Ryan Sigurdson, Jocelyn Ahlf, Andrew MacDonald-Smith and (inside the cellphone) Farren Timoteo, Teatro Live. Photo by Yours Truly.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Fourteen years ago, four young Edmonton theatre artists, emerging talents in their mid-20s, got recruited by Teatro La Quindicina, now Teatro Live!, to do something together, something they’d never done before.

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Jocelyn Ahlf, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Ryan Sigurdson and Farren Timoteo, actors in love with musical theatre, got a Teatro commission to create their own musical. When Everybody Goes to Mitzi’s premiered at Teatro seven months later as the finale of the 2009 summer season, this theatre town had something it had never set eyes and ears on before: a New York-style ‘golden age of musical theatre’ musical actually set in Edmonton AB.

The new musical comedy was an original and high-spirited homage to Edmonton and its flourishing supper club scene of the 1960s, an historic decade when, amazingly, there were 20 supper clubs downtown alone, 13 of them on Jasper Avenue between 100th and 109th Streets.

Bella King, Josh Travnik, Andrea House, Mark Sinongco in Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s, Teatro Live. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

In honour of the season finale revival of Mitzi’s that opens Friday — directed by Kate Ryan and starring Andrea House as Mitzi Dupar, club proprietor extraordinaire — the creators got together at the Varscona (three in person and Timoteo by speaker phone) to remember the origins of the musical, their shared love of golden age musicals, and the seven-month countdown to their opening night .

“The team was put together by Jeff Haslam … like a boy band,” says MacDonald-Smith of the Teatro leading man who became the company artistic director. “No, like the Spice Girls,” Timoteo amends.

Haslam, born-again producer, “was inspired by the golden age New York musicals that were about New York, and wanted that for Edmonton,” says MacDonald-Smith, these days Teatro’s co-artistic director (with Belinda Cornish). It was unprecedented. “I remember him having a lot of faith in us,” says Ahlf. The commission’s other given was “a grande dame character” for Teatro’s vivid and spirited leading lady Leona Brausen to play. And it had to be a big romantic leading role… I remember Gypsy came up a lot.”

And so it was that the four, who “moved in the same circles” and had even been in shows together (but weren’t yet the close friends they are today), repaired to Block 1912. They consumed copious coffee, they divvied up the responsibilities, they figured out a real-life romantic conflict: the grande dame and the younger guy; Mitzi, pushing 50, and band leader Jack, late 20s.

“I remember feeling very fortunate at the time to be selected from a big pool and asked to create something …” says Timoteo, the artistic director of Alberta Musical Theatre and a playwright/ director/ actor whose own solo creation Made in Italy will return to the Citadel next season. “Teatro was then, as it is now, a hotbed of emerging theatre talents…. You’d been in the company a bit longer, Jocelyn, but we were all coming up together at the same time.”

“When I think about this now I think what Jeff did was really smart,” says Ahlf (to general assent). “He assembled chemistry.” Which, as MacDonald-Smith points out, honours a distinctly Teatro tradition. Stewart (Teatro resident playwright Stewart Lemoine) would choose the people, then write the play…. Talent first. Even here, we came before the show, and then we came up with the idea of a lead role for Leona.” And then, as per Teatro practice, “we had a cast before we had a show.”

Ah, the talent. Ahlf had more writer experience. She’d collaborated with Lemoine on the comedy The Hoof and Mouth Advantage (about a couple of scammers who open a musical theatre school in the middle of the prairies) and A Momentary Lapse. So when it came to Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s she and MacDonald-Smith would write the book. And they’d be in the show too, playing off each other, in perpetual bicker mode, as a wry bartender and a phlegmatic server.

Sigurdson was the obvious composer designate of the team. Like his trio of collaborators, he’d graduated as an actor from Tim Ryan’s musical theatre program at Grant MacEwan. But his “real background,” as he puts it, was ‘playing the violin and the piano, classical music.” And he’d been picking up gigs as a musical director, sound designer and vocal coach. He’d written “wordless bizarre music” for Lemoine’s Orlando Unhinged (commissioned for Sigurdson’s MacEwan class) and then the Teatro comedy Eros and the Itchy Ant. And he’d even written an original musical Water’s Daughter with Northern Light’s Trevor Schmidt.

“I approached (composing) as an actor: what’s the actor going through? how would I speak this line? therefore, how would I sing this line?” The ‘60s setting made Dean Martin an inspiration, says Sigurdson. “How would Dean Martin sing this? How would Ethel Merman sing this?…. And in the end I wasn’t happy till I liked the song. I problem-solved my way through it.”

What upped the ante, Sigurdson explains, is that the musical-to-be had a commercial theatre resonance to it: stand-alone hits, preferably hummable, were de rigueur. Period musicals, after all, were a major source of jazz standards. As MacDonald-Smith says, “all the songs the Rat Pack sang were from musicals….”

“Much of my career was me trying to catch up,” says Timoteo, who more than caught up (he starred as Frankie Valli in the Citadel’s Jersey Boys this season). “I didn’t grow up around musical theatre at all. I’d grown up with a steady diet and rock ’n’ roll. I’d been in a rock band. And, yes, we did win Battle of the Bands (laughter from all). From the moment I landed at Grant MacEwan I was pretending I’d seen more than just Grease. The truth is I hadn’t.”

“I took a lot of inspiration from my collaborators,” he says. “I’d written rock and pop lyrics. But this was a deep education for me in dramatic lyric writing. They knew so much more about the craft, the mechanics of it…. I learned so much.”

What producer Haslam had provided them was the idea of the supper club scene in ‘60s Edmonton. And what they brought to it was a personal sense of what that setting meant for young up-and-coming musical theatre artists in Edmonton. Like Jack the bandleader in Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s “there was part of me still grappling with whether or not Edmonton was where I wanted to be,” says Timoteo. “I wasn’t necessarily ready to celebrate that….I had to rebel against my musical theatre assumption that I couldn’t be anywhere other than New York. It was a critical part of my life as an artist discovering the beautiful components to the Edmonton experience I maybe hadn’t seen without the help of my collaborators.”

The journey of Jack, who gets a chance to make it in Vegas, is all about that. MacDonald-Smith remembers the bona fide revelation he had when he was in Avenue Q (with his puppet Maurice) in New York. A dream come true, yes, but then “backstage was just the same as any backstage I’d every been in.”

Sigurdson muses, “a New York musical set in New York is about people who went to the destination. An Edmonton musical set in Edmonton is about people who didn’t go to the destination…. Even non-theatre folk, lawyers and doctors,  are faced with that same question: ‘what are you doing here?’” Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s is by way of a group response.

“It’s really a love letter to the Varscona don’t you think?” says Ahlf of their joint creation. “And also a love letter to Tim Ryan,” says MacDonald-Smith of the late great director/ mentor who “introduced me and Farren to the scope of older musical theatre.”

“Jeff wanted to be a New York producer for Edmonton,” MacDonald-Smith thinks. “So smart and such a great education for us to have a commercialist producer perspective,” says Timoteo. “We were held to a high and immediate standard. Songs got sent back. We had seven months and we were being encouraged and pushed in a pretty big way, to write something for the audience they hadn’t really had before…. A major growth moment for me.”

Ahlf echoes the thought, borrowed from the commercial impulse, that “I’m here for the audience…. They’re who we’re making this for.”

The four look back now with a kind of wonder on the fast track that took an idea from book to lyrics to music, en route to opening night. “We wrote everything down, we needed some splat, the ‘vomit blast’,” says MacDonald-Smith. “Then we’d all meet to discuss…. We learned by doing. That’s really what acting is, that’s what we all do! We do it, screw it up and fix it, and find the gold by screwing up.”

“We knew a lot of stuff,” says Sigurdson. “But I don’t know if we knew we knew it.” Now they know. “People were laughing, applauding in all the right places,” says Timoteo, who remembers weeping and mouthing the words all through opening night. “It was a race to the finish. And on that opening night I felt like we won the race…. ”

Now there’s the thrill of watching a cast of hot young Edmonton theatre artists, the same age as the creators were in 2009, take their musical material and run with it. Come Friday Ahlf and MacDonald-Smith can finally see the show they wrote, from the house seats.

“It’s our dream as writers isn’t it?” says Timoteo, “the ultimate writer’s dream, even if it’s just one more time.… And it’s an enormous, delightful, emotional experience to see that it’s back. All these words are going to get said again. All these notes are going to get sung again.”

PREVIEW

Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Created by: Jocelyn Ahlf and Andrew MacDonald-Smith (book), Ryan Sigurdson (music), Farren Timoteo (lyrics)

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Andrea House, Chariz Faulmino, Bella King, Mark Sinongco, Josh Travnik

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Friday through July 30

Tickets: teatrolive.com