Zachary Parsons-Lozinski in With Bells On, Theatre Network. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A new holiday musical gets it world premiere Thursday on the Theatre Network mainstage). And this is how it started. A decade ago, a New York director/choreographer/producer/artistic director, home for the holidays, took his folks to see a show at the old Roxy.

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With Bells On paired the unlikeliest of urban neighbours: a sad-eyed pipsqueak accountant and a seven-foot drag queen decked out like a giant tannenbaum — in a stuck elevator. Not only did Devanand Janki fall in love at first sight with the warm-hearted 2010 sparkler by Edmonton playwright (cum actor/ composer/ musician/ sound designer/ some time drag queen) Darrin Hagen, he remembers immediately thinking “this should be a musical!”   

“That’s how my brain works,” laughs Janki, who has always (possibly from infancy) been tuned to the musical theatre frequency. “I didn’t know Darrin; I knew of him, of course, and I’d admired his work for years…. Basically I internet-stalked him (more laughter): ‘you don’t know me but will you give me the rights to your play to make a musical?’”

The answer was an (instant and enthusiastic) affirmative. And so it began, With Bells On The Musical, co-written by Janki (who directs and choreographs) with his composer/lyricist collaborator Tommy Newman.

A lot has changed in the world and showbiz since 2013. Even the theatre itself isn’t the same: a new Roxy has risen from the ashes of the old, razed to the ground by a devastating fire in 2015. And there’s this: the pandemic has battered theatres, still struggling to regain audiences, and footing on the slippery financial terrain of 2023.

Devanand Janki, writer/ director/ choreographer. Photo supplied.

It posed a challenge for Janki and fellow New Yorker Newman, who’d first worked together on a “clever and fun” musical called The Yellow Brick Road (a bilingual Spanish/English version of The Wizard of Oz). They had to figure out a way to get With Bells On up and on its feet, singing its dozen songs, during the pandemic.

“We performed it outside, and we Zoom-ed Darrin in…. I was SO nervous; I didn’t know what he’d think!” Janki remembers. In the event, Hagen loved it. “He was weeping,” and paid the pair a compliment that Janki cherishes. “‘OMG, it’s seeing an old friend you don’t recognize, and then suddenly you do’.”

It was Hagen who connected Janki and Newman with Theatre Network’s Bradley Moss. And the result is that Janki, who visits his home town frequently to see his mom and dad, finds himself “super-excited to actually get to work here! It’s so meaningful to me because Edmonton shaped me, completely, as an artist…. I would love to do what I do, here! And that has evaded me, for many years.” The only time the busy theatre artist ever performed here, after his teen years, was in a Broadway touring production of Miss Saigon a couple of decades ago.

Janki grew up here in the ‘80s, “when it was the other oil boom. So many dance and theatre companies! As a young person (in the arts) it was brilliant, the best education you could imagine. ….” A graduate of Old Scona high school, he’d started out as a boy soprano in Edmonton Opera productions. “My teenage years were hard-core ballet — Ballet North, Alberta Ballet, the National Ballet, the Banff Centre.” And there was theatre too, shows at the Citadel and the Fringe. “I did so much when I was here it’s really kind of amazing I graduated from high school,” he laughs.

The allure of musical theatre for Janki was that “it put all the elements together; it was always magical to me, and made sense to me in my brain.” His introduction, “my entry drug,” was being in a production of West Side Story at SUB Theatre: “brown people who looked like me — dancing, singing, acting, all together.”

At 18 he packed up and left for New York (“without knowing anyone!”) and AMDA (the American Musical and Dramatic Academy). “I wanted to be on Broadway,” he says, a cheerful shrug in his voice. “I laugh because I was kind of realistic about it. I knew I had work to do…. My ultimate dream was to be a waiter in New York, paying my dues as a struggling actor! And actually, when I got there my first day job was as a singing waiter. On a cruise ship. The glamour of that lasted one day. It was horrible!”

Since then Janki has accumulated a crammed resumé that alights on every branch of the performing arts, in New York and elsewhere in the world: big Broadway musicals, concerts, benefits; off-centre Off-Broadway fare; regional theatre across the country. “I love working, and I’m so grateful to make my living doing what I love. That’s the jackpot, I know. I teach a lot (for a decade he was the director of the musical theatre division of the Stella Adler Studio for Acting in New York) and I know how hard that is.”

Ten years ago, he founded his own company, Live & In Color, to promote diversity and “develop new plays and musicals from under-represented communities — people of colour, women, queer folk, it’s different every year…. It’s the culmination of years of doing what I do, the struggles with being a person of colour, all the closed doors. And having a whole community of artists I don’t see getting opportunities.” In four months Live & In Color raised $40,000.

“We commission a new play from a woman every year,” says the company artistic director. “And for our musical we take open submissions from across the country, and select a piece to develop, workshop, and present to producers in New York…. There are so many brilliant artists who never get seen and heard. ” As a friend reminded him “my dream has always been to be able to show off all my talented friends. That’s really the heart of it.”

Mostly Live & In Color is into development, not producing. But Janki points out a couple of exceptions. One was the Lucille Lortel Award-winning Little Girl Blue: The Nina Simone Musical. And one is With Bells On.

What kind of music happens in a musical set in stuck elevator with a mismatched pair of strangers who happen to be live in the same building? As Janki describes, the dozen Tommy Newman songs — “he writes earworms!” — are in a variety of styles: “pop and musical theatre-based, disco, some Latin, some Broadway. Tommy has quoted every possible Christmas cliché. All things Christmas, everything you can imagine, musically and lyrically. Tongue in cheek, tip of the hat….”

“Part of why I loved With Bells On is that it’s really producible, a two-hander and one set,” says Janki. But that creates its own tricky challenge: “two male voices, one location, how do we give the music as much variety as we can? So the elevator talks! It has a voice and becomes a character.”

You’ll recognize the story of Ted and Natasha from Hagen’s play. But “there are little changes” besides the vocalizing elevator. The (dramatic) ante has been upped for Ted: when he presses Up in the elevator he’s going to the roof … to jump. “This gives him a drive, and makes the other character, Natasha (who’s pressed Down), have to work harder to connect.”

”It’s set in the present. But for me the show feels very nostalgic — all the things that are familiar to us that we can laugh about. And we’ve tried to lean into that,” says Janki. “We laughed the whole time, working on it.” And it’s a show, too, he thinks, for people who feel they just don’t fit into the season of festive jollity.

Zachary Parsons-Lozinski in With Bells On, Theatre Network. Photo supplied.

Janki’s cast, onstage the whole evening with a four-piece band led by Ryan Sigurdson, pairs two actors whose backgrounds aren’t conventional musical theatre: Zachary Parsons-Lozinski (aka drag queen Lilith Fair) and Vancouver-based Thomas Jones who has a background in clowning. “They’ve brought a new dimension, a new edge” to the piece, says their director appreciatively.

And where will Ted and Natasha find themselves next? Janki hopes With Bells On will have a future in theatres across the country “and become a perennial classic…. After all, you can only see Nutcracker so many times,” he laughs. “This is commercial. It’s going to bring in an audience. And (with two actors and a single set) it’s not going to break a theatre.”

Meanwhile, Janki feels “so lucky” to be making theatre here. “Growing up, the cool kids went to Theatre Network. And I feel like I’ve been let into the club!”

PREVIEW

With Bells On

Theatre: Theatre Network in association with Mary J. Davis and MBL Productions and Live & In Color

Written by: Devanand Janki and Tommy Newman (book) and Tommy Newman (music and lyrics), based on the play by Darrin Hagen

Directed by: Devanand Janki

Starring: Zachary Parsons-Lozinski and Thomas Jones

Where: The Roxy Theatre, 10708 124th St.

Running: Thursday through Dec. 23

Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca