Only one week before the scheduled opening of its 2022 production, the cast and crew of the School District 46 Music Theatre Ensemble received permission from B.C. health authorities to perform before a half-capacity audience, allowing more than 40 student performers to realize their eagerly-anticipated rendition of Brigadoon.
A series of eight matinee and evening performances at Chatelech Secondary School ran from Feb. 25 to a sold-out closing on March 5.
Brigadoon represented a return to near-normalcy for the ensemble, whose preparations in 2021 for a staging of Mama Mia fizzled due to COVID-19 restrictions.
“When we learned only a couple of weeks ago that we’d actually be doing Brigadoon [for live audiences], everybody just burst out,” said Matthew Douglas, a Grade 12 Chatelech Secondary student who played Tommy Albright, a lovestruck hiker beguiled by the Scottish highlands. “We’d been just crossing our fingers, crossing our toes, hoping it would happen.”
The musical theatre program, which is open to Grade 6 to 12 students from schools throughout the Sunshine Coast, was established seven years ago. The cast of Brigadoon auditioned for their parts last September. It included actors who have appeared in every show since the ensemble’s 2016 performance of Into the Woods, when local teachers Sara Douglas and Tom Kellough teamed up to launch the district-wide initiative.
For Brigadoon, Douglas and Kellough returned to their perennial roles as artistic and musical directors, supplementing the production team with Gibsons-based dance instructor Sylvain Brochu as choreographer.
The musical originally premiered on Broadway 75 years ago this week and is the work of lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe.
Its story—of two blithe New Yorkers who encounter an enchanted village in the Scottish gloaming—received some updates for Sunshine Coast audiences. Tommy Albright and his fellow trekker Jeff Douglas (played with sardonic zeal by Callum Baxter) became contemporary travellers on holiday from Vancouver. An unmarried village lass, Fiona MacLaren (a role shared by Isabella Paolozza and Jaclyn Semaniuk), is bewildered by the duo’s references to their Canadian homeland.
When Douglas’s Tommy Albright announces he will forgo his urban lifestyle in favour of kilt-clad romance, he declares that he would prefer a permanent retreat in a rural Scottish idyll over the prospect of “commuting from Sechelt.”
In contrast to her upbringing in a tradition-stifled village, the character of Fiona MacLaren was played by Paolozza and Semaniuk with fiery firmness.
“It’s an interesting role because when the musical was written, back in the 1940s, Fiona was a feminist,” said Paolozza, a Grade 12 Chatelech student. “Nowadays we might not think that. One of the first things the audience learns about her is that she’s ‘waiting for her dearie,’ even though she lives in a world where the girls who are growing up with her are getting married to pretty much the first guy who asked them. It’s just expected that you get married before a certain age and she doesn’t want to do that.”
The production was accompanied by onstage instrumentalists. Two pipers—Kayla Payne and Anneka Bonser—play a plaintive piobaireachd that interrupts a frenzied village dance with unexpected lamentation.
The cast and crew earned standing ovations from their audiences.
“I think a lot of the time theatre is overlooked,” said Jaclyn Semaniuk, a Grade 12 student at Elphinstone Secondary. “People don’t really realize that there’s a lot in it. Like so much communication, there’s so much multitasking and putting together all these different aspects into one. It’s something that you don’t do [ordinarily] in school. This is something I think people need to take the time to learn because there are just so many benefits.”
