Crescendo by Sandy Paddick, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the last three decades Shadow Theatre has produced plays of every size, shape, tone, and sensibility, often contemporary but not always. Shakespeare, Chekhov, Noel Coward have Shadow credits; so do American big-shots like Paula Vogel, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard.

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And the company co-founded by John Hudson and Shaun Johnston has done its share of new Canadian plays, too, premieres by such notable Edmonton playwrights as Belinda Cornish (Little Elephants), Jocelyn Ahlf (The Liars), Conni Massing (Fresh Hell) among them. In fact, Shadow’s official history, now 110 productions long, began in 1992 with a new Canadian play, Johnston’s own gritty inner city drama Catching the Train.

Crescendo!, which opens Shadow’s 30th anniversary season Thursday, is Shadow’s first-ever musical.

And music is built right into the premise. Crescendo! follows the diverse motives and fortunes of a diverse group of women who come together weekly to sing in a women’s community choir. Edmonton actor/playwright Sandy Paddick, who’s collaborated with composer Jennifer McMillan on Crescendo!, found the seed of the “play with music” in the people she met when she joined a choir. “Why had they joined?” That was the question that intrigued her.

Paddick’s own reasons had something to do with the gravitational pull of music in her own life. “Yup, I was the kid who sang all the time!” laughs the Grant MacEwan musical theatre grad. But they had something to do with timing, too. By 2015 “my kids were teenagers and I was too involved in their lives,” she says cheerfully. “I needed something else to focus on.” Yes, my friends, pickleball is not the universal solution to the problem of human connectivity.

“You get really close to the people sitting right beside you in choir,” Paddick says. “I just started to ask people why they’d joined. And I got such interesting answers.” To Paddick, the disparities constituted a gilt-edged incentive to write a play.

playwright Sandy Paddick. Photo supplied.

Crescendo! was by no means her first. Night Without Stars was inspired by the angst of her first professional gig out of theatre school, in a Robin Phillips production. “He had a perfection bell he’d ring. I wrote the play for therapy —  about a queen who had a perfection bell, and ordered the kingdom to bring her the most beautiful thing they owned, and nothing was good enough.” She wrote Back Pocket Lennie (about intergenerational abuse) and Naked Lies (about teen sexuality) for Azimuth Theatre’s high school audiences. Enchantment was based on Christina Rossetti’s long narrative poem Goblin Market. Dark, traumatizing subjects all, she agrees. Crescendo! by contrast has a certain affirming lightness.

“This is not verbatim theatre,” she hastens to add. “I didn’t interview the women. This is a play ‘inspired by’ their stories.” Natural ad hoc curiosity elicited some “wild reasons,” Paddick says. “A huge variety…. There was addiction; there was grief. There were people just wanting to join a community. There were people who want to sing in a choir because that’s who they are, through their whole lives. Sometimes there were people new to the country who wanted to feel connected. There was a woman with autism….”

Cathy Derkach and Kirstin Piehl in Crescendo!, Shadow theatre. Photo by Marc J. Chalifoux.

“A lot of it is purposeful,” she says of the weekly encounters. “You’re there to learn the music. So there’s not a pressure to socialize; it just happens. It’s not enforced.” And that has its advantages. Paddick, a U of A BFA acting grad after her Grant MacEwan years, went back to school again. She has a career as a professional speech pathologist, often working with kids on the spectrum. And there’s a kind of natural continuity with the music and storytelling that underwrites the characters in Crescendo!

“You go there to sing; you don’t have to talk. So it’s a good place to practice your social skills if you need to,” she says. “And the science is fascinating!” When you’re singing in a choir, brain waves tend to synchronize, apparently. “It releases a ‘special agent’ in the brain, because you’re deep breathing,” a happy-making social side effect. Speech pathologists are highly tuned to the connection between thought and language.

Paddick, who’s married to Shadow artistic director John Hudson, says another motivation for writing Crescendo!, which found its first audience at the 2019 Fringe, was that “I just don’t see tons of stories of older women. And (she laughs) quite honestly, we’re the ones who go to theatre. Statistically. Where are our stories? They’re not out there.”

Cathy Derkach and Jenny McKillop in Crescendo!, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Crescendo! she says, “is about (our hunger for) connection. What brings a community of women together in a positive way? How do we manage our lives in terms of balance, work, home, kids? There really was a woman who brought her baby to rehearsal,” she says of the inspiration for one of her characters. “That happened!”

The playlist for the community choir that Paddick joined was widely varied — seasonal music, Broadway show tunes, some classical numbers, pop music, ABBA.… And Crescendo!, which was always planned as a musical, embraces that experience. “Jen (composer Jennifer McMillan) has actually written for choirs!” Paddick says she can pick out who in the audience has been in a choir by the knowing laughter that accompanies some of McMillan’s unerring parodies.

For all their harmonizing, choirs (like theatre) have a complement of backstage friction too. “You’ve gotta have conflict in theatre, or what’s the point?” Paddick points to “competition with other choirs,” or “times when certain people might be pointed out for doing a really good job, and sometimes that can be a little awkward.” Or “I didn’t get a solo this time; I wonder why.”

The main character evolved from exploring the question “when music is your life, what happens when you can’t do it any more? When your voice, your song, your reason for standing leave you? How does that resonate?”

In figuring out how disparate stories could be interwoven into a play, Paddick looked at the structure of the unusual musical Come From Away, inspired by the real-life story of how the little Newfoundland town of Gander hosted thousands of travellers displaced by the terrible events of 9-11. The creators “drop in a variety of stories. And you don’t necessarily get the end of the story (or the beginning for that matter). Maybe a snippet.”    

Crescendo!, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

And speaking of connections, the Shadow production we’ll see is a veritable reunion of long-time friends. Paddick, who was at Grant McEwan with cast member Colleen Tillotson, remembers the “super-fun” of that musical theatre program, “an idyllic magical kingdom” And the two were in the same BFA class as director Ryan. Cathy Derkach wrote music for Paddick’s Back Pocket Lennie.

“I’ve always wanted to write,” says Paddick, with a comic sigh. “And it’s been a pain in the butt! There I am working, loving my life, and then the nagging voice goes ‘you’d better start writing’! It was quite strong after I’d joined the choir.” She tried a new approach. “I told people I was actually going to write it, to see what would happen. And they were ‘so, when’s the play coming?’”

There’s nothing like affectionate peer group pressure. Crescendo! is coming now.

PREVIEW

Crescendo!

Shadow Theatre

Written by: Sandy Paddick with music by Jennifer McMillan

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Cathy Derkach, Michelle Diaz, Jenny McKillop, Kirstin Piehl, Colleen Tillotson

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Nov. 5

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org