Judy post-meeting at the old Varscona, 2003

At the start of the year we had very sad sad news in Edmonton theatre. With the untimely death, at 76, of Judy Unwin, we lost a bona fide arts pioneer, a public-spirited artist who played many roles in the proliferation of live theatre in this theatre town — as an actor, a director, an artistic director, an administrator, a board member, a fund-raiser and donor, a theatre lover and lobbyist who embodied the old-fashioned spirit of stand-up volunteerism.

At the upcoming Sterling Awards gala Monday night, hosted at Fringe Theatre headquarters, Judy will receive the Sterling for Outstanding Contribution to Edmonton theatre. In her honour, I’m re-posting my 12thnight tribute that ran on January 28.  

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Hi. It’s me, Judy. Listen, I’m at the theatre; I’ll meet you there….” 

She was outspoken, opinionated, generous, and funny — an artist herself who stood up fiercely and in all kinds of ways for live theatre, its creators, its practitioners. A sense of disbelief still hangs over the sad news this month that Judy Unwin is gone, at 77. It’s unreasonable; it just doesn’t compute;  And I bet many people in the Edmonton theatre community share that feeling. 

In one energetic, energizing person, this theatre town has lost an actor, a director, an artistic director, a board member, a fund (and fun-) raiser and donor, an advocate and volunteer, a theatre lover extraordinaire. In the old-fashioned sense Judy was a patron, an enabler if you like, of live theatre, and infinitely creative and practical about how to do that. Her loss is a terrible blow.  

I’ve lost a friend, the kind who takes you out for a Christmas martini, or calls you up late night to discuss the 11 o’clock number in a musical or a surprising performance, or whether there should have been an intermission. We first met, 35 years ago, in the mid-‘80s when Judy was directing the premiere Edmonton production of Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God at Walterdale, Edmonton’s extraordinarily ambitious community theatre. Judy learned ASL, found interpreters, drummed up sponsors, and retained connections to the Deaf community throughout her life — at a time when accessibility was rarely discussed.

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At Walterdale Judy was a force to be reckoned with. She’d grown up in a prominent Edmonton arts family; her father Jack Unwin was a notable director, and the founder of the Walterdale tradition of the annual Klondike melodrama. At 19 Judy was the wide-eyed dimpled ingenue in the first of these, in 1965: Nellie Lovelace (“as true as she is tender”) in Tempted Tried and True or Dirty Work at the Crossroads. And after many appearances as the ingenue she graduated to directing the melodramas.    

Judy is a multi-talented presence in the Walterdale archive. She acted in Walterdale shows; her memorial last week (beautifully arranged by her sons Scott and Steve Tilley) was a veritable reunion of the cast of Exit Who? of 1986. It was Linda Karenko’s theatre debut, she says. “Judy taught me everything…. I said ‘what’s upstaging?’ And she said ‘you’re doing it!’” Judy directed Walterdale shows. She sold tickets; she ran the box office; she raised money. She was on the board, she was the artistic director. 

Actor/broadcaster Chris Allen remembers Judy asking him one day “how much do you love Walterdale?.” Thinking she was after him to purchase a seat as part of the theatre’s renovation campaign, he said “’a lot!’ And Judy said ‘Good! you’re directing the melodrama!’” He was terrified, but she was a very hard person to say No to. “She was a very clear, motivated and productive member of Walterdale and by example gave me lessons in how a working theatre should function.” 

Judy was feisty about supporting artists. In 1980, as playwright Brad Fraser remembers with undimmed appreciation, it was Judy who stood up for his early play Mutants at an emergency Walterdale board meeting called to discuss cancelling the production as too risky. “‘We can’t censor this boy. He’s been working with us for years; we asked him to do this, and he did what we asked. We cannot be censors’…. She was an amazing person.” 

By 1996, Judy was on the board of the Varscona Theatre, across the avenue from Walterdale. And later she was deeply involved in the renovations that resulted in an old-new Varscona in 2016, with opinions on every brick and staircase. The most popular item on the Varscona’s silent fund-raising auctions was invariably the multi-course dinner prepared by Judy, a great cook, in the home of the purchaser, and served by an elite team of chatty Edmonton actors.  

“She had a lot of drive and a lot of connections; she did know everyone in town,” says Jeff Haslam, a longtime Judy friend, Teatro Live leading man and sometime Teatro artistic director, who was on the Varscona board for a time. The thought is echoed by the Varscona’s current executive director Kendra Connor. “She was such a good connector; she knew everybody,” and was fearless about using her manifold connections on behalf of theatre. “She could get (the Citadel’s late founder) Joe Shoctor on the phone,” says Connor. And on the phone to some VIP (or potential sponsor) Judy, as we all knew her, became “Judge Tilley’s wife.”

In Judy’s veins flowed a kind of old-school volunteerism, public service that asks “what do you need?” and then just steps up and makes it happen. “She never thought twice,” as Haslam says. “She saw things through.”

And so it was with the Sterling Awards, an annual celebration of excellence on Edmonton stages. Nobody realized how many jobs she did to keep it going until she stepped away in 2017. 

I remember being at Judy’s table at the Mayfield Theatre on many Sterling nights, as she snuck off her party shoes and put on her bedroom slippers. She’d already been part of arranging the jurors, and the elaborately anonymous voting system. She’d hired the venue; she’d argued about the menu (insisting that you can’t have a proper buffet without the prime rib). She arranged the ticketing. And the sponsors. She’d supervised the building of the Sterling trophies, at $250 apiece, along with the winners’ plaques. 

Judy Unwin and actor/choreographer Jason Hardwick. Photo by Jana Hove.

During the day she’d brought sandwiches to the backstage crew, the director, the stage managers. On the night, she was overseeing the 50-50 tickets, fretting about the trophies and the no-shows, paying the band, fielding complaints…. 

It was an endless list. And as a theatre celebration it was “barely break-even,” as Connor says, “always a struggle.” When it didn’t add up, Judy would put the outstanding Mayfield tab on her VISA. “And by the next year’s Sterlings, we’d paid her back.” 

There’s a showbiz gene in Judy’s makeup. In her ‘60s she took up tap-dancing, along with her friend Betty Grudnizki; they tried Taiko drumming. For multiple summers Judy was even a fellow Fringe reviewer, for Global. I’d see her in the Fringe press room, or previewing shows with Betty at the Saskatoon Fringe. They’d make a road trip of it, and brought a startling array of fancy snacks and booze, laid out like a buffet in their hotel room. Back in Edmonton, before each TV hit Judy would change — upgrade only her top since they only shot from the waist up. Which made her, I guess, an early precursor of the Zoom meet-up.

Judy adored her granddaughters; we all knew that. And there were many strands to her life beyond theatre, as I keep discovering. In the swinging ’60s she was a Wardair flight attendant on the London route in the halcyon days when air travel was still exciting. She was accepted to the National Theatre School, but didn’t go when she fell in love with someone in Edmonton. She loved Hawaii… .There are many secret (to me) chapters folded into the Judy life origami. “She loved it, she really loved it, and she had a passion for keeping it going,” says Haslam of Judy’s attachment to the theatre. “She was fun. She was curious.”

Judy was passionately devoted to the principle that “the arts should be celebrated, upheld whatever it takes,” says Connor. “She had a deep love of artists. She was committed to that.” 

Hold that thought, and pay it forward.