Last year I found out there was a pleasant option that involved going to the Royal City of New Westminster and its splendid Massey Theatre. My granddaughter Lauren (then 11) witnessed a Royal City Musical Theatre production of Annie.

This year, my granddaughter Lauren and I attended the opening on Saturday. Nothing has changed in Vancouver but the Royal City Musical Theater mounted a full blown My Fair Lady, book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe, with Artistic Director Valery Easton ably assisted by director Max Reimer. Before I go on I must point out the lesser know fact that Reimer began his days in theatre as a dancer. Easton was a jazz dancer in the CBC variety shows of the 70s and 80s. That adds up to very good dancing in this adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion.

Can you imagine my delight when Dallas Murray Richards and his wife Muriel sat right next to us?

At the interval Richards told me that the large orchestra was made up of amateurs who were all very good.  They were. For me the real star of the show besides the splendid actors, singers and musicians was Set Designer Brian Bell.

His sets were ample proof that much is lost in movies and their special effects. The transformation of the different scenes, a grimy London, Henry Higgins’s interior drawing room, the outside scene from The Street Where You Live and the Ascot Horse Races all happened with complex revolving of sets that were then pushed or pulled. It was a tour de force.It was magic.

Both Lauren and I were familiar to see Warren Kimmel as Henry Higgins. We have seen him twice in the last two year as the father in the Arts Club Theatre production of Mary Poppins. 

The whole house was impressed by the tenor singing of Thomas Lamont who plays the nerdish Freddy Eynsford-Hill. Few might know that George Bernard Shaw stuck to his guns and for years had Freddy marry Eliza Doolittle and they set up their flower shop.

Tracy Neff as Eliza Doolittle was just right although in my books she looked much too clean in the beginning. I guess I had the grimy Wendy Hiller in my mind who played Eliza in the 1938 adaptation of Shaw’s play into a film, Pygmalion. I saw that film many times as a young boy as my mother adored Leslie Howard who was Henry Higgins.

John Payne as Alfred Doolittle rendered With A Little Bit Of Luck most entertaining with lots of dancing and backed up by good singers.

Going to a theatre with a red curtain and red walls and seats is always an experience when one compares it with that of attending a film (you are shouted “Enjoy the show,” many times) at the Scotia Bank Cinema on Burrard. That I shared my experience with my delighted Lauren made it all that much more special.

 I have never associated Audrey Hepburn with Eliza Doolittle because of the many times I saw Wendy Hiller on film. If anything the later adaptation of the Broadway play into the 1964 film was special for both my mother and I as we were fans of Rex Harrison whom we loved in The Ghost of Mrs. Muir with Gene Tierney.


 For me Audrey Hepburn was the young princess in the 1953 film Roman Holiday. I was lucky enough to photograph her in 1984 under circumstances that I regret to this day (read the link).  Having seen My Fair Lady on Sunday I wish I could have been Pygmalion and Hepburn my Galatea. Perhaps had I summoned  Aphrodite, Hepburn would have been transformed to the princess in Roman Holiday.

My Fair Lady runs until the 26th of April.

At age 72 I am now. thanks to my psoriatic arthritis,  a limp wrist and that camera would still have to be on a tripod.

It is easy to be complacent. It is easy to go to a program of Mozart. I can no longer abide going to listen to Bach’s Concerto for 2 Violins in D minor, BWV 1043. I have heard it too many times. In my car these days I am listening to The Rosary Sonatas of Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, a 17^th century composer. It is more difficult to pull yourself together (as the English are fond to say) and go to a challenging evening of new music. But I do my best not to be complacent.

I attend the concerts of Turning Point Ensemble and whatever other new music concerts I can find including the wonderful once-a-year-baby of VS0 conductor Branwell Tovey, the New Music Festival.

I find it strange that the members of Vancouver’s avant-garde mostly have gray hair. Whatever happened to youth in their quest for the new, the daring and the experimental? It would seem that our city’s avante-garde would have to be renamed (and I am doing so) as the Petit Avant-garde.

The Petit Avant-garde including my friend the genius (alas retired!) CBC sound engineer Don Harder were there tonight at the Telus Studio Theatre Chan Centre at UBC for the first of the series Masque put together by Nu:BC Collective (tonight) and the other two forthcoming ones by Turning Point Ensemble and Musica Intima (and friends) featuring  the Nu:BC Collective, Paolo Bertolucci on flute, Corey Hamm, piano and Eric Wilson on cello. Turning Point’s Artistic Director Owen Underhill was also in attendance and he told me, “You are lucky to be here as the last work in the program, Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969) is something that you get to hear only once in your lifetime performed live.”

Adam Da Ross, Diane Park, Paolo Bortolussi, Corey Hamm, William George, Brian Nesselroad, Eric Wilson, Mark Ferris & Françoise Houle

And consider, too that the three works in the program, Converse (2015) by Bob Pritchard, Souffles Primitivs (2001) by Christian Calon and Heroes in the Seaweed (2015) by Keith Hamel (unlike Bartók he smiles a lot) where works by living and breathing composers. Two composers, Pritchard and Hamel were present in the audience. While Maxwell Davies composed his work in 1969 my Spanish grandmother would say “todavía vivitos y coleando,” or all are alive and wagging their tail.   

There was a good reason for the presence of  Keith Hamel and Bob Pritchard (wearing for the first time a Noël Coward style Chinese smoking jacket, a clashing bow tie and orange socks). Both  in some ways were sort-of-like conductors or perhaps as extra performers in the back of the room. This sort of thing is called interactive electronics. I experienced this intriguing method of playing music in 2014 at a Turning Point Ensemble concert at the Woodward’s downtown campus.

The system in which the individual composers sitting by a big Mac and an assorted combination of equipment I hardly recognized, modify the music being played by the performers or they add stuff. There are no real pre-recorded tracks being played (perhaps a few). The result is sound that travels the acoustically interesting Telus Studio (so says Don Harder) through multiple speakers all over the room (ceiling and wall). The sounds of the performers not always come from the conventional use of their instruments. In some cases pianist Hamm was ignoring the keyboard and concentrating on scratching the works of the piano, or cellist Wilson would bang on his instrument or howl vowels into a microphone (in Pritchard’s work). But it was flutist Bortolussi  facing an array of microphones who did stuff with his flute that in many cases precluded the conventional blowing. In Souffles Primitivs he worked on (perhaps a better term than play!) a bass flute, an instrument I had never seen before.

Corey Hamm

The key to enjoying (tolerating some would say) this music is not to be too worried about understanding it. The idea is that composers want to try new things and performers get bored with the conventional repertoire. Just go to any Turning Point Ensemble concert and you will note that many of the performers also play for the VSO or other traditional symphony orchestras. For me new music is the champagne soother between heavy meals.

Many think that new music is scary and serious and yet all three works had lots of very obvious humour, one that as a member of the audience you can share and feel like you are part of it.

At one time philosophers and philosophy seemed to be most important in our understanding of how we think, live and die. Now I would say that role has shifted to the arts and particularly to that new-music composers are pushing that envelope. Pritchard’s piece involved the idea that vowels reveal our emotions while consonants are all about information and content. The three musicians played their instruments but also repeated vowels and consonant (at times it was very funny). The work left me thinking. Is Pritchard right?

Hamel’s second work, Heroes in the Seaweed was an ode to the man that he admires (an admiration shared not only by most Canadians but the world) Leonard Cohen. The performance included (I forgot to look back so I don’t know if Hamel’s wife soprano (but sometimes alto) the Reveren Liz Hamel was saying the words of Cohen’s songs and poetry live or it had been pre-recorded. Her voice is splendid and soothing.

Paolo Bortolussi & his bass flute

The second half of the concert (after I interacted with the cognoscenti Petit Avant-garde) consisted of a complex, moving, impressive, troubling work by an English composer who perhaps not unlike Scottish marmelade might have the words “By Appointment to the Queen, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth Purveyor of Music to Her Court) stamped on his forehead. It was at the beginning of the work that I noticed the four golden “cages” that were lowered to encompass not only Bortolucci, and Wilson but also virtuoso clarinettist Françoise Houle and deapan (but not for long) violinist Mark Ferris. There was an additional change as behind was percussionist Brian Nesselroad wearing a black top hat. He look ominously funereal. All the performers had red, whit and blue tufts of feathers (?) and the whole set had been designed by the elegant Diane Park (My,that red dress she was wearing!) with staging by Adam Da Ross.

The big surprise was the sudden appearance of tenor William George dressed as a bullfinch (King George III, the mad king had an obsession with these feathery friends). He did more than sing (lyrics pulled from the writings, on record of King George III and Randolphe Stowe). In the 8 songs, William George, see-sawed between lucidity and out and out madness. This was scary and I kept thinking to myself what other baritone could possibly do this?

When George repeatedly says:

I am nervous. I am not ill 
but I am nervous.
If you would know what is the matter with me
I am nervous 

I understand that we still have to understand madness and the stigmas still attached to it. We would never ever use the word straight jacket in a sentence and when George put on his coat backwards it was all so reinforced.

It was at the end of Song 7 that George entered Ferris's cage and snatched his violin. He went back to the centre of the stage (I kept thinking he is not going to smash it, is he?) while Ferris expressed unusual shock. George then smashed the violin on the floor and returned the pieces to Ferris who then lay down on the floor apparently dead in shock. It was then than percussionist Nesselroad, with black top hat and a huge marching band drum appeared as death and he led a howling George out of the room.

William George

From left, Bob Pritchard (note the smoking jacket) & Keith Hamel

Tonight I attended the opening night performance of Aaron Bushkowsky’s play Farewell My Lovely based on Raymond Chandler’s 1940 novel of the same name. My companion was Ruth Brooks, my sister-in-law from New Dublin, Ontario who has not gone to a play in many (many) years. The performance was directed by Craig Hall at the Arts Club Theatre’s Granville Island Stage and they co-produced it with Calgary’s Vertigo Theatre.

A punctilious theatre critic (I am neither just an avid blogger and theatre aficionado) would crucify Aaron Bushkowsky who tinkered with Chandler’s minimal dialogue. In fact in the novel one of the cops who manhandles our flawed dick is given the nickname of Hemingway to the utter non-comprehension of the so-named.

Bushkowsky has simplified the plot so there is a tad less left to the imagination. But any play that may bring our youth to an awareness of Raymond Chandler can do no wrong especially when you can add to it a few more very nice things.

Consider that Stephen Hair who plays slightly dense cop Nulty reminded me of Trevor Howard.

He drinks.

Consider that Anthony F. (could that be Fitzgerald?) Ingram plays two parts, Marriot an over-the-top ponce, and Amthor a slippery spiritualist.

He drinks.

Consider that Emma Slipp who plays Annie Riordon and  Jamie Konchak as Helen Grayle can not only act but also display stuff that were I a much younger man I would have had the same problem as that man with the pistol in his pocket. As Mae West said:

Cultivate your curves - they may be dangerous but they won't be avoided.

Consider that the above two women can sing very well and do so. I particularly loved Slipp’s smoky voice.

They both drink.

While I was living in Mexico a Mexican (naturally) told me, "I love those stockings with seams in the back. You start at the bottom and follow the line all the way up to the top." I would cross legs with either of these women anytime.

Consider that Bushkovsky goes on a limb and makes Moose Malloy, a black man in the presence of Beau Dixon. Farewell My Lovely, the novel has language about black people that is not politically correct. The novel’s Malloy wreaks havoc at an all-black night club. This is minimized in the play. Can Chandler be sanitized? Perhaps.

Consider that Jessie Florian (the ultimate Chandler dipso expertly played by luscious Lucia Frangione) is unable to get on with the 12-step program because of terminal circumstances beyond her control.

She drinks.

Consider that Graham Percy, tonight’s Philip Marlowe had to fit the shoes of the likes of Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Montgomery, James Garner, Elliot Gould and Robert Mitchum. He was none of them. But he was a tad less (for a change) hard-boiled  (3 minutes 45 seconds perhaps?) and thus easier to like.  

He drinks lots and lots.

Consider that tonight I overheard three people asking, “Have you seen the Robert Mitchum version?”

Of that latter consideration I can only assert (with one qualification that Charlotte Rampling somehow makes up for the omission) that the 1975 film does away completely with Emma Slipp’s part as Annie Riordon. I do have one puzzle in my mind, the novel’s Anne clearly tells Marlowe, “Don’t call me Annie). Why would Bushkowsky change her name from Riordan to Riordon? Perhaps it is only a program typo. Does that make me punctilious?

But any play that features one of my all-time favourite jazz standards (I have about 15 versions with Gerry Mulligan with Chet Baker or Art Farmer) My Funny Valentine with a trumpet version by Chet Baker has to merit high points for me.

Would I be that punctilious theatre critic (I assert again that I am neither) I would simply write my review in two sentences (and this is not a spoiler alert):

Dumb dick falls for the wrong girl.

Deitra Kalyns (costume designer) blué dress, I almost died when I saw Slipp wearing it.

You could get to like that face a lot. 
And don't call me Annie  
You didn't have to be rough 
Two beauties