By Nicole Fitzgerald
Eleven years ago, Rocky Mountaineer officials placed a business proposal ad in a Kamloops newspaper. Local restaurants couldn’t handle the volume of train passengers stopping for one overnight stay on the two-day train trip from Vancouver to Alberta. An alternate form of entertainment was needed.
Rocky Mountaineer offered to front an individual or organization $100,000 to produce a dinner theatre experience.
No one accepted. Mountaineer officials instead took it upon themselves to produce their own show.
Now, more than a decade later, the Two River Junction Dinner and Musical Revue hosts upwards of 37,000 patrons over its six-month performance season. Like the restaurants that came before it, the show that grew from a 200-seat tent to the now 450-seat cultural centre, still couldn’t accommodate audience demand. This year the Great Canadian Lumberjack Show was added to the playbill welcoming an additional 200 guests to the theatre-going experience.
Scour the newspaper classifieds in Whistler and no such ad is found. The Whistler Mountaineer and Rocky Mountaineer experiences are literally mountains apart. The duration which train travelers stay, the type of tourist the rail service attracts and the number of activities offered differs for each route.
However, three Whistler organizations — MY Millennium Place, Whistler Theatre Project and Whistler Museum and Archives — see the train service and increased visitors leading up to the 2010 Winter Olympic Games as an opportunity to introduce a historically-based musical revue — brushing off the dry read of dusty history books and bringing Whistler’s past to life through theatre and music.
The project, entitled Living History in Whistler, is in the preliminary stages of development. A writer was hired to flesh out a concept of the proposed show. Organizers won’t disclose the writer’s name, only that the individual comes with impressive credits.
“We are a loose working group at the moment,” explained Dennis Marriot, MY Place general manager. “We are at the point of let’s put some flesh on this concept and see if it goes anywhere.”
Marriot said the revue would cater to those looking for soft adventure. Not everyone faring the Sea to Sky climb is looking to hurl themselves off the bungee bridge or fly above treetops on a Ziptrek tour, he reasons.
While Kamloops hosts a buffet dinner along with the show, Marriot envisions a package dinner theatre experience for Whistler through partnerships with local restaurants.
Marriot also said the projected 60-minute show would not be limited in scope. The show could be reduced to short vignettes performed as part of street entertainment programming or corporate entertainment.
“There are lots of lofty ideas,” Marriot said. “I think it’s going to work. We’ve lined up the right groups and there are a lot of different components to it.”
He adds the show could tour, giving outsiders a deeper understanding about the real Whistler often hidden underneath the glossy finish.
“It might help us fight this perception that there is no soul here,” Marriot said. “A lot of people see it as just another Intrawest village. We have a steady stream of people coming in here asking questions. Where do people live? Is anybody here? What do you do? Do you all commute? This (show) might add a different angle. Add some culture to the village — giving Whistler soul. Kind of what like the museum is doing, only on steroids.”
The three organizations drew inspiration from the Storyeum in Gastown, a series of six-themed rooms where actors play and sing out different scenes of B.C. history as audience members wander room to room.
“It makes history more accessible, fun and on the lighter side of things,” Marriot said. “It will show a different side of Whistler: that there are people here, there is a culture here… From garbage dump to sustainability centre, it’s been an interesting path with a lot of fun stories along the way.”
It is no coincidence the idea was spurred after the success of Whistler’s first professional summer stock theatre production, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which drew upwards of 4,400 theatergoers over 35 shows this summer. No one expected the success the theatre project experienced in its preliminary year. The project opened the curtains not only to summer stock theatre, but a greater vision for professional theatre in Whistler.
“It’s great to be working with MY Place and the museum in building something that is very much about Whistler from a historical standpoint,” said company co-founder Zaib Shaikh. “It is great to be recognized as a team that can bring that kind of theatrical event to life.”
The groups remain in creative discussion with no funding perimeters drawn up yet.
While Kamloops has been very successful in its theatre ventures, how dinner theatre in Whistler will fare is unknown.
Riding groups between the two towns are different. The average age for Rocky Mountaineer riders is 62 years old, a demographic more conducive to a theatre than a big mountain adventure. While Whistler’s stats are not yet finalized, Michelle Dunn, Rocky Mountaineer communications manager, says Whistler Mountaineer appeals to a broader range of travelers, and therefore people with a broader range of activity interests.
“It’s guests from all over the world,” Dunn said. “There is every age range. Lots of families with young children, people in their 20s and 30s as well.”
The Whistler trip is significantly shorter: a one-day, three-hour trip in comparison to the B.C./Alberta two-day, 18-hour-plus tour. The financial commitment for the two trips is also worlds apart. This year, Whistler Mountaineer riders boarded the train with round-trip tickets priced as cheaply as $99. A two-day trip on Rocky Mountaineer begins at $550, running as high as $1,100.
No one can predict what these differences look like when the house lights dim in Whistler’s 250-seat theatre, however all parties agree the show would contribute value to Whistler’s diverse offerings.
“Anything that enhances the guest experience, we are in support of,” Dunn said. “The guests on the train who are over-nighting want to get to know Whistler in the time that they are there, however short that is.”
Kamloops celebrates 1906 train robber Billy Minor in its revue. Whistler’s most likely lead character will be Myrtle Philip, one of the first pioneers to arrive in 1914. They are both entertaining and historically-rich stories worth singing about.
“It’s a cost effective venture,” said Tanya Robinson, coordinator of the Kamloops evening entertainment for Rocky Mountaineer. “It took a while to get there. It was challenging for the first few years, but we made it work.”
