Highway visits his first artistic love
The (Post) Mistress
1/2 (out of 4) Script, music, and lyrics by Tomson Highway, directed by John van Burek. Until November 6 at the Berkeley Street Theatre, 26 Berkeley St. Theatrefrancais.com and 416-534-6604.
Tomson Highway is justly revered for his contributions to Canadian theatre and literature, which range from the plays The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing to the novel Kiss of the Fur Queen.
But his first artistic love was playing the piano and it turns out the man is as ridiculously talented as a musician as he is a scribe. Evidence of this is currently on display in The (Post) Mistress at the Berkeley Street Theatre, where this one-woman musical is currently playing, first in French (through Oct. 23) and then in English (through Nov. 6), with each version supertitled in the other official language. It’s performed by the wonderful Patricia Cano, for whom Highway wrote it.
In French, the show is titled Zesty Gopher s’est fait écraser par un frigo, which translates as “Zesty Gopher got crushed by a fridge.” The tale of how the fictional Mr. Gopher, a “Cree sculptor famous for his statue of the Laughing Virgin in Saskatoon,” met his maker in a tragicomic moving van incident is one of the many stories spun by Cano in her guise as Marie-Louise Painchaud, postmistress in Lovely, Ont., a farming town not far from the (equally fictional) mining city of Complexity.
From this, the production’s quirky tone will already be apparent. Highway flirts with sentimentality throughout, but what keeps the show from getting too goopy is his often piercing sense of humour and the level of musical talent on display not just from the talented singer Cano but from Highway himself, who accompanies on piano, and the saxophonist Marcus Ali.
The show started its life as a cabaret revue and still has that flavour. Set in the pre-Internet 1980s, it has Painchaud sharing, through monologue and song, details about the private lives of Lovely’s denizens that she’s learned from their letters and gossip.
They turn out to be a lusty and well-travelled community. We get a samba in Cree, French and English about a Brazilian linguist enamoured of Sylvie Labranche, a “Métis princess who wears too much mas- cara,” and a Dixieland-inspired number about the affair between a New Orleans drifter and the local checkers champion.
Cano, Highway and Ali have an evident ball with this vibrant musical pastiche, which reaches a dramatic climax at the top of the second act with a tango about an Argentinian who romanced a Franco-Ontarian with bowls of spicy spaghetti. From there the tone turns more melancholy, as we discover how Painchaud acquired her seemingly superhuman knowledge of her neighbours’ affairs. The show has been developed through different versions for over five years. This new production is directed by John van Burek, artistic director of Pleiades Theatre, co-producer of this run with the Théâtre français de Toronto. Teresa Przybylski’s striking set is a massive scaffoldlike wall of metal cubes — the postboxes where Painchaud places oversized prop letters, behind which a starlit sky sometimes appears (lighting design by Michel Charbonneau).
Van Burek does a great job in keeping spectators engaged by moving Cano around the large stage (and sometimes up into the aisles), but there’s a missed trick in not making more of the onstage presence of the musicians. As it’s immediately established that Painchaud can see the audience, then who are those guys up
It’s great to see Highway resisting respectability via his raunchy wit and crackling, lateral imagination
there with her? This and using blackouts to cover entrances and exits add to the production’s old-fashioned feel. There’s also not a lot van Burek can do to add dramatic tension to a somewhat overextended first act.
Along with great songs and a winning performance, what’s delivered here is a celebration of Francophone Northern Ontario, and the place in it of native cultures, languages and spirituality. It’s also an awesome display of linguistic virtuosity: Highway wrote both the French and English versions of the play and its lyrics, which has meant translating complex and extended jokes between languages, into which are also woven passages of Cree. As Highway enters the senior statesman phase of his career (he’s 65 this year), it’s great to see him resisting respectability via his raunchy wit and crackling, lateral imagination. Sharing the same room with this man, his talent and these collaborators is so exciting.