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Where's Whistler's theatre scene?

Pique takes a look at what it will take to breed a local theatre scene
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Last month, Short Skirt Theatre sold out all three performances of its pantomime A Long Time Ago (In A Ski Resort Far, Far Away). It was a celebrated string of performances that has resulted in a scheduled fourth performance during this year's TELUS World Ski and Snowboard Festival, replacing the annual (and much beloved) Chairlift Revue.

Not only was this a success for Short Skirt, it was a success for Whistler's performing arts. The town has been void of any live theatre for the last few years until last November, starting with the first of Michele Bush's Whistler Town Party series (the third installment is slated for Thursday, April 5) and Short Skirt Theatre's pantomime.

As the town's various stakeholders plan for boosting Whistler's cultural offerings, theatre frequently floats around as one aspect that needs to be refined in order to attract the types of visitors who can afford to spend a week in town with their families.

For over 20 years, various groups and individuals have attempted to establish a Whistler-based theatre group that could provide regular programming to appeal to both locals and visitors. There have been some successes but these have been few and far between. For the most part, Whistler's theatre scene has been characterized by a lack of one.

"I believe that theatre is an art form that relies on a larger number of people," says Doti Niedermayer, executive director of the Whistler Arts Council. "It's a group effort. Very few plays are one-handers or two-handers and so, generally, theatre is something that you need more people around to create."

She says the original passion for theatre has never existed in Whistler in any large number, so it has never grown beyond a very small core of enthusiasts.

And yet, as the Resort Municipality of Whistler moves forward with its 2012 Festival Events & Animation strategy, it is seeking new ways to make Whistler more culturally relevant as a way to attract more visitors. Jan Jansen, the RMOW's manager of resort experience, said in his report to council on March 6 that theatre was one of the avenues being looked at.

And why not? Squamish has a successful theatre troupe in Between Shifts Theatre. Nelson has a lively theatre scene, as do small communities all over the world.

But revving up Whistler's theatre offerings is no easy task. It's not something that can be easily assembled and, according to Todd Talbot, who along with Zaib Shaikh launched the ill-fated Whistler Theatre Project in the summer of 2005 with A Midsummer's Night Dream, it requires support from the entire community.

"Especially in a community the size of Whistler, it needs to be a priority," he says.

He and Shaikh spent three years launching WTP — two years in preparation and another year producing the show. It was intended as an annual theatre festival, starting with one performance every year and then seeing where it went. It was was funded through grants and private sponsorship, with some support through the RMOW. A Midsummer's Night Dream ran throughout the summer of 2006 in Rebagliati Park. Pique reported in August 2006 that the venue was averaging 49 per cent capacity every night.

"We showed that it could happen, that it could be successful (down the road) and that there was an appetite," Talbot says.

So they began work for the next season, which would have been a production of the musical The Fantasticks. They had cast all the parts and were in rehearsals. But as the summer loomed closer, it became clear that WTP didn't have the financial backing, or the community support, to move forward. The WTP dissolved. Talbot is still active in the Vancouver theatre community and Shaikh later found success in the lead role on CBC's Little Mosque on the Prairie.

"It takes a Herculean effort on the part of so many people to make something like that happen, like we did, and it takes very little to destroy it. It's like a house of cards," Talbot says, comparing the fate of the WTP to the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company, which announced on March 9 that it would shut its doors after 49 years. "It takes very little for it to come apart. It's a delicate process that is very different from any kind of for-profit business model."

"Theatre is built on tradition," he continues. "Theatre is not something that works very well in a one-off situation. You need to train your audience, you need to train the community, you need to train the visitors in Whistler that this is an event that they can plan around, that can be a part of their experience in Whistler, whether they live there or not."

He uses Stratford, Ont., which holds the Stratford Shakespeare Festival every year, as an example of how Whistler could develop its own theatre festival. Stratford was a predominately blue-collar town with virtually no history with the performing arts. In its first few years, most of the actors and theatre professionals were from out of town, returning every year with the municipality's support to build what is now a considerable boon to the town's economy, not to mention an asset to Canada's cultural offerings.

But Whistler is not Stratford. There were a myriad of forces that had built up against WTP. Perhaps the most glaring was the absence of an available venue for rehearsals, set design and storage. All its sets had to be built in Vancouver and transported up. The same problem still exists for locally based theatre groups — they have no home base.

"You need a place that is almost to the point of being free to rehearse in. You need that," says Kathy Daniels, who co-founded Between Shifts Theatre in Squamish in 1993. "You need an affordable theatre rental. It's going to cost you between $5,000 and $7,000 to do a moderate production, say. You need to know that that's how much it's going to cost the theatre company, so you have to be able to make that affordable."

Having both affordable venues in Squamish to rehearse and stage productions has been instrumental to Between Shift's longevity. Over time, it's found a dedicated audience and volunteer pool that eventually, after the span of two decades, has led to some very well received and well-attended productions.

All of Between Shifts productions are funded through ticket sales of the production that preceded it and so volunteers are crucial in developing the show. Without an affordable venue to serve as a home base, Between Shifts would never have lasted.

"It's hard to marry that with a theatre space that works on a business-profit idea," Daniels says. "You need to have that mindset that's able to look at a non-profit group and say, 'Okay, we need to cut them some breaks here.'"

In Whistler, Millennium Place has historically been far too expensive for not-for-profits to rent out. If a production hadn't sold out, the producers would take a hit. The potential financial risk was too great for anyone to take any chance. It has prohibited Between Shifts from bringing shows up to Whistler in the past.

It has improved, and by all accounts, will continue to get better now that WAC manages Millennium Place. They've begun subsidizing some productions through a revenue share program, where producers and WAC split ticket revenues 50-50 so the productions are never a personal risk. This alleviated the pressure for A Long Time Ago's writer-producer-director Heather Paul, and allowed the production to actually take off.

Not that it mattered, in the end. The show was hugely successful by Whistler standards, though stitched together on a shoestring — all costumes were secondhand, the advertising budget was practically non-existent and all the actors and crew were, of course, volunteers. They sold out every show and in the end they had earned a grand total of $150, which Paul says will be put toward the next production.

She founded Short Skirt Theatre in 2003 as a way to cultivate a local theatre scene by ideally staging three productions every year: the pantomime, a locally written monologue series and a "serious" or dramatic production.

"The pantomime was always ideally a way to fund some serious theatre because there are a lot of actors that would like to try it out," she says. "Pantomimes are fun but I think we'd all like to know if we can do the serious show."

But, she says, it's much easier to attract an audience and to attract actors when the production is a pantomime, where everyone is "absolutely having a blast all the time." She says the cost of living is so expensive in Whistler that people have to work more to make ends meet. Given the nature of a tourism economy, people work non-regular hours, so she says wrangling 20-plus volunteers to rehearse more than two days a week, every week, is exceptionally challenging.

Which is why Paul and Chairlift Revue creator (and Pique columnist) G.D. "Max" Maxwell decided to replace the Revue with another staging of A Long Time Ago. It simply made life easier for everyone involved.

"You can't expect people to act for nothing on a regular basis," Max says. "Once a year or irregularly you can get them to act for nothing because actors act for the same reason that writers write. If they're not getting paid for it, they're probably still going to write.

"You can't develop a theatre culture on free labour. You just can't. (Otherwise) it's a hobby. You can have a hobby but chances are you won't have the time to devote to theatre for it to be any good."

As a result, "serious" or dramatic theatre is very rarely staged here. It seems that the only performance art Whistler appreciates are comedies about Whistler, which will make it very difficult for anyone to build a theatre scene that will attract visitors in significant number.

"It's community theatre and people recognize the actors in them and they come to laugh at the them and, you know, it's funny," Niedermayer says. "But for real theatre, for serious theatre, we can't get an audience. If I could bring up the Fringe Festival, I'd be ecstatic but it's not a theatre town. It's been a real challenge."

In 2002, the WAC brought the Pick of the Vancouver International Fringe Festival, featuring four of the best plays at that year's ever-popular performing arts festival in Vancouver. This was top grade contemporary theatre that relevant and impeccably acted. It was the the sort of event that would attract full houses in urban centres

"There was hardly anybody in the theatre," Niedermayer says. "People aren't interested... You get 20 people in the audience, the hardcore theatre goers."

In 2005, Between Shifts brought its production of Five Women Wearing the Same Dress, a piece of dramatic theatre written by Alan Ball. It was Between Shifts most successful show in Whistler, with up to 200 people showing up each night. Part of the success, says Daniels, was all the support they had from WAC and Millennium Place in supporting the show.

Later that year, they brought up another show, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. They had won awards for that play in competitions around B.C., but they did not have WAC's support on that one. It did abysmally.

"We lost our shirt on it," Daniels says. "I guess it really needs the promo machine behind it of the Whistler Arts Council.... But I saw those people come out to that show, so I think there's an appetite for it in Whistler for sure."

Even if that's not true, and even if Whistler never develops a serious theatre scene akin to Stratford, Nelson or even Squamish, Max says Whistler will always have a small theatre culture because there will always be a small group of people who want to perform in front of an audience and make them laugh.

"I'm not going to live long enough to see theatre be a big part of any arts and culture strategy in town," he says. "But I don't know that there's anything wrong with that. I've never lived in a place that had a strong local theatre that didn't also have a population of a couple hundred thousand."