Vinyl Cafe The Musical, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the new Canadian holiday musical that premieres next week at the Citadel, characters we know well do something they’ve never done before. They step out of the radio and off the page — and, for the first time ever, onto the stage, 3-D. To breathe the air of live theatre, and speak and sing for themselves.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

Vinyl Cafe: The Musical taps into the much-loved quintessentially Canadian CBC Radio story collection created over 20 years by the late great Stuart McLean. It’s inspired by the stories of the Toronto couple Dave and Morley, their kids, their neighbours, their ‘hood, and in particular two of the archive’s holiday classics, Dave Cooks The Turkey and Rashida, Amir and the Great Gift-Giving.

Five years in the development, Vinyl Cafe: The Musical is the bright idea of Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran, who directs the premiere production that starts previews Saturday. And it’s been on his mind for a decade at least, since his time as artistic director of Western Canada Theatre in Kamloops.

“I reached out to the Vinyl Cafe team (led by Jess Milton, the long-time Vinyl Cafe producer, podcaster, and the executor of the McLean estate). They always considered it would make a good musical but didn’t have time to pursue it.” Not till 2020, that is, “when Jess and I built a fast friendship, and started to build the team…. We had similar ideas of what this could be, what it would look like as a musical.”

Citadel Theatre artistic director Daryl Cloran. Photo supplied

Musical theatre isn’t an outlandish destination for The Vinyl Cafe, of course. Far from it. “Music was such a big part of Stuart’s radio shows (and his live touring concert/shows),” says Cloran of the signature McLean format, with musical interludes featuring the hippest bands across the country. And after all, Dave is the owner of a vintage record shop.

“We started with the music,” Cloran says. And after considering submissions by a variety of artists, he and Milton went with the Canadian composer/lyricist duo Colleen Dauncey and Akiva Romer-Segal. “They’re quite something,” Cloran says, pointing to The Louder We Get (formerly The Prom Queen, book by Kent Staines), which premiered at Theatre Calgary during COVID, and Grow, a new musical comedy about a couple of green-thumbed Amish kids in partnership with a cannabis dispensary, slated for a 2026 premiere at Montreal’s Segal Centre. “They write a great contemporary pop musical, super-catchy tunes. Definitely you’ll be singing the songs as you leave the theatre.”

“In the sense that the characters sing their feelings as part of the story, it’s a traditional musical ” says Cloran. As an example he points to the song I Am A Train. Dauncey and Romer-Segal wrote it as a musical response to Morley’s line, in Dave Cooks The Turkey, where she describes the unending to-do list attached to being a mother at Christmas.

Stuart McLean, creator of The Vinyl Cafe. Photo supplied

The book was a challenge for theatre, as Cloran describes, not least because the voice of McLean, with its signature cadence, pauses, and intonation, is so inextricably built into his stories. He’s a storyteller. In his radio and live shows “he doesn’t play a bunch of characters,” the way Farren Timoteo does, for example, in his solo show Made In Italy, or Rod Beattie does in his Wingfield series. “So it’s quite something to see them come to life,” Cloran says of Dave and Morley and the rest onstage.

“How do you take a story and make it something that leans into the power of theatre?” That was the question that propelled the development of The Vinyl Cafe: The Musical. “We made a conscious decision not to have a narrator or a narrative voice, not to have somebody pretending to be Stuart.” Instead, two of the most popular Dave and Morley holiday stories (Dave Cooks The Turkey and Rashida, Amir and the Great Gift-Giving) “are intertwined into a narrative musical…. For the first time the characters are being embodied.” The musical isn’t “telling” the stories, as Cloran says. As a piece of theatre, it “leans into action and dialogue.”

The book for the new musical is written by Mexican-American playwright/librettist Georgina Escobar along with Milton. “We wanted someone with experience writing musicals, someone with a unique take on it,” says Cloran. Citing Milton, he says “there’s an inherent nostalgia about these stories and the tone of The Vinyl Cafe…. Jess knows these characters inside out. So she’s able to say ‘in this situation Dave would do this.”

The goal, says Cloran, was to honour the history of The Vinyl Cafe “and speak to contemporary audiences.” In locating stories written 15 or 20 years ago in a contemporary setting, Rashida, Amir and the Great Gift-Giving was particularly apt, as he describes: “new Canadians who’ve moved into a neighbourhood as they take in all the neighbours’ wacky stress about this particular holiday.”

“Escobar was really able to tap into that experience…. We approached a whole bunch of writers, and Georgina’s take on it was the one that got the team the most excited.”

Damon Pitcher and Muhaddisah in Vinyl Cafe The Musical, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography

Vinyl Cafe: The Musical is heir to such Citadel musical premieres as Full Moon and Prison Dancer. With its $800,000 budget and 16-actor cast, led by Shaw Festival veteran Mike Nadajewski as Dave and Edmonton theatre star Patricia Zentilli as Morley — plus a six-piece band — it’s on a scale. And Cloran has hopes its appeal, its sense of humour, its Canadian-ness, will have appeal across the country and beyond. “Other (Canadian) theatres have been sniffing around about the show,” he says. And The Vinyl Cafe has always had American fans; the CBC Radio series was  picked up by some 80 public radio stations in the U.S.  

Meanwhile ticket sales have been “quite impressive,” as he puts it. So brisk, in fact, that  weeks ago, “unheard of for us, that early,” the Citadel announced an extension to the run. “If we do this right, there’s a good chance it will have a life after the run here.”

Canadians, Cloran among them, have a history with The Vinyl Cafe. “They feel a connection, not only to the stories themselves but the (family) ritual of hearing those stories on the radio every Sunday, and going to the live Christmas concerts.” His wife’s parents took the family to the Christmas shows in Toronto every year. “It’s been a big part of my life.”

Threaded through the radio broadcasts are McLean’s jocular “don’t get ahead of me” asides to audiences anticipating developments in the stories. At the workshops (there have been three since 2020) of the new musical, “people would be laughing at the jokes half-way through. Fascinating to see,” reports Cloran.

“As we navigate into previews making changes,” he and Milton have been at pains to create something for long-time fans (“with little Easter eggs”) and for Vinyl Cafe newbies who “just want a great night out….”

PREVIEW

Vinyl Cafe: The Musical

Theatre: Citadel Theatre, based on The Vinyl Cafe story collection by Stuart McLean

Book by: Georgina Escobar with Jess Milton

Music and lyrics by: Colleen Dauncey and Akiva Romer-Segal, respectively

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: Mike Nadajewski, Patricia Zentilli, Nadien Chu, Rain Matkin, Muhaddisah, Damon Pitcher, Kristin Johnston,  Jameela McNeil, Nick Boegel, Benjamin Hill, Cooper Nash Rajotte, Leon Willey, Sheamus Swets, Andrés F. Moreno, Kristel Harder, Koko

Running: Saturday (in preview) through Dec. 7

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820