AH! ROMANCE! TAPS INTO THE CLASSICS
Revue features favourites from legendary musicals
The best way to think of Plain Jane Theatre’s newest production Ah! Romance! is a giant, romanticladen mixed tape, says director Kate Ryan.
You remember making those, right?
Sitting with your double cassette recorder, turning tapes or perhaps pushing the microphone up close to the speakers of your parents’ sound system, flipping LPs to create a playlist that perfectly captured your feelings for that special someone?
Well, you won’t find any trashy 1980s glam metal Whitesnake or Womack & Womack here.
No, instead, the latest in a string of revues performed by the theatre group taps into the rich vein of musicals from Rodgers and Hammerstein through to Stephen Sondheim and Cole Porter.
“A lot of these songs capture the messiness of romance,” Ryan says.
“The revue is just like romance itself. You go in thinking it’s one thing and it’s never that. But it’s real. It’s not perfect, but that’s what I love about it. That’s my favourite kind of romance.”
The genesis of the show came this past summer, Ryan says, when she was directing a Fringe show called Working.
Ryan said its stories and journeys were told through song and each and every song was completely different in style.
“This gave us a chance to step inside each of these individuals and see how unique and yet universal their journeys were,” she says.
“It’s like a beautiful pot of stew rich with different characters and desires.”
But as wonderful as the concept of a revue sounds, the process of weaving more than two-dozen songs from classic musicals from different eras with varying styles and making them fit together seamlessly is complex and time consuming.
So, in a way, making a romance revue became a labour of love for Ryan and her team.
“You have to understand the structure of a really good story or how to write a musical and understand that, in any good musical, why a song is where it is,” she says.
“There is a structure to a good musical and to writing a good musical song.
“Every song is a play, a mini story, so I try and make it as active as possible, where there is some kind of journey in each song, some kind of discovery.”
That means working out if it is a Who Am I song about someone on the cusp of entering the journey or if it is the Turning Point song where someone has made a discovery about themselves or a Hit The Wall song, a Screw You World song or the I Know I Can Do It song.
“For me it’s working out what kind of song it is,” she says.
“In terms of structure show I try to follow the format of a good musical. I feel a bit selfish but you go to the songs that excites you in terms of good writers.”
During the early part of the process, Ryan turned to music director, David Fraser. Fraser, a classically trained pianist and singer based in Edmonton, graduated from The King’s University with a bachelor of music in 2014 and is known for his versatility. The St. Albert-born musician made his professional debut with the Janes almost a year ago with their production of Wish You Were Here: An Evening of Noel Coward. Fraser was also brought in to work on Working before being tapped again for his latest gig.
“Musical theatre is just such a beautiful and expressive form of art,” he says.
“I love the dynamics of the music combined with the text and the acting. There’s just something that’s always been compelling for me about musical theatre.
“It’s an art form where a song really has to, in a short amount of time, encapsulate a particular kind of message or content in the scope of the play that it’s in.
“It’s amazing how a lot of pieces written in musical theatre are able to achieve that, to have such a specific effect of conveying a specific thing, or emotion for a character in one short piece of music. I just love it.
Fraser said that his experience working on the Noel Coward production taught him many lessons about the medium of musical theatre.
Instead of preparing for a one-off concert as a classical musician, the 10- to 12-day run of shows means that every show is different.
“There were a couple of instances where someone wouldn’t quite remember their next line and I’d have to quickly figure out a way to jump to the next verse seamlessly or somehow feed them the words,” he says.
“That show taught me to be adaptive and how to react to surprises each night. It’s a skill I learned very very quickly.”
Ah! Romance stars Jocelyn Ahlf, Jason Hardwick, Madelaine Knight, Ron Pederson and Gianna Reid and is choreographed by Cindy Kerr.