Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
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book, music & lyrics by Anika Johnson & Britta Johnson, directed by Mitchell Cushman
Outside the March & The Musical Stage Company, Heliconian Hall, 35 Hazelton Avenue, Toronto
September 17-October 21, 2018
Dr. Silver: “We are all vibrations”
Outside the March and The Musical Stage Company have teamed up to present Dr. Silver: A Celebration of Life, one of the most unusual musicals you are likely to see in this or any other year. The musical is written by the wunderkinder of Stratford, sisters Anika and Britta Johnson. Britta wrote the Dora-Award-winning musical Life After in 2017, Anika wrote the Next Stage hit Blood Ties the same year and both combined to write new lyrics and music for Mordecai Richler’s book for Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang in 2015.
Dr. Silver takes them in a new, darker, more ironic and more exciting direction. This is first musical I can think of that is staged as fully-fledged memorial service. We the audience are also part of the mourners and have to participate in the strictly mapped out service that the deceased Dr. Leonard P. Silver had planned before his demise. As a Ph.D. and an M.D., Dr. Silver is a doctor twice over, but his particular claim to fame that imbues the entire musical experience with an authentic eeriness is that he is the founder of a cult religion and we as mourners become privy to some of its rites, beliefs and background.
The atmosphere is established when we are directed by two smiling acolytes outside the charming Heliconian Hall, built as a church in 1875 in Yorkville. They ask if we’ve come for the “service” and motion us to the entrance at the back. We place our left hand on a small bound book by Silver, The Key of Living, that looks like a combination of hymnal and catechism, and our left hands are stamped with Silver’s logo that looks like an 8 but is really two entwined esses suggesting the infinity symbol. We must repeat the mantra, “Your Song, Your Choice”, without realizing as we do later, that by being stamped we have pledged to give our voice to Silver.
At the beginning of the service we are invited to drink from small cups of blue-dyed water as the obligatory first toast to the Master. Jokes abound among the audience of the Peoples Temple massacre in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978, but they are soon forgotten until we learn there will be an ominous second toast (with an amber-coloured liquid) that will bring us all to “The Best Part”.
The order of the service is dictated by a vinyl recording, that Silver made before his sudden death, ceremoniously played on the gramophone-cum-podium-cum-altar. Silver refers us to the Six Rules for the service that all seem straightforward except for Rule Six which states “Let no one in”. We might understand this at first from the point of view of etiquette since Silver’s wife and two daughters have rented the space for the event. Yet, as the service progresses we wonder whether the rule has both a more specific and a more general meaning than we supposed.
As in a typical memorial service we hear from people close to Silver but in a order he has specifically arranged. The conceit of the Johnson sisters is that each tribute morphs into a recreation of memories the speaker has during the tribute – ones not always in accord with the words they begin to say. From the first speaker, Timothy Sweetman (Bruce Dow), Silver’s main assistant for 17 years, we learn of Timothy’s first meeting Silver’s son Gordon at university and of Timothy’s later distress when Silver treats Gordon as dead and later announces that Gordon has actually died.
About halfway through the show’s 110 minutes, knocks are heard at the door. This frightens all the celebrants because it reminds them of the raid that happened at the Silver compound five years earlier. They try to ignore it but eventually that raid, that Gordon set in motion, is played out as a mark of shame that the cult has valiantly overcome.
Anyone who happens to have attended the meeting of a cult religion will be struck by how fully the Johnson sisters have imagined this kind of alienating experience and how well director Mitchell Cushman has captured it. As would be the case, we only partly understand the various rituals we see and only partly understand the particular cant the participants use and the beliefs they hold.
Because of this structure, however, we also only partly understand the nature of show’s five main characters. Why is Timothy so preoccupied with Gordon? Is it because of thwarted friendship or thwarted desire? Why is there so much tension between Vera and Harmony? Is it just that Gordon was close to Vera or is there more to it? We can understand why Vera is now so staunchly dogmatic in overcompensation for having once “sinned” in her father’s eyes, but we would like to know more about what she thinks behind the façade she has created. As for Caroline, who is now in charge of the cult, we know she has had conflicting views of Gordon and her husband’s treatment of him, but what does she really feel now?
The well-chosen cast can thus do only so much when so little is known about their characters. We really get only one emotion from each of them. Rage from Gordon, anxiety from Timothy, haughtiness from Vera, comic ineptitude from Harmony and generalized concern from Caroline. All five use mics and for four of them this may be necessary even though the space is so small. Bruce Dow, however, is developing a strong, almost classical tenor and has no need at all of a mic to amplify his beautiful singing.
The real stars of the show are ten teen members of the Edge of the Sky Young Company from Wexford Collegiate. They play the Silver Singers and they bring a spontaneity to their dancing, movement and acting and a precision to their gorgeous choral singing that an adult choir simply couldn’t match. As teens they represent possibilities of a full life that belonging to a cult has cut off even if they seem so ecstatically happy with their lot.
What is particularly fascinating about the Johnson sisters conception is that Dr. Silver’s belief system is entirely expressed in musical terms. Following the neo-Platonists, he believes that our earthly corporality is an illusion and that death is a release from that illusion. His musical takes on that notion is that "We are nothing but vibration rising up from the ground”. The point of the rising is to join eventually with the celestial music of a higher plane, known as “The Best Part”, although he phrases this in a more ambiguous fashion by claiming that we will all join the Master Conductor without being clear whether this is a form of God or of himself.
The Johnson sisters’ music is consistently vibrant and inventive and they show a real gift in writing for a choir, relishing numerous sensuously unusual chord progressions. It makes one wonder whether they should try their hand at a modern oratorio or a more fully choral musical. Nevertheless, it is strange and intentionally perverse that they have written so much glorious music for a musical about the misuse of music as a metaphor for life. Near the end the subtitle of the musical, “A Celebration of Life” is appallingly revealed to be just the opposite.
This is a sung-through musical, a pop opera in the form of a memorial service, unlike anything you have ever seen before. It makes Leonard Bernstein’s Mass (1971) seem far too melodramatic and didactic. The Johnsons’ Dr. Silver is much more subtle and frightening. Unlike Mass, it looks at the problem of unreflective belief rather than at the supposed crisis of non-belief. With enormous irony it disturbingly associates unreflective belief with the power of music. The Johnsons and Cushman thus turn Dr. Silver into a provocative experience you will definitely not want to miss.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) The cast of Dr. Silver; Bruce Dow as Timothy; Donna Garner as Caroline Silver; Kira Guloien, Rielle Braid, Donna Garner and the Silver Singers. ©2018 Dahlia Katz.
For tickets, visit www.doctorsilver.ca.
2018-09-19
Dr. Silver: A Celebration of Life