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.
After a summer break, the Whitehorse Drama Club met in early September 1976 to consider options for a show to do that fall.
One of the names that came up in brain-storming was American playwright Ira Levin. Born in 1929 in New York, Levin was know for works like “Rosemary’s Baby”, “Boys from Brazil” and “Stepford Wives”, each with intriguing plots and story twists.
Someone noticed that Levin’s 1973 play “Veronica’s Room” had received good reviews and was available for productions by amateur theatre companies. The club executive bought a copy of the chilling mystery thriller, took turns reading, and decided to go with it.
It was a big change of pace from the old-fashioned melodrama we did in the drama festival in Dawson City in the spring. A young lady named Veronica finds herself trapped in a terrifying situation, persuaded to impersonate the long-dead daughter of an elderly couple.
Front and back cover of the program. The front design, ably done by Liselotte Hutton, was also used for the show’s publicity posters.Scenes from the play. From left: Sam McBride as The Man, Pamela Hedley as The Girl, Penny Melin as The Woman.Donn Olsson (right) as The Young Man.
About a month after the “Love in the Lodge” mellerdramer show closed I saw a story in the Whitehorse Star newspaper in which the Whitehorse Drama Club (WDC) invited individuals interested in community theatre to attend an organizing meeting about the club’s participation in the upcoming 3rd Annual Break-Up Drama Festival in Dawson City, the former capital of the Yukon Territory which was at the centre of the famous Klondike Gold Rush of 1898.
I phoned the contact person and said I would attend the meeting, and be happy to help with publicity, in line with my background as a newspaper reporter. She thanked me for the offer, and encouraged me to try out for a part in the auditions. The meeting was held in the WDC’s longstanding clubhouse, which was a remarkable log cabin-like structure not far from downtown Whitehorse which was large enough for meetings and rehearsals but not for performances, which would often be held on school stages.
ad in the Whitehorse Star on auditions
A great aspect of the Break-up Festival (so named because it coincided with the time in late May each spring when the ice on the Yukon River melts enough for boat travel on the river) was its venue: the wonderful Palace Grand Theatre in Dawson City – a replica of the type of the stage and performance hall in the exciting gold rush era. The theatre project was funded by the Diefenbaker government in the early 1960s as part of its commitment to preserving the heritage of Northern Canada.
1890’s Style Palace Grand Theatre in Dawson City, Yukon
As I had just recently played the role of villain in the Sourdough Rendezvous Mellerdramer, I was asked to play a very similar role in WDC’s entry in the festival, called “The Valiant Villain”, written by John Murray. I was very happy to play the character named Seymour S. Schnitzel because I knew it would be a lot of fun.
I had been to Dawson once earlier in the year for a short visit as part of an orientation tour, and looked forward to spending more time there. One of the special things about Dawson City at the time was that it was the only place in Canada where gambling was legal. I remember several visits to Diamond Tooth Gerties Gambling Hall, both during that trip and again when I returned with friends to Dawson City for a summer visit in August 1976. I was very impressed by the shows at Gerties, particularly skits by the Frantic Follies group, including a hilarious acting-out of Robert Service’s classic poem “The Cremation of Sam Magee”.
We drove up to Dawson City on Friday May 21st. It was a gravel road at that time because of problems paved roads had in winter due to periods of extreme cold and permafrost. Even so, with good van on a well-maintained gravel road we were able to average about 60 miles per hour and get to our motel in Dawson in six hours.
We were one of six theatre groups participating in the festival – an even measure of three Canadian and three American clubs. Our competition included the local Klondike Theatre Guild of Dawson City; the Pelly Players of Faro, Yukon; the Canal Community Players of Haines, Alaska; the Poverty Players of Skagway, Alaska; and the Baronof Little Theatre of Sitka, Alaska. I was amazed that folks from Sitka, which is well south of Juneau on the Alaska Panhandle, were able to get to the festival. Today it is a 20-hour Alaska Ferry trip from Sitka to Haines. Then you have a six-hour drive to Whitehorse, and another six hours to Dawson City from there. I felt tired after our drive from Whitehorse, so I could only imagine how exhausted the Sitka troupe were.
Scans of the program for the Drama Festival, which I kep as a souvenir.
The festival was sponsored by the Klondike Visitors Association (an alliance of businesses supporting tourism) and the city, which at that time had a population of 700.
The festival went through the weekend. Our “Valiant Villain” show was either the second or third performance on the Saturday, and the other three groups performed on Sunday. For our cast and crew, it was nice to get our show done so we could relax and enjoy the rest of the festival. The audience participation in our show was terrific – much louder and enthusiastic than the “Love in the Lodge” crowd had been. In response to the action in the play, the audience cheered, booed and hissed vigorously. The festival adjudicator, Kathleen Nouch from Saskatchewan, later mentioned the enthusiasm and energy of the audience in her comments on our play. As an actor, it was a thrill to have the audience respond “on cue” as the show proceeded. It was an exhilarating experience, in a perfect setting in an 1890s-style hall with boisterous spectators.
A fun party and dance on Saturday night was an opportunity to get to know people from the other plays, as well as the technical staff and adjudicator. I remember some of us joking about “lobbying” the adjudicator so she would give our play better marks in her adjudication. The six plays in the festival were in a range of styles and all enjoyable to watch. with ours being the only melodrama. After the conclusion of the performances on Sunday afternoon, adjudicator Nouch announced the awards.
The big winner was the Haines show, with awards for best production, best original play, best director (Sharon Shaver-Kennedy), and best actress (Nancy Naney). “The Valiant Villain” got two awards: me for best actor, and Sandy Nicholson best actress runner-up. As a relative newcomer to community theatre, I was stunned when my name was mentioned for the award. I think it really helped that I continued essentially the same character that I did in February in “Love in the Lodge”. The award was a carving of Yukon’s logo by Dawsonite Otto Beutler. I still have the carving, almost half a century later.
The award for best visual presentation went to Faro’s Pelly Players for “Strange Welcome”.
Following the adjudication, our troupe drove back in the van to Whitehorse. We arrived late in the evening, but still daylight thanks to the North-of-60 latitude and season.
The WDC performed “The Valiant Villain” in Whitehorse twice the following weekend — Friday at the Whitehorse YWCA, and Saturday at the Whitehorse Elementary School gym, along with a school production of “Rockin’ Robin”, a fun spoof of Robin Hood. Ticket revenue from those shows helped offset WDC’s costs associated with the festival, as well as ongoing expenses such as for heating the clubhouse.
As a collector of memorabilia, I also kept a copy of the program, several photos and news clippings, which I have scanned and used in this posting to help tell this story. Here are program listings for the six entries in the festival.
This is a photo of one of the Alaska plays. Taken from where I was sitting in the audience,Report on the festival in the Whitehorse Star newspaper.My prize for the actor award (front and back side below)., a carving highlighting the Yukon logo, by Otto Beutler of Dawson.plaque on the back of the best actor prize. KVA stands for the Klondize Visitors Association Nice memento of the event, which I will be donating to the Yukon Archives along with other memorabilia I have.WDC cast members Doug and Sandy chatting at a gathering after the festival.
thebravestcanadian 