CENTAUR THEATRE AT 50
Key players share memories
Just as it did in its very first production, Centaur Theatre is taking us to school five decades on.
Inaugurated in 1968, the Centaur launched in 1969 with an adaptation of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark’s classic novel set in a posh Scottish girls’ school. Now its golden-anniversary season opens with Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Choir Boy, which is set in a Chicago prep school and tells the story of a young gay student making his way through Obama’s era of hope and change.
The Centaur itself was born in a time of upheaval. Internationally, 1968 was ablaze with the revolutionary Events of May,
while locally the Quiet Revolution was making its own relentless way into every aspect of life in Montreal. On the other side of town from Centaur, at Théâtre du Rideau Vert, Michel Tremblay was making his own theatrical revolution with the world première of Les Belles-Soeurs (which, incidentally, gets its 50th-birthday party later this month with the musical version at Place des Arts).
And yet, as befits Centaur’s location in the historic Old Port area, some things remain the same, like the colonnades and portico exterior of the listed building, which used to be the home of the Montreal Stock Exchange.
It was through those portico doors that “the Momma and Poppa of English theatre in Montreal,” as Choir Boy’s director Mike Payette fondly calls them, walked 50 years ago. Actor and director Maurice Podbrey, originally from South Africa — hence his introducing
the plays of Athol Fugard to Centaur audiences — came by way of England to Montreal to teach at the National Theatre School. Elsa Bolam, his partner (they got married the same year the theatre opened), subsequently left her job at the BBC to join him.
Speaking to the Montreal Gazette by phone, Bolam cheerfully describes her role at the time as that of “a general dogsbody,” though that description belies the energy, vision and accomplishments of this Order of Canada recipient. She regularly directed plays at Centaur (Brian Friel and Harold Pinter were particular favourites), and went on to found another major force in Montreal Anglo theatre, Geordie Productions.
Centaur’s first year, Bolam says, was “really a cliffhanger, because we had no money. We could have gone belly up at any time.” Everybody, she says, was living on their nerves, but “it was
so exciting, too. We were writing letters to everybody we could think of. We got 1,000 subscribers that first summer.”
The theatre’s determination to keep to the mandate of producing Canadian as well as international plays wasn’t always met with enthusiasm. Take, for instance,
the 1980 première of Anne Chislett’s The Tomorrow Box.
“A local critic at the time, Myron Galloway, gave us the most terrible review,” says Bolam. “He wrote, ‘Do we have to watch this Canadian rubbish?’ He called the play ‘the obligatory Canadian turkey.’ But the audience liked it. We had queues around the block.”
Bolam moved on to found Geordie Productions in 1980, while Podbrey remained director of Centaur until 1997, when he passed the baton to Gordon McCall. If those first three decades had been marked by a gradual gravitation toward not just Canadian but Montreal plays — most prominently David Fennario’s Balconville in 1979 — McCall hastened the trend.
He introduced his audience to translations of francophone plays, significantly the English world première of Tremblay’s Encore une fois, si vous permettez. In keeping with McCall’s determination to create international connections, the production went on to Washington, D.C. and Dublin’s Abbey Theatre.
Speaking from Saskatchewan, where he runs the Lyric Theatre, McCall says of those Washington performances: “A cultural anthropologist from Harvard told the Montreal Gazette, ‘I’ve never been north of the 49th parallel, but tonight I learned more about Canada in a story about a mother and a son than I ever knew before.’ It was a tremendous reinforcement of what we were doing.”
McCall also sought to bring more adventurous, perhaps younger theatregoers through the doors with initiatives like the Wildside Festival, Brave New Looks and Urban Tales, all of which are still regular fixtures.
The big success of McCall’s tenure — apart from winning the Grand Prix du Conseil des arts de Montréal for a 2006 season of Montreal plays — was, of course, Steve Galluccio’s Mambo Italiano in 2002. Actually, as McCall explains, “big success” rather understates things.
“That production just took off like a rocket, so much so that we had people scalping tickets in front of the building, people coming in with credit cards fanned out over the top of their heads. I remember one fellow saying, ‘I want 30 tickets and don’t tell me I can’t get them!’ It was a theatre event that became a city event. Entire offices would empty out to come and see it. We retired a deficit with it.”
One achievement of which McCall is particularly proud is his championing of local female playwrights, including Ann Lambert ( Very Heaven), Marianne Ackerman (Venus of Dublin), Dulcinea Langfelder ( Victoria) and Kit Brennan (Tiger’s Heart).
McCall’s successor Roy Surette, who took over in 2007, continued that trend, premièring works from Ackerman and Langfelder, as well as newer writers like Michaela Di Cesare, whose Successions has continued the theatre’s connection with striking Italian-Canadian writers such as Galluccio and Vittorio Rossi.
Initially, Surette had to contend with murmurings that he might not be the ideal man for the job, given his status as a unilingual Vancouver “outsider.” He immediately went about dealing with such criticisms by wholeheartedly plunging into the local theatre scene, no matter how humble or “fringe” the show might be. And if he never quite mastered the language, he did strengthen ties between Centaur and francophone theatres, especially La Licorne.
Speaking from Vancouver, where he now runs Touchstone Theatre, Surette says of these ties: “I think it was part of the evolution of what was going on in the city. It was always a goal, trying to integrate more between the two communities. There are some wonderful crossover actors, like Jean Marchand,” who starred in a Centaur translation of François Archambault’s La Licorne hit Tu te souviendras de moi.
Of his 10 years at the helm, Surette cites his work with musical duo Bowser and Blue — Schwartz’s: The Musical and Last Night at the Gayety — as the most fun. “I also really enjoyed the fact that the mandate allowed us to be international: some of my favourite pieces to work on were God of Carnage and Good People, pieces that had a life elsewhere. Something I was really proud of, because it was such an enormous undertaking on every level, was The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God.”
Surette’s departure in 2017 paved the way for Centaur’s first female artistic director, Eda Holmes, who arrived from the Shaw Festival, where she had served as associate director. During a phone conversation, she says she’s looking to meld “past, present, future” for her first curated season.
An example of this is a new strand of programming, the Legacy Series, which consists of staged readings of past Centaur hits. The recent presentation of Balconville saw seasoned players like Leni Parker and Michel Perron performing alongside the next generation of Centaur actors, such as Laurent Pitre.
“It’s inevitable that a landmark like this makes us take stock and reassess where we’re going,” Holmes says of the 50th anniversary. “For instance, we need to build our audience to expand into more of Montreal. We want to give the sense that Centaur Theatre can really bridge the gap between all different communities.”
One seemingly minor but practical change Holmes is bringing to the theatre is to extend the number of preview performances, to ensure a show is at its best by opening night.
“At the end of the day,” Holmes says, “I think the quality of the work will be what keeps us alive for the next 50 years.”
The auguries are looking good for the first production of that new half-century. Written by McCraney (whose play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue became the basis of the Oscar winner Moonlight), Choir Boy is an acclaimed drama soaked in a-cappella versions of spirituals and gospel songs. According to director Payette, it depicts the intimacy and rivalry among a group of young black men, and “asks larger questions about their relationship with the world and about having access to being greater than the circumstances you were born into,” all enhanced by “conversations about the history of spirituals and gospel and why they are still pertinent today.”
I remember one fellow saying, ‘I want 30 tickets and don’t tell me I can’t get them!’ It was a theatre event that became a city event.