Andrea House, Farren Timoteo, Cathy Derkach, Kendra Connor rehearsing Far Away and Long A-Gogo!, Teatro Live!. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Oh, there’s no cure like travel/ To help you unravel/ The worries of living today…. “ — Anything Goes, Cole Porter

Ah, wanderlust. The journey as antidote to what ails you. “When the poor brain is cracking/ There’s nothing like packing/ A suitcase and sailing away.”

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Teatro Live! launches their 42nd season, a November to July lineup slanted to “adventure, travel, and discovery,” Thursday with a “concert event.” Far Away and Long A-Gogo! isn’t a play, says musical director Cathy Derkach, searching for the mot juste. Cabaret? Not really. Musical revue? Nope. And not a song cycle either.

With music curated by Teatro’s resident playwright Stewart Lemoine, the “concert event,” which has only eight performances over two weekends, gathers a trio of Teatro faves — Kendra Connor, Andrea House and Farren Timoteo. And it puts them onstage with a live band of three including Derkach, a Teatro star herself of long standing, on keyboard.

Cathy Derkach

“It’s the flavour of travel,” says Derkach, fresh from a starring role in Shadow Theatre’s premiere production of Crescendo!. Travel through time and space, across decades and oceans. “Literal travel, and travel within oneself,” along with the rediscoveries attached to “the feeling of change” and the return home.

The far-reaching song list “presents many challenges,” she says happily, “as Stewart does.” In Lemoine’s own plays, life changes are often attached to musical experiences, from the operatic and full-scale symphonic to the beginner piano student handbook. That Sondheim, Jacques Brel, Noel Coward, and Petula Clark are cast-mates in this new show might give you some idea of the range of Far Away and Long A-Gogo.

In her work as a vocal coach, musical director, accompanist, and mentor in the musical theatre performance program at MacEwan University, Derkach “plays hundreds of songs.” So when she says “challenging,” talks about “breaking the code of the composer,” and points to songs in the program she hadn’t known in advance, that counts, big time.  

Andrea House, Farren Timoteo, Cathy Derkach, Kendra Connor in rehearsal for Far Away and Long A-Gogo!, Teatro Live!. Photo supplied.

Some you will recognize, the Tonight quintet from West Side Story, for example, in which Connor, House and Timoteo are joined by two special mystery guests. Or Kander and Ebb’sNew York, New York. But even musical theatre devotés might not have rubbed shoulders with the Kurt Weill/Ira Gershwin musical Lady in the Dark, with its very funny Tchaikovsky patter song. Or the 1933 Cole Porter musical Nymph Errant. Or the Act II opener Dream With Me from Bernstein’s 1950 musical Peter Pan.

Derkach is especially intrigued by the provenance of the jazz standard Stranger in Paradise, which Timoteo delivers. It’s from the ‘50s musical Kismet, based on music by the Russian composer Alexander Borodin.

Travel and adventure, literal and metaphorical, threads through the Teatro season. The company’s most travelled show, Lemoine’s 1997 Pith! returns Feb. 9 to 25, in a revival directed by the playwright and starring Andrew MacDonald-Smith and Kristin Johnston (casting of the third role has yet to be announced). It is, par excellence, a theatrical tribute to the power of the imagination to transform the life of a widow paralyzed by grief.

Lemoine’s 2009 comedy The Oculist’s Holiday is a rom-com Euro-holiday adventure, in which a Canadian travels to Lausanne, meets an eye doctor, and, yes, her vision changes. The revival directed by Belinda Cornish happens May 30 to June 16. And the season finale in July, Noel Coward’s prickly Private Lives starring Cornish and MacDonald-Smith and directed by Max Rubin of Theatre Yes, is a kind of travel adventure, too. A warring couple whose marriage has gone up in flames meet by accident on their separate honeymoons, with new partners, in the south of France.

PREVIEW

Far Away and Long A-Gogo!

Theatre: Teatro Live?

Curated by: Stewart Lemoine

Musical director: Cathy Derkach

Starring: Kendra Connor, Andrea House, Farren Timoteo

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Sunday, and Nov 30 to Dec. 3

Tickets: teatrolive.com, varsconatheatre.com