer Night’s Dream. Lemoine decided right then to revive The Hothouse Prince the following season; he’d found the perfect Dmitri. As the playwright has said, “you just don’t do a play like this one if you don’t have the right prince.”
“Stewart sent me the script on my last day of theatre school. And I wept, I was so moved, by the play itself, the sheer beauty of it, and by the gift of receiving it,” says Tellier.
He’d grown up with musical theatre; from age nine, he was onstage in big Broadway musicals at the St. Albert Children’s Theatre. At MacEwan, he’d landed big parts, including the title character in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein.
If Tellier’s grad in April 2014 “feels like forever ago,” as he puts it, it might be because he started working instantly — first in the chorus of Edmonton Opera’s Barber of Seville, then the Maggie Now trilogy.
He was part of the Citadel/Banff professional program that took Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia onto the Citadel mainstage last winter. That run overlapped with rehearsals for Blarney Productions’ Mote, a new perspective on Hitchcock’s Psycho, with Tellier as Norman Bates.
Meantime, there were roles in assorted Teatro pieces, and summers working at Arts Trek. And now “a comedy that gets very dark,” as Tellier says of The Hothouse Prince, a coming-of-age triptych that takes Dmitri from Russia to the Paris demi-monde, then the world of southern Ontario farmers — and a language incomprehensible to young Dmitri, which is why those scenes, amusingly, happen in gibberish. “You get to watch the doors to the rest of the world get opened before his very eyes.”
A coming-of-age piece for coming-of-age actors: that was always the impetus behind The Hothouse Prince, as Lemoine explains. Originally written for a cast in the 13 to 21 bracket at the Citadel’s 1991 Teen Festival, that première production starred Mike Schultz as the prince and actor/musician Andrea House as the mysterious trio of sisters who propel Dmitri through the world at crucial points. A 2000 revival starred Josh Dean and Dana Wylie.
The Hothouse Prince is among Lemoine’s own favourites, in his large canon of originals. “It felt substantial, a large-scale undertaking. And a turning point.” Teatro has always included new younger-generation actors in its seasons. But that first collaboration with teen actors was an exceptionally happy one; it even resulted in a Teatro young company, Teatro Bambino, that premièred such specially written Lemoines as The Delightful Garden of Saint Piquillo and Fatty Goes To College.
Dmitri, says Lemoine, “is one of the largest individual parts I’ve ever written.” He looks at Tellier. “You’re always talking. Always discovering, explaining … People expect things of Dmitri. And he has to step up.”