In early January 1977 the Whitehorse Drama Club met to consider options for a spring production.
Someone suggested doing Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap”, as it was setting records as the world’s longest-running play in London. The group agreed that it would be a great show to put on, but it was thought unlikely that the performance rights would be available for an amateur club like ours. When we found out the play was unavailable in England, but available for rent in other countries, we got quite excited about doing it.
Having seen the show in London in ’75, I knew the show was do-able for us because there was only one set and eight characters.
Whitehorse Star article on the production.
poster and program cover design forby Lottie Hutton for WDC’s “The Mousetrap”
Scenes from our spring production of “The Mousetrap”.
Putting on “Mousetrap” was certainly a thrill for all of us at the Whitehorse Drama Club. There were large, enthusiastic and appreciative audiences for the three-show run.
A couple of months later I was offered a higher-level job by Cominco Ltd. in Trail, B.C., where my parents and large extended family lived, just an hour’s drive from my boyhood home of Nelson.
After presenting the dark, haunting “Veronica’s Room” with adult situations in October 1976, the Whitehorse Drama Club thought it would be good to do something kids would enjoy.
The idea came forward to do a Cinderella play as a Christmas show. Then we were surprised that we could not find a published Cinderella script that we could rent for use in the type of show we wanted to do. In desperation, I offered to try writing a script myself. Using my home typewriter and office typewriter for writing different sections of the play, I got a draft script. Other club members helped in re-typing it with revisions we decided on (this was about seven years before computerized word processing became available).
For the auditions, we welcomed the general public as well as local school students. I was very pleased that several of the F.H. Collins High School students who were in the Sourdough Rendezvous Mellerdrammer with me in early 1976 came out for the auditions, including Laurie Ogilvy, who took on the lead role of Cinderella.
I was not going to be able to participate in the performances of the show in December because I was scheduled to visit friends in England and Ireland over the Christmas holiday period. I watched a couple of early rehearsals of the play and was looking forward to seeing the opening night of the show before my vacation, but then I heard that my grandmother Helen Dewdney had died at age 89. She had lived with our family as a widow when I was growing up, and was like a second mother, so I was not going to miss her funeral in Trail. Being away from Whitehorse meant missing the pre-Christmas performance of the show, as well the two performances in the last days of December.
As a result, I never saw the show. And I did not keep a copy of the script. I heard later that the show came together well and the audiences — particularly children — really enjoyed it.
Laurie Ogilvy as Cinderella in scene with Lynn Duff as evil stepsister Yeckzala.
At about the same time, our club heard from CBC Whitehorse radio centre who said they had a script for a radio play, and would we be interested in participating in a recording of it. I remember going to the CBC studio with some other club members to do a one-act play called “The Price of Freedom is the Cost of Living”. I recall the writer/producer was Sally Halliday of CBC Radio, and I spoke the lines of a character named Uncle Tom. I don’t know if the show was ever broadcast, or if the script is in some archives somewhere. I have not found it in internet searches, but it was almost half a century ago. For us at the club, the experience was a fascinating change-of-pace from stage rehearsing and performance,
As noted in the newspaper ad above, another project of the drama club at the time was to get some professional training in acting. For this we partnered with the Yukon Territorial Government’s Recreation Branch to sponsor an intermediate acting workshop over a weekend in January. As it turned out, Diana Belshaw was tied up with theatre commitments in Vancouver and could not come. In her place, we were very pleased to benefit from the expertise of professional director and actress Kathryn Shaw.
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