Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
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by Louise Pitre, directed by Jen Shuber
Theatre Passe Muraille, Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace, Toronto
September 25-29, 2013
“An Enchanting Evening with Louise Pitre”
When most music theatre people do a solo show, it is a survey of the greatest hits they’ve sung on stage interspersed with a few anecdotes. Louise Pitre has been in show business long enough that she certainly could do that if she had wanted to. But there’s a strong independent streak in her and she wants to do something different. The result is On the Rocks, an autobiographical musical with songs written by Pitre and her husband W. Joseph Matheson. Pitre mentions the shows she has starred in – Applause, Jacques Brel, Les Miz, Mamma Mia!, Mame – but never sings from them. On the Rocks is about Pitre as a person, not the characters she has played. It’s a frank, unsentimental look into the life of one of the greats of Canadian music theatre.
Pitre enters dressed in white tie and tails and tells us that one of her favourite memories as a child was when she would go on summer walks with her father and brother en bédaine, or naked from the waist up. When Pitre turned seven her mother thought she was too old to be doing that anymore, but Pitre always retained the joyful feeling of freedom from those times.
A standard chronology underlies the show’s structure. We learn how much Pitre enjoyed growing up in Montreal and how is was a shock when the family moved to Welland when she was 11 and she had to start speaking English. We learn how she entered the University of Western Ontario as a piano major and never gave music theatre a thought until her senior year when she played the lead in a university musical. We learn how she began as a typist in Toronto, auditioned and got jobs in several industrials playing everything from talking rabbits to dancing pills. Her biggest break was playing Margo Channing in Applause. Her proudest moment was when she got to sing Fantine in Les Misérables with her parents in the front row – proof that she had finally made it. Then came Mamma Mia! in Toronto, followed by the North American tour climaxing in Pitre playing the lead on Broadway.
Yet, while that chronology may provide a guide to signposts in Pitre’s life, the show’s surface structure is much more associative. During the first half hour of its 90 minutes, Pitre introduces a series of themes that she follows throughout the show. Her freedom en bédaine is one of these. Another is a series of drawings that Pitre did when she was seven and that her mother had saved all this time. In one particularly significant picture, Pitre had drawn what she hoped her life would be like when she grew up. As is clear in all its charming naïveté, she thought she was going to be the perfect stay-at-home mother with children in the yard while she hangs up laundry on the line.
In fact, Pitre’s life never turned out to be like that. In counterpoint with her successes in music theatre are her succession of failures with men. She didn’t meet the perfect man, her present husband, until just before Mamma Mia! happened and they had to make the agonizing decision not to have children.
Contrary to fictional depictions of show business, Pitre reveals the fundamental irony underlying the theatre. People rehearse and rehearse to get a show perfect and then have to perform it eight times a week as if it were brand new. For Pitre, music theatre was never about glamour but rather the joy of performing on stage. Yet, she is honest about the toll that a gruelling schedule can take and that “keeping it fresh” is a constant challenge. Then, what happens after you have finally starred in a hit show on Broadway and are nominated for a Tony? Well – nothing. The shock that all theatre people have to deal with is having to start from scratch every time. Do you feel elated when you finally leave a show that has been part of your life for most of a decade? No, depression comes after and the feeling you don’t ever want to perform again. Such feelings may seem surprising but anyone who knows actors and singers will know that even for someone as spunky as Pitre fighting off doubts about ability and self-worth are the norm.
What was especially wonderful to hear is what helped bring Pitre back into theatre after the low that came after Mamma Mia! It turned out to be a show at Young People’s Theatre called A Year with Frog and Toad, where she played Frog. The chance to play a childlike creature and the chance to hear the squeals of delight from an audience of children turned out to be one of her most cherished moments on stage.
The eight songs in the show sometimes make their appearance a stanza at a time in the midst of Pitre’s narration. Some like “I Just Wanted to Say” is a full-out showstopper. All are written in the style of the great musicals of the past. They are not immediately memorable on first hearing, but you suspect many will be when heard again. All are about Pitre’s emotions at various stages in her life – the excitement of going on stage, her frustration with men, finally falling in love with the right man, despair at her parents’ Alzheimer’s disease. All of these Pitre delivers with the power and truthfulness that are her trademarks. She is accompanied by the excellent Diane Leah, who perfectly judges the tempo and volume of each song. Nevertheless, it is fun when Pitre gets behind the keyboard herself to demonstrate her favourite song from her piano lessons or to show how she would play popular songs of the time when in high school.
Robin Fisher has designed a sensibly minimal set consisting of swathes of purple velvet curtain to soften the harsh TPM Mainstage and a collect of theatre trunks with names of four of Pitre’s big hits on their sides. In this context Lesley Wilkinson’s lighting is key in setting and changing the mood.
On the Rocks struck me as a very Canadian take on show business. Pitre doesn’t glamourize or sentimentalize the work she does. There’s as much emphasis on the weight of success as on the benefit of it. Pitre’s overriding view, one that would benefit anyone thinking of making theatre a career, is her insistence on finding a way to live life that balances a career and home, her public and private lives. Her goal is to live life as a whole person rather than to claw her way to the top and fight to stay there and sacrifice everything else.
The guts and honesty Pitre has brought to her characters on stage is visible here where she is being herself. She’s unflinchingly willing to share her life with you, both the good and the bad. On the Rocks is so enjoyable that it could easily play for a longer run in Toronto and should play to standing ovations all over Canada.
And, by the way, since Pitre mentions how Mame is one of her favourite roles, one that she played last year at the Goodspeed Opera House in the States, why doesn’t Stratford, Shaw or Mirvish mount a production for her here in Canada?
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Louise Pitre with Diane Leah at the piano. ©2013 Michael Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.passemuraille.on.ca.
2013-09-26
On the Rocks