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Farren Timoteo in Made In Italy. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Farren Timoteo has always loved being Italian. “To me, it’s always been great!” he declares with his usual spirited good cheer. “Film-making, sports cars, architecture, fashion and food, music!”

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What’s not to love?

That thought — and that question mark — threads its way into Made In Italy, Timoteo’s hit, much-travelled, coming-of-age solo show, back at the Citadel opening Thursday, this time on the Shoctor mainstage. It’s inspired by the story of Timoteo’s own Italian family, with its vivid multi-generational panoply of idiosyncratic characters — and its appealing teenage protagonist, who’s having a tough time of it growing up Italian, as an immigrant outsider in small-town Alberta in the ‘70s.

Francesco is a fictionalized version of Timoteo’s rock musician dad Luigi, who did indeed grow up in the small and very non-Italian town of Jasper, AB. “My whole life, it’s been art and music, knowing the great contributions Italians have made to the world and how recognized they’ve been for that,”says Timoteo.“It only dawned on me in my 20s my dad had had a difficult time with it … and that if there was going to be a story, it would be rooted in his experiences.”

“Not to be dramaturgically cold, but stories do need conflict; they do need growth and development.” And as Made In Italy audiences of every ethnic background have discovered, the family stories are funny,  and the play also speaks to the immigrant experience, the sense of being outside the mainstream culture and yearning to belong.

The show premiered in Kamloops in 2016 (director Daryl Cloran’s last moments as artistic director of Western Canada Theatre there before he moved to Edmonton) arrives at the Citadel from a sold-out November run in Calgary in both the Theatre Calgary and Alberta Theatre Projects seasons. “It felt like a real community event,” he says. And bringing it home — the 200th performance of Made In Italy happens in Edmonton — is particularly joyful, he says.

For the actor/playwright, who grew up surrounded by music, creating the show grew from roots, and discoveries. “As a teenager I started to play with it, the idea of sharing the experience of the family…. My dad and I would do family impressions at the dinner table, laughing and laughing. Not in a mean-spirited way; we did them for the family too.” It was a father-son bond. He and Luigi, a gigging musician to this day (“he can play anything in the pop repertoire; he’s great on folk; we pride ourselves on being able to rock out!”), are still on the phone with each other every week, “sharing experiences. ‘Do you have a gig? I had a gig’….”

Timoteo had experimented a bit with stand-up comedy in high school,” he says. “The idea of solo performance and Italian comic material was taking shape for me.” And he remembers auditioning at 15 or 16 for a play with a stand-up act about his convivial and quirky family. “And that just took another step when I got to Grant MacEwan Theatre Arts and met Ken Brown (Life After Hockey), who taught us solo performance, and is himself one of the great Canadian solo performers.”

It was the era when classmate Sheldon Elter, another Brown mentee, was creating his one-man show cum personal memoir Métis Mutt. “Somehow I was aware that that as a playwright, something I wanted to be but wasn’t yet, I might want to go into that family material and do something with it,” says Timoteo. “It took me quite a long time to realize the potential.”

And when he did, he asked permission of his dad and the rest of the Timoteos, the aunts and uncles and the cousins, “to share experiences from their lives, to borrow characters and personalities…. And I was also reserving the right to change things as need be. And everybody gave me their blessing.”

Farren Timoteo in Made In Italy. Photo supplied

“I tried very hard to create something hilarious, and fun to do,” he says. “But I was pretty nervous when it was all said and done…. I felt a great responsibility: I’d used these real-life textures and experiences and memories. And to what end? Is this any good?”

His dad, who now lives in Sherwood Park, “made himself very available,” Timoteo says. “We’d meet at the Old Spaghetti Factory on 103rd St. I’d bring a notebook and we’d sit for hours and talk as I filled it up…. He was gracious and kind about making himself vulnerable to reliving his experiences.”

The father in Made In Italy is inspired by Timoteo’s grandfather, who passed away shortly before the show’s premiere in 2016. He’d arrived from Abruzzo in the 1950s with the idea of getting a job (on the railway), bringing his family and creating a better life. “He was a very joyful, kind spirit, the perfect host…. And another one of the great joys of doing the show is resurrecting his spirit,” says Timoteo. “There’s something ghostly and mystical about theatre, about conjuring spirits. They feel very real to me as I perform.” And Cory Sincennes’ set, a dining room with an outsized table, is lined with real photos from the Timoteo album.

The cultural iconography of the show, Italian through and through, is part of Timoteo’s inheritance growing up. Rocky and John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever were “real organic figures in my life.” He remembers being six or seven, getting home from school to see “two VHS tapes face-down on the carpet.” And a solemn coming-of-age pronouncement from his dad, “son, I think you’re old enough now,” as Luigi turned them over: Rocky and Rocky II.  “I was obsessed,” says Timoteo. “I rented Rocky so much from the local video spot they just gave me the big Rocky V cardboard cut-out.”

He laughs. “Rocky, technically, was my first play … on a mattress in an unfinished basement. I’d do ‘plays’. I’d invited people to come over and basically watch me jump around to the Rocky soundtrack, wearing boxing gloves.”

Farren Timoteo, Made In Italy. Photo by Murray Mitchel

When Saturday Night Fever came out, “a lot of pennies dropped for me. Hey, this isn’t just my dad — the rigid hair regime, the dressing a certain way. To quote my dad, when they saw Saturday Night Fever they felt like somebody had been following them.”

The dance in Made in Italy, fun for the audience, is “such an identifier of the period,” Timoteo says of Laura Krewski’s choreography.  “I contacted her immediately, and asked ‘would you …? And she said ‘disco? I’m in!’” Timoteo laughs. “I was 33 when I started and I’m 40 now. That work-out feels a bit different now.”   

“I just had so much fun as a writer digging into as much Italian culture as I possibly could,” he says. “‘70s cinema was practically ruled by Italians: Scorsese, Pacino, De Niro ,Coppola. Great actors, great films. For me I had representation. For my dad, he didn’t…”

Farren Timoteo, Made In Italy. Photo by Murray Mitchell

Italian-ness seems to have followed Timoteo through a stellar theatre career that’s included such starring roles as Black Stache in Peter and the Starcatcher, in which the Mollusks, led by Fighting Prawn, speak a lingo — “manicotti! prosciutto! pasta fazool” — derived exclusively from Italian cuisine. He’s been in (and has directed) Light In The Piazza, the Adam Guettel musical about an Italian romance set in Florence. Last season he turned in a sensational performance as Frankie Valli, he of the swooping falsettos,  in the Citadel production of Jersey Boys. “He felt very relatable,” says Timoteo.

When he became artistic director of Alberta Musical Theatre Company, a touring kids theatre company specializing in sassy original musical versions of fairy tales, Timoteo and the late composer Jeff Unger went back to original Italian sources for their version of Pinocchio. “I discovered my creative voice” at Alberta Musical Theatre, he says of a hands-on ‘writing school’ where such Timoteo signatures as multiple characters, comedy (“sometimes absurdist”), energetic pacing, music, developed. All of it, “practised in front of tens of thousands of children,” is part of the artistic continuum that led to Made In Italy.

Farren Timoteo, Made In Italy. 2017 photo by Murray Mitchell.

A lot has changed in the world since Timoteo first stepped onstage as his dad, his grandfather, and a dozen other characters in 2016. A pandemic, for one thing, that made live performance desperately uncertain for a time. It was at Theatre Aquarius in Hamilton post-pandemic that “we discovered Made In Italy was alive again … and that we could fill a mainstage house.” And alive it’s been (and kicking up those disco moves) ever since.

“I barely remember the first run in Kamloops… I was holding on for dear life trying to remember my lines.” Now, after tours that have taken the show to sold-out houses, sometimes multiple times, in Edmonton, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Hamilton, Calgary, and places in-between — Cloran calls it a bona fide Edmonton success story — “it’s still the same show. But it feels so fun, it’s playful. I feel so free to connect with the audience, to discover all the text as it goes.”

Before it premiered Timoteo had always been concerned whether “a show that was specific to our family’s experience” would resonate with a broader audience. But whether it’s the immigrant story, the cultural deep dive, or the inter-generational experience of the young guy and his father, “the connection is powerful and pretty consistent,” he reports.  And so is the discovery that “a lot of people feel they’re alone when they’re experiencing life as an outsider. It’s fascinating to me now how much that’s a common struggle.”

A communal experience is what theatre is all about, after all. And that, for Timoteo, has been a joyful affirmation.

PREVIEW

Made In Italy

Theatre: Citadel

Created by and starring: Farren Timoteo

Running: Thursday through Jan. 28

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 7890-425-1820