Month: October 2022

We should all shout ‘Bravo!’

There are moments in the cultural life of a city that should be remembered as nothing less than a triumph. What happened Saturday night, at the corner of Wellington Street and Dufferin Avenue in London, Ont., was one of them.

London Symphonia‘s season-opening concert at Metropolitan United Church was more than an evening of orchestral music. It was the dramatic, even cathartic, meeting of two story lines: that of a skilled and undaunted ensemble that has wandered an artistic wilderness for nearly a decade in search of place to call home, and that of a faith congregation in the heart of the city that seized an opportunity to transform its space into one that could serve as both a place of worship and an arts hub. Saturday night’s result was as brilliant as the autumnal colours of the weekend and as glorious as its warm sunshine.

London Symphonia performs En el Escuro, es Todo Uno, by Kelly-Marie Murphy, under the direction of conductor Gordon Gerrard, at Metropolitan United Church on Oct. 22, 2022.

The concert, dubbed We Are All One, after the double concerto for harp and cello by Kelly-Marie Murphy titled En el Escuro, es Todo Uno (In the Darkness, All is One), was spectacular for its music alone. Murphy’s evocative score revealed the skilful artistry of harpist Angela Schwarzkopf and the prodigious talent of cellist Cameron Crozman. But layer on the culmination of a $1.65-million renovation, jointly financed by the church and the orchestra, and the evening became a landmark event. It was a brand new space — not even Metropolitan’s congregants, who had spearheaded the fundraising, will gather in the renovated sanctuary until Oct. 30. One could hear the understated satisfaction in the voice of Al Edwards, chair of the renovation steering committee, during opening introductions: “This is really going to happen,” he said, with a hint of emotion. “It’s tremendous.” And it was.

Al Edwards, chair of the joint renovation steering committee, welcomes patrons to London Symphonia’s new home at Metropolitan United Church at the start of yesterday’s concert.
Kelly-Marie Murphy

Akasha, (meaning “sky” in Sanskrit) by Canadian composer Glenn Buhr, offered a foretaste of the exotic sounds and rhythms that would pervade the first half of the evening, while Mendelssohn’s familiar Symphony No. 4 in A major (“Italian”) closed the program, post-intermission. The concert’s centrepiece, however, was Murphy’s remarkable double concerto, which premiered in Montreal in 2018. The composition draws on songs from the Sephardic tradition for each of its four movements, together with Bulgarian, Turkish and Balkan influences. The concerto’s third movement, the Cadenza Yigdal, was arresting in both the emotion it evoked and the musical virtuosity it revealed. Conductor Gordon Gerrard, in his sixth season as leader of the Regina Symphony Orchestra, brought a casual yet masterful, business-like style to the podium, displaying an ease with audience interaction as he offered an unscripted, light-hearted introduction to the Mendelssohn work.

Harpist Angela Schwarzkopf and cellist Cameron Crozman perform En el Escuro, es Todo Uno, by Kelly-Marie Murphy, on Nov. 22, 2022, in London, Ont.

After two years of experimenting with live-streaming as a box-office option, London Symphonia appears to have mastered that aspect of its business plan too, with the help of Stratford-based Stream Studio. (Much as I would have loved to have been there in person, I opted for the livestream of Saturday’s concert. I’ll leave it to others to evaluate the acoustics of Metropolitan’s new space.) The livestream’s production values are high: superb direction, timely switching, sharp and focused video and a rich sound quality. The best I’ve seen and heard.

Amid the information desert that is London, Ont., on weekends, it’s easy to miss — or worse, dismiss — events of this import. But Saturday’s concert was a marvellous, exultant feat, both on the stage and off.

Here’s a time-lapse video produced by Metropolitan than speeds through the orchestra’s rehearsal on Thursday evening:

A guide to the remainder of London Symphonia’s 2022-23 season is here.

Three years on, Grand Ghosts reappears as a new incarnation

At 6:30 p.m. on Dec. 2, 2019 — it was dark and cloudy in London, Ont., with the temperature just below freezing — Grand Theatre artistic director Dennis Garnhum summoned donors and patrons to the Spriet stage. With the house lights low and a single ghost light onstage, Garnhum announced that Grand Ghosts, a new play by Canadian playwright Trina Davies, would launch the theatre’s 2021-22 season.

The date of the Grand’s announcement was symbolic: It had been on Dec. 2, 1919 — exactly 100 years earlier — that Canadian entertainment magnate Ambrose Small sold his chain of theatres for $1.7 million, deposited the money at a bank and then disappeared, never to be seen again. At least, never to be seen in the flesh again. In the 100-plus years since Small’s disappearance, his ghostly manifestations in and around his once-favourite theatre have been some of the most persistent (and saleable) tales at the city’s venerable arts institution.

Jesse Gervais as Ambrose Small in Trina Davies’ Grand Ghosts. Photo by Morris Lamont

According to the Grand, Small was “a ruthless businessman with a fondness for gambling and women; qualities that did not endear him to his employees, his business partners, his gambling rivals or the ladies of his life.” The Davies commission, financed through the COMPASS new play development program with additional funding from Tourism London, would explore one of the city’s most lingering mysteries.

To add import to the occasion on that night in 2019, the Grand invited journalist and author Katie Daubs, who three months earlier had published The Missing Millionaire: The True Story of Ambrose Small and the City Obsessed With Finding Him. Daubs shared some fascinating stories drawn from her new book. Davies, meanwhile, appeared via a video link from Vancouver. In describing the development of the new play, Davies said that, with Grand Ghosts, “audiences will be invited on a ghost hunt to experience the Grand in a way they never have before. Areas of the theatre that have been previously unseen by the general public will be exposed, along with the stories that are held within the building’s 1901 bricks and mortar. This hunt may open up something that has long been hidden within the theatre: the story of Ambrose Small, his disappearance, and all those around him that felt entitled to a piece of the action.”

Fast forward one pandemic, a building renovation and nearly three years later, and Grand Ghosts, in its new incarnation, is a dramatically different show than the apparition Davies had conjured. Gone are the suggestions that audiences would explore the theatre’s haunted spots, even entering the building via a shadowy, circuitous route. Instead, the show has gone vaudeville.

“The Grand started as a vaudeville theatre and would regularly have travelling acts cross its stage,” Davies says in the theatre’s latest press release. “Bringing the theatre back to its roots, over 100 years later, is truly exciting.” What she has produced, the theatre’s release says, “is a ghostly spectacle bursting with music, dancing and spectacular vaudeville acts.” In the show, the ghosts who haunt the Grand (yes, there are others) return to relive “what actually happened on that fateful day.”

Emcee with a ghost light in the Grand Theatre production of Grand Ghosts
Andrew Prashad plays Emcee in the world premiere of Trina Davies’ Grand Ghosts at the Grand Theatre. Photo by Morris Lamont

“This has been quite a process — unlike any other than I’ve been a part of,” Davies said when I spoke with her earlier today. ” The first draft of this play — probably mid-2019 — was over 200 pages long and did exactly what we’d talked about early on. It was an experience where the audience would come in through a non-traditional entrance (not through the front doors) and there were going to be scenes and experiences backstage, all around the lobby, things that would travel. And then there would be a main-stage show. The intermission would involve more of those kinds of experiences and then you’d come back for the end of the main-stage show. That was the concept at the time.”

All along, however, Davies was concerned about how the site-specific show would work in a theatre as big as the Grand, with as many as 800 patrons at a time. “It was a bit of a mind puzzle,” she said.

When former executive director Deb Harvey heard about the plan in May 2019, she was taken aback.

“Deb said, ‘You want to do WHAT?'” Davies remembers. There were all kinds of emergency exit issues, along with logistics and safety concerns.

“It was all very challenging that way. And then, of course, COVID happened. That added a whole other layer to it. And the idea that we had to go into all these spaces kind of got dropped — which was actually a huge gift for me, because that was really stressful…. So then it became a more traditional stage play. I call it a play with singing, dancing and vaudeville acts. It’s not strictly a musical, but there is a lot of music in it now.

Jesse Gervais and Allen Cole in Grand Ghosts
Jesse Gervais as Andrew Small, with music director Allen Cole at the piano, in Grand Ghosts. Photo by Morris Lamont

“Thankfully, Allen Cole, the composer, came on this year. He’s amazing; he’s done beautiful work. And he actually agreed, at the last minute, to be onstage as the pianist, so he’s right there, every night,” Davis said. The lyrics and music ended up being a collaboration between the two.

“It was a learning process for me. I’m really happy with how things have turned out, although I don’t know, if I were to go back to myself five years ago, that I would take it on again.”

Audiences during the show’s previews this week have responded enthusiastically, “right off the hop,” Davies says.

“I do feel a special connection to London,” she adds. “When I came for Silence, I stayed here for a month. I was at rehearsal every day, living and working here, digging into the fantastic resources of the London Public Library. This time, too, it feels a little bit like home. I feel like I have my neighbourhood when I’m here and I just really love working in London and working at the Grand…. I hope to return and work at the Grand and be in London again.”

Meanwhile, patrons will be left to decide what happened to Small — and whether the radical pivot from the audience-interactive mode to the vaudeville format tells the story effectively.

(Additional images from the Grand Theatre’s production of Grand Ghosts can be found in a Facebook post by London photographer Morris Lamont. London Free Press entertainment writer Joe Belanger’s adoring review is here.)

World Premiere of
Grand Ghosts
By Trina Davies
Directed by Jillian Keiley
Musical director, composer and pianist: Allen Cole
The Grand Theatre, London, Ont.
October 18-November 5, 2022
Cast: Tess Benger, Jesse Gervais, Cyrus Lane, Katelyn McCulloch, Christian Murray, Andrew Prashad, Jan Alexandra Smith, Tahirih Vejdani and Anthony Raymond Yu
Buy tickets here.

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