Grindstone Theatre’s first-ever mainstage subscription season

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The little comedy theatre that never sleeps just got bigger.

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The little theatre with the insomniac energy has announced their first mainstage subscription season, three big musicals, two from Broadway and one original. With a big new mainstage to match: Grindstone has taken over the Orange Hub, the City-owned ex-MacEwan venue in the west end (10045 156 St.).    

It’s not like they weren’t already busy. Grindstone’s dizzying weekly roster of comedy shows — sketch, stand-up, improv — includes a hit all-improvised musical, The 11 O’Clock Number. They throw themselves into festivals like Fringe and Pride, and launch new ones — mural-painting, disco, a curated Comedy Festival (July 3 to 7) among them. The indefatigable Grindstone team of artistic director Byron Martin and composer/musical director Simon Abbott create original musical comedies and satires of their own: Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer, ThunderCats, Die Harsh The Christmas Musical. Last year Grindstone produced a Broadway musical, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.

No high holiday is safe from a Grindstone bash (and dance party). They run a theatre school with 120 students a term, assorted improv, comedy, musical theatre workshops … and a bar and bistro in their 85-seat Strathcona headquarters.

And now the Orange Hub. Grindstone’s artistic director Byron Martin, who magically exudes an air of the unhurried and laid-back, explains that “we won the management bid, a three-year lease” to manage the City-reno’ed building’s two theatres. And the 350-seat Haar and a flexible black box studio theatre with a 100-seat (or so) capacity depending on the configuration, have already roused a lot of interest from performing arts companies looking to rent, he reports. Grindstone is “the anchor tenant,” says Martin. “Depending on the time of year, we’ve had to squeeze ourselves in….”

“There aren’t many places you can see big musicals here,” he says of the scene. It’s in the Orange Hub’s big upstairs house, the Haar, where Grindstone’s ambitious debut mainstage season of musicals will happen. It opens Oct. 18 to Nov. 3 with a 21-performance run of Richard O’Brien’s hit Rocky Horror Show, an international cult classic that’s a sassy homage to the B-movie horror genre.

For a company with improv roots, and a love of playing with audiences, Rocky Horror is, as Martin points out, “a great choice…. It’s just so fun. And we enjoy the kind of audience interaction, the back and forth” that has propelled the show for the last 50 years. He anticipates a band of five or six and a cast of nine for the show, timed to sync with Halloween, a festive season in itself for Grindstone.

Evan Dowling, David Findlay, Mhairi Berg in Die Harsh The Christmas Musical, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau

The Yuletide season marks the return of Grindstone’s holiday hit Die Harsh The Christmas Musical, Martin and Abbott’s inspired amalgam of the iconic action thriller and Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The show, Sterling-nominated this season for its score, arrives back buoyed by full-house audiences, and a history of expanding every time out. The first incarnation, a one-act version at Grindstone itself, sold out even before it opened (“we did two shows a night, a marathon for the cast”). And much the same thing happened last December in a full-body two-act version at the 176-seat Varscona, where Abbott led a live four-piece band.

The run at the Orange Hub Dec. 13 to 29 on the much larger Haar stage “is a great new step for the show,” says Martin. “It was a real puzzle to put together. And this is a chance to see it with fresh eyes, see what can be tightened.” Or expanded. “We might add two swings to the five-member cast, hey, a chorus!” Which means, potentially, more tap dancing from the FBI in one of the show-stopping numbers. “Our main goal always: more tap,” laughs Martin.

A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder, a fizzy 2013 Tony Award-winning musical comedy, concerns the murderous swath cut by a penniless hero to advance his chances of inheriting an aristocratic title. Only eight relatives stand between Monty and his goal, and lo and behold they begin to drop like flies. Monty is a veritable Hamlet of a role, in quick-change musical comedy terms. The character leads a cast of nine. Martin reports the 120 actors have already signed up to audition this week for the new mainstage season.

Additionally, Martin, a Grant MacEwan musical theatre grad with an MFA from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow, will direct MacEwan’s production of the musical The Prom next winter. “Yup, no down time.”

“It’s pretty ambitious,” he says of the new mainstage line-up. “Massive, yes. We have this new stage, and you have to meet the demands of the stage, in a way.”

Fair to say “there’s a lot going on” elsewhere at Grindstone. For one thing, there’s a new Grindstone Martin/Abbott musical in preparation for the Fringe: Accidental Beach The Musical. “A sort of Bay Watch parody,” as Martin describes, it takes up the Hot Boy Summer initiative to create something of this place, for this place.

The origins of the new musical are, like ThunderCats, in improv. It started as an episode of the all-improvised 11 O’Clock Number (“we record every show now”). “We’ve used the text verbatim!”

Grindstone is bursting at the seams. “We’ve had to hire three full-time people for festivals and events,” he says. There’s a full-time rental person. There’s a full-time education person, based in the Grindstone space under the Mill Creek Cafe, who oversees classes in improv, acting, sketch-writing, magic, burlesque, plus summer camps for teams. They’ve added an education venue: the Ritchie Community League.

Grindstone’s Fringe lineup will happen in three venues, the original bistro, the theatre school and Mile Zero Dance headquarters…. And first there’s the Comedy Festival (with stars like Bruce McCulloch and Debra DiGiovanni).

Meanwhile, “we have season tickets on sale for the first time!” says Martin of the new mainstage venture. “It’s a big step for us! We never had our shit together before.”

Subscription season tickets: grindstonetheatre.ca.