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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Vinyl Cafe The Musical, the new Canadian holiday musical premiering at the Citadel in a Daryl Cloran production, is a cool idea bravely built on a double challenge.

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On one hand it’s an homage to a bona fide Canadian institution, as vintage as the vinyl in the hero’s indie record shop, very Canuck in an appealingly unself-conscious way. For its inspiration it dips into the story and character archive of the late great storyteller/humorist Stuart McLean, a voice in the ear of nostalgic CBC Radio listeners from 1994 to 2017.

On the other hand Vinyl Cafe The Musical is … a musical. A singing dancing musical theatre entertainment for 2025, and the festive season. For an audience that includes people who know nothing in advance of the Toronto couple Dave and Morley, and their kids, their neighbours, their urban ‘hood (or CBC Radio).

That duality made for a fascinating opening night experience Thursday. When the hapless and hopeful Dave (Mike Nadajewski) says to his wife Morley (Patricia Zentilli) at the outset, “it’s Christmas. Relax. We got this….” by way of brushing away her mounting mental checklist of seasonal tasks, there were those in the house seats who got it as a pre-emptive punchline to Dave’s chronic misadventures (Dave, the man of famous last words), and laughed. And there were those (I sat near an assortment) who didn’t. Fair enough. You don’t have to study up to enjoy.

Mike Nadajewski and Patricia Zentilli in Vinyl Cafe The Musical, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

In any case making a big piece of musical theatre from stories grounded in the small, and the familiar homey details of daily life (the motto of Dave’s shop: “we may not be big but we’re small”) is a delicate theatrical matter. The charm of the episodic source material, with its texture of the quotidien and its distinctive narrative voice, is tricky to capture as reinvented for the stage in a musical’s more extrovert energy, bolder outline, and heightened dramatic frictions.

Does Vinyl Cafe The Musical succeed? On this first viewing, there’s a lot to love, and some things to reconsider, about the new 16-actor six-musician musical, two years in the making, created (and directed) by Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran with longtime Vinyl Cafe producer and McLean estate executor Jess Milton.

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

The book — curiously, this most Canadian enterprise is by a Mexican-American playwright, Georgina Escobar, with Milton — has hits and misses, which will no doubt be worked on for future iterations of the show.

The driving force is the relationship of all the characters onstage to Christmas, the most stressful holiday of them all, the one with the weighty obligation to make people joyful and the tendency (and to-do lists) to make people crazy. And the musical weaves together two of McLean’s most popular stories, Dave Cooks The Turkey and Rashida, Amir and the Great Gift Giving, the latter an amusing newcomers’ perspective on festive traditions.

Morley, who’s feeling beleaguered by Christmas, Martha Stewart’s holiday tips, and ‘101 ways to fold a napkin’, longs to reclaim the special holiday spirit. In order to appease her, Dave’s one obligation is to take charge of the fateful turkey. And his breezy confidence that this will be easily accomplished is what threatens to be his undoing. It all becomes Dave and Turkey, a funny, farcical, hallucinatory union (with its own duet and pas de deux, amusingly choreographed by Gianna Vacirca), which I won’t spoil for you. It’s a literal embodiment, in poultry form, of go big or (maybe and)  go home.

Leon Willey and Nadien Chu in Vinyl Cafe The Musical, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

The dramatic conflict starts in the friction between easy-going Dave, embodied with loose-limbed ease by Nadajewski, and his officious, fiercely competitive, perfectionist neighbour Mary Turlington (Nadien Chu, in riotous comic red-alert), the President of the Neighbourhood Christmas Club. It escalates into a veritable war for the ownership of Christmas in the ‘hood. When Dave sings “we’re heading for a very Mary Christmas,” it’s an opening gambit.

If you know Dave and his turkey situation from the story, you’ll know that a posh hotel kitchen figures prominently in his solution to his culinary deadline crisis. But the hotel scenes and a disjointed little subplot about Tommy and his Aunt Sue, a hotel chef with her own backstory, could use a re-think. They seem to stop the show, until Dave’s back in action, wing to wing, puns akimbo, with poultry.

Kristin Johnston, Nadien Chu, Jameela NcNeil in Vinyl Cafe The Musical, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

On this first hearing, the pop songs by the Canadian team of composer Colleen Dauncey and lyricist Akiva Romer-Segal are accessible, comfortably rhymed, and mostly a bit on the bland side with some notable exceptions. These include a funny tango number for Dave and Mary locking horns, and a couple of knock-out songs for Morley, beautifully delivered by Zentilli. I Am A Train is all about her feeling that Christmas is a grinding milk-run of repeating duties. Along Comes Life, in Act II, is a lovely ode to going off-book in your life plan. Stephanie (Rain Matkin), the teenage daughter of the family, has a sweet duet Scare Me Away with Tommy (Shaemus Swets), the boyfriend she’s brought home to meet the family. Family, incidentally, rhymes with calamity.   

But the opening song, which has Dave at the door of his shop, seems oddly flat and generic. And the only rock number, The Beast Inside, sung by Dave and Morley’s nerdy pre-teen son Sam (Benjamin Hill, a real theatre find, alternating with Cooper Nash Rajotte), is energetic but seems like a set piece inserted awkwardly (the sound mix didn’t help) that doesn’t get much of a pay-off except a fleeting sight gag.

Cloran’s cast is excellent, and the production establishes a real family dynamic. It’s led by the rueful, distractible Dave as conjured by Nadajewski, a remarkably physical comic actor. He’s a particularly Canadian sort of hero, forever misstepping blithely and then scrambling to pry himself out of scrapes. Nadajewski the human pretzel has an inspired scene actually inside a Canada Post letter box. Zentilli is just right as the graceful, more practical Morley, exasperated by Christmas as overtime. And the neighbour couples, Rashida and Amir (Muhaddisah and Damon Pitcher) and the Turlingtons, Mary the Yuletide dragon and her affable, defeated hubbie Bert (Chu and Leon Willey) are vividly cast too.

Nick Boegel and Rain Matkin in The Vinyl Cafe, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

Cory Sincennes’ set conjures a whole neighbourhood of rooms — bedrooms, a kitchen, competing living rooms, a record store —  sliding magically across the stage behind the brick townhouse facade. And Jareth Li’s lighting has fun with a sparkly season.

Naturally, you don’t have to be a prophet to feel a resolution coming on; it isn’t a spoiler to say that Vinyl Cafe The Musical ends with a validation of community and family — Christmas as ‘a beautiful day in the neighbourhood’ — where festive joy prevails, as per the catchy finale ensemble number about a “perfectly imperfect holiday.” Speaking of imperfections and working with them, if the translation of story and characters into musical hasn’t quite arrived yet in a satisfying and cohesive final form, the new musical has a lot going for it as it starts its journey to other theatres across the country. And you leave feeling the seasonal bounce.

REVIEW

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