National Post (National Edition)
An irresistible temptation
LOGGERS’ DEAL WITH DEVIL A TRICKY CONFLICT UNFURLED MAJESTICALLY IN SONG AND DANCE
AS THE PLOT PROCEEDS ... THE DANCING TAKES ON REAL DRAMATIC POWER.
Chasse-Galerie Soulpepper Young Centre, Toronto
In Chasse-Galerie the energy never lets up. It’s a musical based an old Canadian legend that may itself have even deeper roots. The accepted Québécois version tells of a group of loggers who make a deal with the devil to escape their frozen fastness for one night of tavern revelry. Of course, the bargain comes with escape clauses, and of course, Satan works hard to prevent his victims from exercising them. You might even say that he does his damnedest.
In this stage version the woodchoppers are four in number, and female; the lumberjacks are lumberjills.
So we have Alex, Michelle, Lea and Toba, all of them pining for hot lights and far-off loves (of both genders), when into their hut tumbles a smooth-talking tempter who gives his name as Damien. They know almost immediately who he really is, and what they’re getting into. If you want to take that phrase literally, it is the Chasse-Galerie itself: a flying canoe. While they paddle vigorously onstage, their course is charmingly plotted by whimsical projections. When they arrive, everybody dances. But then everybody’s been doing that since the show began.
Tyrone Savage wrote the adaptation and is also the director. James Smith wrote the music and lyrics, and is also the musical director; he plays piano and guitar, sometimes simultaneously. Ashleigh Powell is the choreographer, and her contribution is immense. The show begins before the story begins, giving us a preview of the bar, the club, the dive, that is to be the pleasure-seekers’ destination. The entire company are wildly stomping in what will turn out to be the production’s signature style. It’s exhilarating, but it courts monotony. However, as the plot proceeds and conflicts get underway, the dancing takes on real dramatic power. The steps and bends can be seductive, they can be threatening, they can even be witty.
What isn’t danced is mostly sung. “You know how susceptible I am to the majesty of song,” says one of the characters, and Smith’s songs are indeed majestic: tuneful, rousing, clever and funny. He also acts; his depiction of a shy suitor is delightfully understated: a quality, to be honest, that isn’t much evident in the other performances.
They still give a lot of pleasure. Tess Benger, Shaina Silver-Baird, Nicole Power and Kat Letwin are — in ascending order of rowdiness, though not necessarily effectiveness — the four Cinderellas who can beat the devil if they get home before dawn, provided that they also abstain from touching crosses on steeples and from swearing. The last prohibition is the hardest to observe, as it also entails their abstention from hard liquor, which is one of the things for which they hazarded their souls in the first place.
Damien/Satan (played, with rather too obvious enjoyment, by the author/director) thinks he has them there; he well knows how susceptible they are to the majesty of whiskey. But the ladies find an unexpected, and unacknowledged, protector in the heavily-disguised shape of the Archangel Uriel, Satan’s old foe from way back in Paradise Lost. This, for all its earthiness, is a very erudite show; it also invokes Dante and Shakespeare.
Uriel, who likes a challenge, agrees to conduct his campaign entirely in verse, which he has of course to make up as he goes along. This allows us to hear a lot of intentionally bad rhymes, in instructive contrast to the scrupulously good ones in Smith’s lyrics. Uriel’s endgame, though, remains obscure even while he’s playing it and irrelevant afterwards; we don’t even see him in hell, which is where the show has its showdown. It’s a protracted finale; there have apparently been additions to the production since its debut appearance last year at the Storefront Theatre (which I didn’t see) and it was probably better shorter. It shouldn’t really have an intermission. There are also a couple of unready performances.
None of that matters, though. The show is irresistible.
Chasse-Galerie runs until Nov. 26 at the Young Centre in Toronto.