Retiring Millerd shaped city’s theatre scene
After 45 years at the helm of Vancouver’s Arts Club Theatre Company, Bill Millerd is bowing out at season’s end, Jerry Wasserman writes.
When Bill Millerd laughs, you know it. His loud, sharp, startling bark can only be the Sound of Bill, as distinctive as a signature, but hard to read. Four decades of theatre artists in this city have heard it with trepidation, hoping it was a sign of appreciation from the top dog.
Actress Gabrielle Rose worked for Millerd in numerous Arts Club shows.
“Sometimes when you were performing and he was in the audience, Bill’s laugh could jerk you right out of character. But you couldn’t help being pleased you’d tickled his funny bone.”
Millerd has pleased a lot of people during his 45 years running the theatre company he’s built into one of the largest and most successful in Canada. He’s produced more than 500 shows and directed a third of them himself. In the process, he’s helped launch the careers of many of the country’s major artists and significantly shaped the arts scene in Vancouver. The Arts Club now has a 15-play season, three theatre buildings, three plays on tour and an annual audience of more than 250,000.
His recent announcement that 2017-18 would be his last season at the helm brought into focus Millerd’s extraordinary career.
Growing up in West Vancouver, he decided not to go into the family fish business. He thought he might become a professional musician or a lawyer, and majored in political science at the University of B.C. But theatre classes from Dorothy Somerset and John Brockington shifted his focus.
Somerset provided important advice. Noting his oddly nasal vocal delivery, she told him, “I don’t think you want to be an actor, Mr. Millerd. You have this very peculiar voice.”
Brockington’s directing course steered Millerd toward postgraduate study at Montreal’s National Theatre School, where he enrolled in the production program and studied stage management.
“That,” Millerd says, “was really my life-changing event.”
When he returned from Montreal in 1969, Joy Coghill, then artistic director of the Vancouver Playhouse, gave him his first job. (In a cosmic theatrical coincidence, Coghill’s memorial was held last Monday, the same day Millerd announced his retirement.) She appointed him stage manager for the Playhouse’s second company, operating out of the 200-seat Arts Club theatre on Seymour Street. The Playhouse soon left that space, Millerd started to direct, and began managing the Arts Club company in 1972.
The first years were formative. Millerd’s long-running production of the musical revue Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, with Leon Bibb, Ann Mortifee, Pat Rose and Ruth Nicol, and the American comedy Hot L Baltimore, with a cast of 14, including Jackson Davies and sisters Susan and Janet Wright, “really established an identity for the Arts Club.”
One thing that set the Arts Club apart from the Playhouse, the major game in town at the time, was Millerd’s brave programming of gritty new Canadian plays like David Freeman’s Creeps, David Fennario’s On the Job (the professional stage debut of Bruce Greenwood) and the West Coast premieres of Michel Tremblay’s plays in English translation.
“They weren’t like anything Vancouver audiences had really seen to that point,” Millerd says, and they made stars of actors like the Wright sisters and leading man Winston Rekert.
Another distinction was Millerd’s decision to stick with local actors and develop local playwrights.
“I wanted to work with people who lived in the community and understood what it was about.”
That policy paid off in numerous ways. The first Arts Club premieres, Sherman Snukal’s Talking Dirty and Ann Mortifee’s Reflections on Crooked Walking, a musical Millerd would remount many times, both became long-running hits. New plays like Morris Panych’s 7 Stories and John Lazarus’ The Late Blumer followed, successes for both the Arts Club and its writers.
“Bill’s interest in new work has never wavered,” says playwright Joan MacLeod. “He’s launched careers — or in my case kept a career going.”
Vancouver audiences responded enthusiastically to work from their community and about it.
“That localization,” Millerd says, “led to my belief that the Arts Club should own and operate its own venues.”
From the Seymour Street theatre, demolished in the early 1990s, to the Granville Island Stage, the renovated Stanley Theatre and the new BMO Theatre Centre, control of its own spaces has been crucial to the Arts Club’s ability to maximize revenues.
Just as important is the investment Millerd has made in the people he’s worked with, reflected back in their loyalty to him.
“Bill provided me with a community and an artistic family,” says Arts Club musical veteran Jane Mortifee.
Writer Anosh Irani describes Millerd’s leap of faith when hearing he had a story about a eunuch who runs a Bombay brothel. Millerd told Irani to “write the damn thing.” When he did, Millerd programmed it. The Matka King was Irani’s first play. The Men in White, running at the Granville Island Stage, is his third Arts Club premiere.
Asked about the most interesting people he’s worked with over the years, Millerd steers the conversation away from personalities and refuses to drop names like Michael J. Fox, Eric McCormack and Michael Bublé, whom he employed at the Arts Club before they became international celebrities.
Instead, he cites memorable moments in Arts Club shows. The time the oven in Absurd Person Singular toppled over on Susan Wright as her character attempted suicide by sticking her head in it, and audience members had to come onstage to haul it off her. Or Janet Wright as Hedda Gabler preparing to shoot herself, finding her gun hadn’t been pre-set, “and stage manager Louis Bournival yelling ‘Bang!’ in his French accent.”
The common denominator of these and other favourite stories of Millerd’s is “the extraordinary resilience” of actors, and the willingness of audiences to embrace almost anything done with grace and good faith.
But actors also tend to cite Millerd’s reputation as a tough negotiator.
Rose remembers asking him for a raise during the long run of Talking Dirty.
“After sweating in his office for an hour, I came out exultant.”
She’d managed to score an extra 10 dollars a week.
Tom McBeath, performing in The Audience at the Stanley, recounts a negotiating session in which he compared the salary Millerd was offering with the price of toilet paper.
“Bill offered a little more, but said he could find toilet paper for cheaper than I had described. I agreed he could, but it was definitely one-ply and I felt I could give him a two-ply performance.”
Does that make Millerd a thrifty minder of the purse strings or a cheapskate?
“There were years when ‘cheapskate’ was a compliment,” he says. “Our budgets were always tight. When I first got involved we had no grants and no donors. We relied entirely on box office.”
The longevity and fiscal health of his company provides its own judgment.
Ready to go on to the next phase with longtime partner and resident Arts Club lighting designer Marsha Sibthorpe, Millerd is comfortable having given his notice. He believes he’s leaving the company fiscally sound, stable and in good administrative hands. The recent deaths of Winston Rekert, Leon Bibb, Janet Wright and now Joy Coghill may also have reminded him, in his 70s, that the clock is ticking.
“There’s a time when you feel it’s right to move on,” he says.
Even the top dog has to go sometime.