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music, book and lyrics by Wesley Colford, directed by Luke Brown

Aim for the Tangent Theatre, Next Stage Theatre Festival, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

January 7-17, 2016

“Talent – beauty –

A girl who does her patriotic duty” (“Heart of Steel”)

The musical Heart of Steel by Wesley Colford with its 21 performers must have the largest cast ever seen at any Next Stage Theatre Festival.  Colford’s excellent subject for his musical is how women took over men’s jobs at the Sydney Steel Plant in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, in 1943 while the men were away at war.  His enjoyable songs are generally in the style of East Coast Folk with a few incursions of 1940s swing.  To make the show fully successful, Colford needs to punch up the dialogue and, more urgently, devise a plot with greater dramatic tension.

The story focusses on Amelia MacPherson (Nicole Power), who needs to get out of the stifling atmosphere of Cape Breton.  She’s bought a one-way ticket to Toronto, but the day she plans to leave she learns that her uncle has died in battle.  Her father had already died working the coke ovens at the steel plant, so now her mother Maureen (Eliza Jane Scott) is left with no way to pay the mortgage on the house.  Her mother says Amelia will have to get a job, preferably in a shop, but Amelia wants to work in the steel plant where she can earn ten times a shopgirl’s salary.  Maureen puts up opposition but relents, stipulating that she’ll allow Amelia to work there as long as it’s an office job.  Having lost her husband to the mill, she doesn’t want to lose anyone else. 

Once Amelia realizes she can double her salary if she takes on working in the same coke ovens where her father died, she takes the job without telling her mother.  Meanwhile, her younger sister Jenny (Mercedes Morris) also gets a job at the plant without telling Amelia or her mother.  The boys ship out, the girls put on a show, Jenny and Amelia find out each others’ secret, the plant holds a talent show and the boys come home.

The main problem is that the plot is entirely episodic.  Any conflicts Amelia has, say with the plant manager Jinx (Sam White) or with harassment from the men, are resolved as quickly as they come up.  The only overarching conflict in the musical is between Amelia and her mother, but since Amelia does whatever she wants to do despite her mother’s opposition, this is not a very strong force.  It also doesn’t quite make sense.  If Maureen needs money to pay off the mortgage, why does she portray the steel plant as a den of sin when her own husband worked there and, in fact, Amelia’s prim Aunt Edie (Jan Alexandra Smith) presently does work there?  For us to be involved in the story there has to be a greater sense of conflict to be resolved.

A second problem is that Colford is so busy with his many subplots that we don’t give us time to know his main character.  Initially, she wants to escape Cape Breton for Toronto but she seems to have no idea what she will do there.  She does not like all the unwanted male attention at the plant that her friend Georgie (Rose Napoli) saves her from, yet during the talent show she sings a seductive blues number with stripper elements that seems completely out of character.  After 90 minutes with her, all we know about Amelia is that she is energetic but nothing else.

Minor flaws include Jenny’s attempt to find work at the plant as a bearded Ukrainian man who has no knowledge of Ukraine, which is much more embarrassing than it is cute.  Also, Amelia gives Georgie a ticket to join her on the train when she leaves Cape Breton, but we never find out if Georgie does or doesn’t go.  Also, what exactly is the nature of the feelings between them?

The cast is very uneven.  Nicole Power’s main gifts are as an actor and dancer, but she doesn’t have the strong voice that everyone raves about in Amelia.  Power does the best she can with a vaguely written role by making Amelia an energetic, determined woman even if we don’t quite know what she is determined about. 

Eliza Jane Scott is very good as Amelia’s mother Maureen, but even she can’t make Maureen’s repetitious statements about the depravity of the steel plant interesting.  As Jinx, the plant manager, Sam White makes the colourful metaphors Colford gives him sound perfectly natural, but he tends to overact and he can’t sing which is a liability in a song like “By Jingo!” where he has so large a part.  In contrast, Jan Alexandra Smith speaks volumes about Amelia’s Aunt Edie’s intractability simply through facial expression and posture.  The scene where she reads a fairy tale to Amelia’s little brother and sister while inserting her own social commentary is one of the best in the show can could stand to be longer since Smith derives so much wry humour from it.

Rose Napoli gives Georgie more personality than all the other factory workers combined.  Hilary Scott and Richard Lam make a fine romantic couple and sing their sentimental duet “Mon Coeur” beautifully together.  Colford has no time to give them any characteristics other than being a “sweet romantic couple” however.  Mercedes Morris brings welcome humour to the MacPherson family scenes though pulling off the Ukrainian disguise and later rescuing a factory worker both seem far-fetched.  Amy Marie Wallace is quite believable as a schoolteacher turned factory worker who simply shifted her emphasis on precision from one field to another.    

    

The best feature of Heart of Steel is the music itself with the cast functioning as both singers and band.  The East Coast folk sound gives the show a sense of place and the few incursions of swing help set it in time.  The best of the latter is the show’s title song, “Heart of Steel”, for a girl group singing in four-part harmony.  As for Colford’s lyrics we have to wonder whether the change in imagery in Amelia’s songs is intentional or not.  At the very beginning she wants to be an eagle soaring free while at the end she says she will be like a seagull returning home.  So which is it?  Has her experience working in a steel plant made her feel more attached to the home she had been so keen on fleeing?  It’s too bad that Colford does not make her feelings clearer.

Heart of Steel has already been staged successfully in Sydney, Nova Scotia.  But for it to find success elsewhere Colford will have to have define Amelia’s character more fully and have to confront her with an obstacle more difficult to overcome than a mother whose advice she disregards anyway.  In his notes Colford mentions that most of the women who took over steel plants jobs had to give them up when the men returned home.  He could emphasize that more in the show since it would help cut though the work’s tendency toward sentimentality.  The fact, too, that married women were not allowed to work at the plant is a point mentioned in his notes that ought to appear in the show.

Colford has chosen great material ripe for musical treatment.  While his songs don’t always advance the plot as ideally they should, they are varied and enjoyable in themselves.  Let’s hope that the experience of seeing the work on stage will help him see how to make it even more stage-worthy.

 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Courtney Fiddis, Nicole Power, Vicktoria Adam and Rose Napoli; Hilary Scott and Richard Lam. ©2016 Nicholas Porteous.

For tickets, visit http://fringetoronto.com.