Reed McColm, Paul-Ford Manguelle and Glenn Nelson in The Drawer Boy, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“We’re here to get your history and give it back to you.” — The Drawer Boy

Paul-Ford Manguelle. Photo supplied.

In Michael Healey’s 1999 play The Drawer Boy, a naive young actor from a Toronto theatre company ventures into rural Ontario to research farm life on location for a new collective creation. In the course of Miles’s stay with two elderly bachelor farmers, art and real life collide with memory and identity in intricate and mysterious ways that confirm the power of stories and storytelling.

A bona fide Canadian classic, with a history that includes the landmark collective The Farm Show that came out of the hinterland adventure, The Drawer Boy arrives in Shadow Theatre’s 30th anniversary season Thursday. John Hudson’s production, the first Drawer Boy to be seen here for two decades or so, stars two theatre veterans Glenn Nelson and Reed McColm. And the young urban actor, who arrives on location figuring to write about the rich inner lives of cows, is played by … a young urban actor, a relative newcomer to the scene who seems to have arrived, a fully formed triple-threat with startling natural gifts for comedy, at ease in the acrobatic reaches of dance and song.

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“Miles is a lot like me,” says Paul-Ford Manguelle cheerfully of his Drawer Boy assignment, his first professional gig in a straight play. “Just about my age (he’s 21), and hasn’t been on a farm, or done (that kind of) labour.” So, an innocent out in the countryside? “100 per cent.”

Glenn Nelson, Reed McColm in The Drawer
Boy, Shadow Theatre. Photo supplied.

If you saw Die Harsh, Grindstone Theatre’s clever and very funny holiday musical mash-up of that action thriller and A Christmas Carol, you won’t have forgotten Manguelle’s multiple contributions or his comic dexterity in negotiating them. Among his 13 or 14 roles (and precision high-speed quick-changes of voice, gesture, and hat to match) were a cop and a code-breaker, not to mention a rapping limo driver who delivers one of Simon Abbott’s most memorable songs (Let’s Take A Ride), and his own favourite character, Mary the pregnant hostage. “I workshopped her at the time,” he says. “It was funny and I was proud of her.”

Paul-Ford Manguelle, Mhairi Berg, David Findlay, Evan Dowling, Mark Sinongco in Die Harsh The Christmas Musical, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau

“It’s a sprint,” he laughs, looking for a descriptive for this kind of crazy stage (and backstage) busy-ness. “It’s daunting at first, but after a few runs at it, it does get easier,” he says. “And you feel you have a lot more time.”

I heard “who is that guy?” a lot from admiring fellow audience members on opening night. Manguelle’s own story criss-crosses art and life in highly unusual ways. He arrived in Canada in 2011 with his family from Cameroon in West Africa, at age eight a francophone  without any English. And after eight months in Quebec, the Manguelles moved to Edmonton, “more opportunities for my parents,” as he says of their government jobs. “A little accent pops up some times,” laughs Manguelle, who speaks French at home with his parents and idiomatic, perfectly unaccented English the rest of the time.

He wasn’t a theatre kid. Did he grow up singing? “No, absolutely not!” he says definitively. Soccer was his jam. “I wanted to play professional soccer; I had family in Europe,” Manguelle says. “My professor in high school — he was the only reason there was drama there in the first place — was pushing kids to try it….”

Paul-Ford Manguelle. Photo supplied

“At some point I’d seen Hairspray.” Seaweed’s solo (Run And Tell) struck a chord. What impressed him was “somebody that sort of looks like me, and is doing (acting) professionally…. So from that point I was looking at it as something not so far-fetched. It was there a little spark happened.” He laughs. “I had to get my friends to also do it (laughter); I wasn’t going to do it by myself.” ”

“From my background, if you tell people you want to be an actor they say ‘what? what do you actually mean’? Manguelle feels “very lucky; my parents are the most supportive people in the world!”

By Grade 11 at J.H, Picard, the francophone high school, he was smitten by theatre. “My first show was West Side Story … then a small part in (Brecht’s) The Life of Galileo.” Then he tried out for Anything Goes. “Billy Crocker was the part I wanted to go for. And I was ‘OK, I don’t have such a bad voice; I may have something here’. And from then on, people told me ‘hey Paul you have a good voice! You do have some talent; you should try it!’ External approval is a big thing, right? It was a catalyst.”

“My parents raised me to believe nothing was out of my reach if I worked at it….” Theatre was, he says, “something new. And in high school you know what the pressure is like: Oh, this guy’s weird or whatever. But I was gonna try. And it was a great decision I made.”

Encouraged by Grindstone’s resident musical director/composer Abbott to audition for “this thing we’re doing at Grindstone,” he didn’t even ask what it was. He just said “Hey sure!” And so it came to pass that a 17-year-old kid “with no dance background at all” landed a starring dance part as the perpetual motion blue cat Panthro in the Byron Martin/Abbott Cats parody ThunderCats in 2022. “When Byron told me what it entailed I told him ‘I don’t think I’m good enough for any of this’. It was a lot. Ballet, too.” In the event, he took to the show’s most strenuous role with remarkable ease.

Meanwhile as the gigs accumulate, Manguelle is “undergoing” as he puts it, a business degree “I’m very business-savvy. It’s a field I’m interested in. And super-necessary if you want to be an actor, or performer of any kind.” So the schedule in fall and winter is “class in the morning, other classes and work, then rehearsal, then (at the end of the night) studying. “I’m so young and I have so much energy now,  I’m better doing the the most difficult things right now rather than later.” His mom is the schedule-keeper. “I’m not doing this alone!” he says.

Manguelle’s last show in high school was Cyrano de Bergerac. He occupied the title role as the man equally adept with word and sword. And he’s slated to take sword in hand again, in the season finale Citadel production of The Three Musketeers, understudying D’Artagnon, and also Porthos and Buckingham, as well as playing in the ensemble. The country’s foremost fight instructor J.P. Fournier, one of his high school instructors, assisted Manguelle in preparing his fight audition.

“It’s huge for me! I’m, super-excited. There’s a lot for me to learn, personally and professionally!”

Paul-Ford Manguelle and Glenn Nelson in The Drawer Boy, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

And there’s a lot to learn, as he says humbly, from his cast-mates Nelson and McColm in The Drawer Boy. “I look at them as veterans. They’ve done so much. And they’ve been so kind. And so funny. Rehearsals are the smoothest chillest process ever.”

There’s a mystery in The Drawer Boy, and a tribute to storytelling, sacrifice, and friendship. “It’s a beautiful show…. And Miles’s arc, as the catalyst, is amazing,” says Manguelle. “He essentially learns that as artists, it’s not our right to tell people’s stories if they don’t want us to, As creatives we’re looking for material all the time. And sometimes, are we intruding on people’s personal experiences? By the end of the play he realizes this is not my story to tell….”

“Beautiful.”

PREVIEW

The Drawer Boy

Theatre: Shadow

Written by: Michael Healey

Starring: Reed McColm, Glenn Nelson, Paul-Ford Manguelle

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Feb. 4

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org