Mavor Moore Research Articles

A Watershed Moment: Transitioning to Gender-Neutral Performance Awards

In April 2018, the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts declared that their flagship program, the Dora Mavor Moore Awards, would present fully gender neutral performance categories beginning with the June 2019 ceremony. In this article, TAPA staff detail organizational background history, outline the consultation and discussion processes leading to this policy change and present an examination of why this change is important now and the implications or ripple effects such a policy has internally and in the broader performing arts community.

Louis Riel: History, Theatre, and a National Narrative – An Evolving . . . Story

How do historiographies change over time? What are the factors that necessitate change? This article offers a comparative view of two productions of the opera Louis Riel, by Mavor Moore and Harry Somers, as a way to investigate these questions. Commissioned by the Canadian Opera Company for its 1967 season, then produced again fifty years later, these centennial and sesquicentennial productions provide a glimpse into the political and cultural circumstances that informed the dramaturgical choices that led to adaptations made to the production of 2017. Tracing the roots of a Nisga’a song, the “Kuyas” aria, from its preservation in the archive, to a rewritten version, and eventually back to its origins, tells a story of acculturation and assimilation. It also tells a story of resistance in the form of a wake-up call for a nation.

“Decolonizing” Riel

Harry Somers and Mavor Moore’s opera Louis Riel embodies inherently conflicting messages. While the opera was intended to celebrate nation building and suggest a new, postcolonial Canadian nationalism in 1967, it also conveys a distrust of its own nationalizing message. Setting the opera in the broader context of works created about Louis Riel (whether historical, literary, socio-political, or musical) makes clear that it participates in a mythmaking enterprise surrounding the Métis leader. This process aims to present Riel as the quintessential Canadian hero. However, because this paradigm suggests a collapsing of Canadian-ness and Indigeneity, it is at odds with calls for decolonization and Indigenization. Examining more recent musical works about Louis Riel by Andrew Balfour and Karen Sunabacka highlights some of the limitations of the nationalizing discourse around the opera and provides alternative musical representations of Riel that foreground his Indigeneity and, specifically, his Métis identity.

The Spectre of Louis Riel: Opera, Archive, and the Silent Witness

“The Spectre of Louis Riel: Opera, Archive, and the Silent Witness” is a critical review of the Canadian Opera Company’s (COC) 2017 revival of Mavor Moore and Harry Somers’s 1967 production Louis Riel. The essay considers director Peter Hinton’s prompt for audiences to “question why we need to keep re-telling our history” by further questioning the COC’s use of Louis Riel as its subject when commemorating Canada and its use of the production’s original colonial structure in an attempt to demonstrate the concept of reconciliation.

The Money Tree

When Shasta’s father loses his job, she is devastated to learn that previously laid plans for her upcoming birthday party must be significantly downsized. As the story progresses, Shasta and Simon meet a mysterious Traveller who gives them a seed that will make a tree grow leaves of money. Through a truly magical journey, the two ultimately learn that being a loyal friend is worth more than a big party or having all the latest toys. In the end, our friends, families, and imaginations are truly our greatest assets. The Money Tree introduces elementary audiences to financial literacy and value, exploring the idea of “needs versus wants” and affirming the power of imagination and creativity. Roseneath Theatre (roseneath.ca) premiered The Money Tree in the fall of 2014 to coincide with Financial Literacy Month in November, and the production was directed by Artistic Director Andrew Lamb. The Money Tree was nominated for two 2015 Dora Mavor Moore Awards: Outstanding New Play—Robert Watson, and Outstanding Ensemble Performance—Joshua Stodart, Rong Fu, and Heather Marie Annis.

Editorial Introduction: Our 35th Year

It’s spring, a time of renewal and festivity! This special “bonus” issue of Theatre Research in Canada celebrates the journal’s 35 th issue and the beginning of its 35 th year (we officially turn 35 in 2015). For over three decades, TRIC has served as a site of scholarly debate, dialogue, and discovery for a vibrant community of theatre and performance scholars, both in Canada and increasingly beyond its borders. TRIC’s first issue, published in the spring of 1980, featured an eclectic range of articles on such topics as Dora Mavor Moore, the first circus in eastern Canada, Montreal’s Theatre Royal in 1825, the nineteenth-century theatre manager Eugene A. McDowell, and Rick Salutin’s Les Canadiens. In their inaugural editorial, co-founding editors Richard Plant and Ann Saddlemyer expressed hope that the journal would advance research on “the theatrical and dramatic history of Canada” and “provide a forum for the exchange of thoughtful and studied opinion, thereby encouraging the formation of an informed critical perspective within which to view Canadian theatre.” In addition to publishing articles on a broad range of topics, they planned to include excerpts of scripts, book reviews and review articles, and a “Notes and Queries” section with “brief statements of important new projects and specific requests relating to individual research.” Plant and Saddlemyer anticipated that over time the journal would “achieve [. . .] a balanced presentation of contemporary work in the areas of criticism and research into theatre history in Canada.”

(Un)Related Purposes: Theatre and Law

Describing the Mavor Moore teleplay The Roncarelli Affair , which appeared on CBC Television in 1974, A. G. BOSS explores the literary adaptation of an actual trial, raising questions of representation, audience, and the slippery relationship between fact and fiction.

(Un)Related Purposes: Theatre and Law

Describing the Mavor Moore teleplay The Roncarelli Affair , which appeared on CBC Television in 1974, A. G. BOSS explores the literary adaptation of an actual trial, raising questions of representation, audience, and the slippery relationship between fact and fiction.

Come Away: Remembering Mavor Moore

In his most poignant and lyrical play, Come Away, Come Away, Mavor Moore imagined death as a little girl gently leading an old man away in a park. When it played on CBC-TV in 1972, Mavor — it still seems impossible to call him anything else — was at the peak of a brilliant career. That his success should lead to scenarios of imagined death is not surprising because as he later explored in detail in his 1994 autobiography, his many successes were accompanied by depression and self-doubt. Anticipating the inevitability of his own death, he scripted the best possible and lived long enough to produce it. “Produce” may be a curious way to speak of a death, but Mavor was, among his many professions, foremost a producer, for whom the boundaries of life and theatre were always troubled.

The Impossible Theatre: Roy Mitchell and The Chester Mysteries: Experience, Initiation and Brotherhood

This article considers the influence of Theosophy in the theatre work and theory of director Roy Mitchell (1884-1944). Mitchell’s apparently prescient theories concerning mise en scène, motion in acting and the communal role of the audience in the experience of theatre in his popular book Creative Theatre (1929) has led scholars such as Mavor Moore and Renate Usmiani to compare Mitchell’s work with that of Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, Peter Brook, and Jerzy Grotowski. What has been neglected, however, is Mitchell’s conviction that theatre is a "medium of revelation" that allows for the universal and, most importantly, the "creative," vital spirit or soul to manifest itself in the material world and to foster the "great end" he called the paradosis; this he defined as a "recreating instant" in which the senses are filled with "form and sound," the emotions stirred "to sympathy," and ideas shaped "to one intense accord." This event makes for the witness "a causeway into an inner world where they rested in a lightning flash of communion." In this way Mitchell envisioned the re-creation of an idealized,"ancient" form of performance, by way of the confluence of theosophical and theatrical practice, in an effort to "proclaim the immortality of the souls of all created things, to restate the law of the cyclic return of souls and of the effects of the deeds of souls, to enunciate the doctrine that all religions, philosophy and science at their highest emanated from a body of custodians of the wisdom of the race."

Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture Cecilia Morgan Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture. Edited by Irene Gammel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press Inc., 2002. Pp. xiv, 348, illus. $70.00 Making Avonlea is the result of both editor Irene Gammel's longstanding interest in L.M. Montgomery's relationship to Canadian culture and of a widespread scholarly fascination, in Canada and abroad, with Montgomery and her work. Originating from a conference held in 2000 at the L.M. Montgomery Institute at the University of Prince Edward Island, this collection of essays explores both the meanings and manifestations of Montgomery and her most famous characters, Anne and Emily of New Moon, in a wide variety of genres and locations. Twenty-three authors have contributed to this book; most of them write from either the discipline of English, with a specialization in Canadian literature, or from interdisciplinary perspectives, such as gender studies and cultural studies (which includes film, television, drama). One essay comes from music history. There also are pieces that are as much reflections on the more personal, material, and sometimes embodied meanings of 'Anne' and Montgomery to these authors' lives (for example, Tara Nogler's essay on working in a Japanese theme park, performing Anne) as they are academic work. L.M. Montgomery and Canadian popular culture, the authors of Making Avonlea argue, are compelling and significant topics for both scholarly and popular communities. Making Avonlea is divided into three parts: Avonlea's cultural weight and Avonlea as iconography; Avonlea on film and television and as music and drama; and Avonlea as tourist landscape. The first section deals primarily with Montgomery, Avonlea, Anne, and Emily in literature and spans the late-Victorian and Edwardian decades and selected periods in the twentieth century; its authors consider topics as diverse as Montgomery's visual imagination, the meanings of hair in Green Gables, international images of Emily, and the controversy over English professor Laura Robinson's paper on lesbian desire in Green Gables (given at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Edmonton, 2000). Part two explores the treatment of Montgomery's novels in Kevin Sullivan's television adaptation (at both 'macro' and 'micro' levels); the role of the Disney Corporation in Sullivan's Road to Avonlea series; CBC's Emily of New Moon series; Paul LeDoux's play, Anne of Green Gables; and the music of Elaine and Norman Campbell, Don Harron, and Mavor Moore's long-running musical. Part three looks at the construction of 'Avonlea' as a tourist site, both in its geographic manifestation in Prince Edward Island and as an imagined terrain and community that is [End Page 634] recreated elsewhere, whether in Japanese theme parks and clubs or in electronic discussion groups around the world. As Gammel points out in her introduction, there is no one 'unified thesis' or particular approach that underpins the book. While all of this work is written from feminist perspectives, it also represents a mixture of other theoretical approaches to understand the formation of Avonlea as an imagined community in its cultural manifestations (including Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Bourdieu, John Fiske, Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson, Dawn H. Currie, and Angela McRobbie). Many of the essays point to, though, the shifting boundaries between 'high,' 'middle,' and 'low' cultures that Montgomery's work and its subsequent iconography illuminates, although with a few exceptions they do so in ways more contemporary than historical. Furthermore, Making Avonlea illustrates another boundary, one that has been constructed to neatly divide the personal, subjective, and local from the 'academic,' objective, and national. A number of these scholars identify with Montgomery's work on both these levels, often simultaneously, and see that identification as a source of strength, not weakness. While I find this approach intriguing (for while historians do so as well, they usually are not so honest about it), it has its pitfalls, for it can lead us to focus more on the poetics and less so on the politics of cultural production. While some authors consider issues of race, ethnicity, and representation (for example, Christopher Gittings in his essay on both the original and the television version of Emily), the...

Fantasies of Origin: Staging the Birth of the Canadian Stage

In the period that Don Rubin characterizes by the eventual necessity of “Government Interventions” – that is, 1945 to 1967 – the Anglo-Canadian stage is repeatedly defined as something unformed, primitive and justifiably neglected (131). George Broderson, in a fevered succession of metaphors, calls it a “national impotence,” the “Cinderella of the arts,” and an “undernourished, puling infant” (147); to Nathan Cohen, it is a thing that has “never counted in the life of English-language Canada, [n]or is it likely to in the reasonably foreseeable future” (228). Even to those more inclined to see the glass as half-full, there is no denying the apparent barrenness of Anglo-Canada’s theatre culture; Mavor Moore, for instance, describes it in the mid-fifties as a “tabula rasa,” “propitious[ly]” awaiting inscriptions of “considerable consequence,” but currently blank nonetheless (238). It is thus the paradox of Rubin’s post-war readings in Canadian Theatre History (of which the foregoing are all examples), that they are largely dedicated to bemoaning the lack of a Canadian theatre to historicize. Reading these selections, one gets the impression of a posse of academics impatient for a discipline in which to profess expertise. Conventional wisdom would call this placing the cart before the horse.

New "Look," Emerging Vision: A Time For Introductions

From the Executive Editor: I am constantly at least a bit surprised by the path my life takes. Little did I know that slightly over twenty-six years after Ann Saddlemyer and I headed up the founding of this publication, and somewhat less time after I retired from its editing, I would be writing this short introduction in the capacity of Executive Editor of Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches Théâtrales au Canada. When we originally conceived of the journal, we thought of "theatre research" in terms of a very broad understanding of those two words. As scholars interested in theatre in its more than three dimensions, Ann and I were conscious of the theatre's visuality as well as its textuality, and its almost endless modes of performative expression. I remember our first issue tried to signal that with an article on circus, a tribute to Dora Mavor Moore, an essay on a historic theatre, another on nineteenthcentury theatre management, one on a "Canadian" company in the West Indies, and another on contrasting versions of a recent theatrical success. Reality was that we also lacked content in French despite the strong work of Louise Forsyth in our editorial team. But one of our wishes at the time was that we would leave enough room in the journal's mandate and design for it to change and grow, and for high quality research and reporting that were outside the traditional boundaries as well as work that was within. To a significant degree, that has occurred thanks to the efforts of the editorial teams after us. But this newly designed issue with its completely new team of editors seems to me to indicate an exceptional desire and opportunity to go further than before. We live in a climate that in many ways is remarkably open to and desirous of expression that is aptly different from what has preceded it. To say that we live in a different Canada now may be a cliché, but even in a cliché there is truth. Canada is now a country of many evident cultures and many forms of theatre and we need many forms of theatre research to represent it, its history and its place in an international world. There is much to be done and said in this new world, and so many areas to develop that have not been well developed to this point. The plans Bruce Barton briefy outlines in his short introduction, and that are obviously shared by Louise, Patrick, "the other" Bruce, Rebecca and Jennifer, are already becoming evident in the contents and design of this issue. They will be even more evident in the forthcoming issues, two of which are virtually ready for the printer, including one under the skilled guest editorship of Glen Nichols and the same Louise (Ladouceur).

A Modo Suo (A Fable): A Production History

Tony Nardi and I recently met to discuss his second play, A Modo Suo (A Fable), written in an Italianized Calabrian dialect and published here for the first time in an English translation by Antonino Mazza. The play was first staged at Canadian Stage Company’s Theatre Upstairs on Berkeley in April and May of 1990. It was produced independently by Tony, actor Mary Long and me and co-directed by Tony and Italian commedia master Alberto Fortuzzi. It featured Tony in the central role of Raffaele; Mary Long; Frank Crudele; Dom Fiore; Lucy Filippone; and me as Linda, the daughter. While A Modo Suo (A Fable) secured substantial funding from both government and private sources, was the subject of over twenty articles and reviews and received a Dora Mavor Moore Award nomination for Best New Play in the Small Theatre Division, from a historical point of view the production is important because it provided a focus for a number of questions about the production, reception and critical evaluation of plays written in a language other than English or French that are as relevant today as they were a decade ago. The mere fact that the play was performed in Calabrese by a group of professional Equity actors in an English-language mainstream theatre in downtown Toronto rather than in a local Italian church basement by amateurs caused a stir among the English and Italian media.

Opera and National Identity: New Canadian Opera

Much has changed on the Canadian stage since 1969, when composer Barbara Pentland lamented to Musicanada that “[w]hat comes from outside the country must de facto be superior. Prime example: the opening of our multi-million-dollar ‘National’ Arts Centre with an imported French ballet company dancing to a score by a Greek composer conducted by an American born in Germany” (qtd. in Kallmann and Potvin 1033). In fact, by 1969 things were already changing – at least on the operatic stage. The centennial year 1967 had made government money available for commissions, and as a result there was an explosion of new operatic productions: Murray Adaskin’s Grant, Warden of the Plains, Kelsey Jones and Rosabelle Jones’s Sam Slick, Robert Turner and George Woodcock’s The Brideship, Raymond Pannell’s The Luck of Ginger Coffey and, perhaps the best known, Mavor Moore and Harry Somers’s Louis Riel.

In Review, Later Stages: Essays in Ontario Theatre from the First World War to the 1970s, Dora Mavor Moore: Pioneer of the Canadian Theatre

As contributions to the continuing discovery of Canadian theatre history, these two works provide valuable information about the development of theatre in Ontario between the First World War and the 1970s and deserve to be added to personal and public library collections for the abundance of information they contain.

Paula Sperdakos. Dora Mavor Moore: Pioneer of the Canadian Theatre

Paula Sperdakos. <i>Dora Mavor Moore: Pioneer of the Canadian Theatre</i>

Rural Roots: A Theatre Memoir

The theatre has always been a part of my life. I had my first drama lessons with Dora Mavor Moore at the New Play Society in Toronto. As a kid, I saw Toby Robins play Peter Pan at the Eaton Auditorium. My mother, the actress Beth Amos, took me to the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto to see The King and I with Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner. I found the music annoying because it interrupted the story. I remember sitting at the back of Prudhomme’s Theatre in Vineland (near St Catharines) when I was about nine watching my mother in a matinee of For Love or Money. But I was never stage-struck and I did not harbour any theatrical ambitions for myself. My brief stint as an apprentice at the Red Barn Theatre on Lake Simcoe, doing eight shows in nine weeks, convinced me this was no way to make a living, and I wisely decided to go to university and study Chinese.

Never Swim Alone &amp; This is a Play; The Ends of the Earth; Come Good Rain

Two themes link these plays: alienation, and each individual’s struggle to survive in a world where communication and compassion are lacking. Daniel Maclvor, an actor, director, producer, writer and the artistic director of Da Da Kamera, has won seven Dora Mavor Moore Awards. He has been nominated five times for the Chalmers Canadian Play Award, including a nomination in 1991 for Never Swim Alone, the same year that he won for his play House Humans. In her introduction to Never Swim Alone &amp; This isa Play, Carol Bolt identifies one of the major qualities which make Maclvor’s work so well-received: through direct address, his characters welcome the audience to the theatre, and make each spectator feel that they make a difference.

Gerald D. Parker. How to Play: The Theatre of James Reaney

In his often impressive but uneven new study of James Reaney's theatrical development, Gerald D. Parker cites two disparate responses to the 1960 premiere of The Kildeer. Mavor Moore enthused that it was 'likely to become an historic event-and perhaps even the most important one in contemporary Canadian arts and letters,' whereas Nathan Cohen characteristically grumbled, 'The Kildeer is a desperately bad play.' One of the paradoxes of Reaney's career is that, while writing some desperately bad plays, he also created some of the central events in the modem Canadian theatre, his Donnelly trilogy paramount among them. Another paradox is that for all Reaney's acclaim as one of our most important playwrights, his plays themselves are almost never remounted professionally: not one of the major plays examined by Parker from the works of the early 1960s to Reaney's last full-length non-musical, Gyroscope (1980), appears among the thousands of productions documented in Canada on Stage since 1984. Though addressing this paradox is one of the many things Parker's book does not do, what it does do well provides ample reason for welcoming to the all too short list of books on Canadian playwriting.