On Nov. 10, 1965, the curtain rose on a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in a small, defunct Salvation Army citadel in a prairie oil city 2,500 miles west of Toronto.
The 277 theatre patrons who flinched in their new soft seats 50 seasons ago while George and Martha hammered each other ferociously onstage — in a recent play by controversial hotshot Edward Albee — were in on the birth of something big: a city-changer; the country’s biggest, most secretive, most splendidly appointed, most idiosyncratic regional theatre; a national cultural institution.
A lot has changed since that gala night, when a citadel turned into The Citadel and Edmonton first got a professional theatre with professional actors. Starry artistic directors, luminaries from elsewhere, have come and gone, often after heated deal-breaking arguments with the Citadel’s feisty and imperious founding father who’d personally picked them.
The Citadel’s cosy chandeliered digs on 102nd Street south of Jasper Avenue have turned into a succession of hairdressing schools and nightclubs after the theatre moved to its big brick-and-glass playhouse on Churchill Square in 1976. A $75,000 a year budget has turned into a $10 to $11 million operation. Since 1999, there’s actually a homegrown Edmonton-born artistic chief in place, Bob Baker, the company’s first and only. And Joe Shoctor, the obsessive, outsized personality who thought up the idea in the first place and willed it to happen, no longer gets daily reports from “his” theatre. He died in 2001.
In the crowd at the old Citadel that night half a century ago sat the stage-struck 38-year-old Edmonton lawyer-cum-real-estate entrepreneur, nervously chewing his nails and eyeing the fellow audience members he’d buttonholed into buying subscriptions. Shoctor and three of his friends (Sandy McTaggart, Jim Martin, and Ralph MacMillan) had shelled out $100,000 for the messed-up old brick building where the heat had been off and the pipes had burst. But here’s the thing: it had a sloped floor, with seats and a platform. And to Shoctor that spelled t-h-e-a-t-r-e.
“Good or bad, it would get lots of ink and everyone would be talking about it.”
A real estate agent had called Shoctor with a proposition, his wife Kayla recalls. “He said ‘have I got a property for you! Maybe you could do something with it’. If he hadn’t made that call, well …. And Joe went for it. And the next thing you know….” There’s a lot of “and the next thing you know!” woven through the Citadel Theatre story. If the Citadel had been a play and not a theatre, it would have been sent back for rewrites — too many improbabilities.
Shoctor and his friends sank another $150,000 into renovating the old citadel. They hired an American artistic director (Carnegie-Mellon drama prof John Hulbert) and five actors who became the resident company. And Shoctor found them a play. “I didn’t think it was the greatest play or anything,” he said of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in a 1994 Journal interview. “But I knew it would shock Edmonton. Good or bad, it would get lots of ink and everyone would be talking about it.”
Shoctor and his wife Kayla had seen the original Broadway production in New York, and it looked like box office gold. After all, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? controversially divided the Pulitzer committee two years before; they didn’t even award a prize in drama in 1963.
Long before George and Martha were slogging it out on that Citadel stage, Shoctor was already in love with showbiz. The second he had graduated from law school he headed to L.A. to try his hand, unsuccessfully, at a film acting career. Back in Edmonton, his production company brought in acts like the Inkspots and Johnny Otis. He’d directed Guys and Dolls for Civic Opera.
Shoctor’s frequency was tuned to New York. Broadway Joe, as Edmonton would dub him, had co-produced big shows on the Great White Way, including Nicol Williamson’s Hamlet and Peterpat, directed by Broadway heavy-hitter Joe Layton. New York was Shoctor’s Shangri-La, the ultimate artistic validation. Margaret Mooney, the Citadel’s first and most versatile administrator/artistic co-ordinator/archivist, sums it up: “according to Joe, Broadway never put on a bad play.”
Margaret Mooney, Citadel administrator, now retired, was working there on opening night 50 years ago.
Her name is now forgotten, but the woman who phoned in to the Irv Shore Beefs and Bouquets radio show in 1965 and demanded to know, rather tartly, why Joe Shoctor was fooling around in New York theatre when he could start one in Edmonton, was on to something.
A force of nature had been untethered. Shoctor was one of the most persuasive, persistent, energetic fundraisers in the history of Canadian theatre. You couldn’t talk to Shoctor without getting hit up for cash or a Citadel subscription. He was shameless. “Every time you went into a restaurant or you saw someone in the street you said ‘gimme 65 bucks’,” he told the Journal. By “you” he meant “he,” of course.
Mooney remembers that “people would see Joe coming, and cross the street because they knew he’d ask them for money!” Legend has it that he’d send back cheques to donors if he thought they were too small. By that first opening night, the Citadel had 800 subscribers.
When the renos began on the old citadel, Mooney, who had been working in the University of Albert drama department, started helping out on the carpentry, and gradually everything else. By the summer of 1965, she confronted Shoctor. “I work here. I do things. You have to pay me. So he did.” One thing led to another: season tickets, box office, front-of-house, the 17,000-name mailing list for the fall and spring brochures, from which Mooney assiduously “changed addresses and removed the names of the deceased” by hand. On the first opening night, the ticket stock still hadn’t arrived from Winnipeg, so she hand-wrote all the vouchers.
The original Citadel was housed in this old Salvation Army citadel. Tthe building now hosts a nightclub.
The Citadel operation was spread out over three 102nd Street buildings, Mooney explains. The office, in the theatre proper, was in the control room, so she couldn’t work there during matinees. The administration bathrooms were upstairs in the Sovereign Building down the street. And the third was above Rony’s Restaurant.
The patrons didn’t see any of that frantic backstage scramble, of course. What they saw were chandeliers and plush seats — and each other, dressed to the nines. Downstairs was the elegant Citadel restaurant owned by musician Tommy Banks and his business partner Phil Schragge, who’d “gone to New York to scrounge for antique fittings and furnishings,” says Banks. Kayla Shoctor remembers it as “San Francisco red velvet-style fabulous, with excellent food and banquettes from Hello Dolly!”.
“‘Gold seat night’ included the show and dinner at the Downstairs and various hotels …. The shows were $5, the dinners were $5, and your $100 season subscription got you six of each, with a $40 donation receipt,” she recalls. “We sold out …. Do an explosive play if you want attention!”
By opening night of Virginia Woolf, Mooney and her co-workers were exhausted. Was the debut production any good? “I have no idea; I was snoring in the balcony; the paint fumes were terrible,” she says.
Hulbert’s first season mixed modern classics (Death of a Salesman, The Glass Menagerie) with lighter Broadway fare. The lightweight followup to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was Under The Yum-Yum Tree.
“The guy could sure paint sets,” Shoctor recalled of Hulbert, with a sigh, in an interview on the occasion of the Citadel’s 30th birthday. “But direct? Forget it!”
Hulbert’s replacement was Texan Robert Glenn, who couldn’t hack Edmonton winters and went back to Dallas after two years.
In 1968, at the recommendation of Toronto Star theatre critic Nathan Cohen, came a theatre artist as mouthy and gregarious as the Citadel’s founder. Sean Mulcahy was a peppery proselytizer who drove his MG into hinterland towns like Fort McMurray and Hinton, spreading the word about the theatre, gathering subscribers and putting lunch on his Citadel tab. When he arrived, the Citadel had 3,908 subscriptions, by his second season, 5,359. He launched a student matinee series, seven plays for seven bucks, and packed out the house every time.
He and Shoctor, by all reports, had colourful rows and dramatic reconciliations, until Mulcahy’s abrupt exit. He got fired by the board in 1973. But not before the Citadel had done its first Shakespeare, Othello (in 1971, with Mulcahy as Iago), then The Tempest (1973), along with an assortment of plays by Mulcahy’s countrymen Brian Friel and Sean O’Casey. Most of the productions were designed by the Citadel’s resident design whiz Phillip Silver. In all, Silver worked 11 seven-show seasons, a punishing production schedule in which a show would close on Saturday night, and the next one would preview the following Wednesday.
For the first 35 seasons, the Citadel’s history had everything to do with the outsized personality of its colourful, charismatic, hands-on founder cum “executive producer”: confrontational, brash, fearless, fascinated by stars and big names, but somehow unintimidated by them in the crunch. Hence, the series of high-profile, well-connected artistic directors, who came, brought their theatre friends with them, and left in huffs of various sizes and volumes.
Shoctor hadn’t actually heard of the eminent English actor/director John Neville, an Old Vic star and one of the leading Hamlets of his generation. But when he found out that one of his New York-producer friends knew Neville, Shoctor thought nothing of picking up the phone and making him a proposition.
Neville arrived in a town he knew about only vaguely — it was even farther west than Winnipeg, where he was in Hedda Gabler. First up, in 1973, was Shakespeare, Neville’s Tex-Mex style Much Ado About Nothing, which Mooney describes as “actors in giant sombreros, chaps, pistols, holsters, running from the back yelling Ya-Hoo!” Theatre-goers ate it up. His 1974-75 season was sold out entirely on subscription before it started. And Shoctor, who referred more than once to Neville as “an actor’s director and a terrific presence,” began to think expansion.
John Neville, actor-director in the Citadel’s 1973 season opener.
Neville presided, in 1976, over the opening of the $6.5 million landmark playhouse on Churchill Square. He opened with Romeo and Juliet starring the young Brent Carver with Edmonton’s Tom Wood as Mercutio. Neville’s mellifluous voice was the first to be heard on the new stage; he delivered the Prologue. The star-cross’d lovers played to 99.42 per cent capacity.
Neville had insisted on Citadel Too, an alternative second stage a couple of doors north of the old Citadel. His programming there included Canadian fare — plays by John Lazarus, Michel Tremblay, David Freeman, among others. The new playhouse had a second stage, too, the Rice, a 250-seater downstairs where Neville mixed “classics” with Canadian plays like Sharon Pollock’s The Komagatamaru Incident.
He even did plays in the complex’s third space Zeidler Hall, a long, narrow shoebox that would later become a kids’ theatre, an alt-cinema, and now, the home to an improv company, Rapid Fire Theatre.
The Citadel was hot. And the fare was surprisingly challenging. Teatro La Quindicina playwright Stewart Lemoine, who had been a Citadel subscriber as a kid, was in Grade 12 when he signed up to be an usher.
His first show was Happy Days, with Neville and Peggy Ashcroft, he remembers. In the enigmatic two-character Samuel Beckett play that has baffled audiences and critics, we see Winnie buried to her waist, then her neck, in sand onstage, chatting away to her husband as she goes about her daily rituals.
Peggy Ashcroft in Happy Days by Samuel Beckett, Citadel 1977
“It had the same name as the popular TV show of the time … People would come up at intermission to us ushers and say ‘what is this really about?’ The only encouragement I could offer them was that Act II wouldn’t be as long,” laughs Lemoine.
Lemoine remembers his Citadel usher period — manning the “latecomer upper door” of the Shoctor Theatre — as “a great opportunity to be part of that (theatre) world. I got to see Neville as Alfred Doolittle in Pygmalion, as Malvolio in Twelfth Night.”
When Neville left in 1978 to take up the artistic directorship of the Neptune Theatre in Halifax, Shoctor called Peter Coe, an English director who’d had a huge hit, in both London and New York, with his production of the Lionel Bart musical Oliver! It starred Ron Moody as Fagan. Coe brought the star with him when he came to the Citadel to play Richard III, in gumboots.
“It was pretty nuts,” recalls Lemoine. “The whole thing was contemporary, very House of Windsor. And Moody went for the funny. I remember him bowing at the end, then shaking hands with the audience, and leaving his fake hand….” It played to packed houses.
The usher made his Citadel stage debut in The Trojan Women. “I was backstage one day, a fascinating environment, lots of excitement, and someone said ‘you’re quite tall and we’re missing a guard’…. I wore a huge black Darth Vader helmet; there wasn’t a lot of chance to act,” says the playwright modestly. He hasn’t been seen onstage since.
The hit of the period? Like Mooney, Kayla Shoctor, and many others, Lemoine “had never seen anything quite like” Coe’s first Citadel production in 1978: Harold and Maude, with Glynis Johns. “It had such a ‘70s movie indie quality to it, a huge fantasy of everything white and pink. A hundred white balloons dropped over the whole house every night, while the music of the Moody Blues played.”
Peter Coe, Artistic director of the Citadel Theatre. Edmonton Journal file.
Eventually, Shoctor and Coe had a falling out over the $800,000 price tag on a musical version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Coe left in a major huff but Shoctor remembered the era fondly. It glittered with import stars, and export shows. Hugh Leonard’s A Life got Tony nominations in New York. Mr. Lincoln, starring Roy Dotrice, went to Washington and New York, and was filmed for PBS.
During decades when other Canadian regional theatres were wrestling with self-esteem issues and labouring over serious dramas set on Canadian farms, the Citadel was grooming flashy musicals like Pieces of Eight and Duddy for Broadway. And the staff was finding hotel rooms for the likes of Broadway composer Jule Styne (of Gypsy fame) and the legendary musical-writing team Leiber and Stoller.
Which is, arguably, one reason that so many of Edmonton’s mid-sized theatres, Theatre Network, Workshop West, Northern Light among them, are hitting the big four-oh about now. By the mid-1970s the talent pool constantly replenished by University of Alberta theatre school graduates, was overflowing its banks. But talent, by the Citadel definition, was something to be imported. Local up-and-comers, actors, directors, playwrights, often found the doors of Edmonton’s biggest theatre closed to them, so they started their own.
“So many of the country’s mid-sized theatres were born as a response to the big houses that weren’t doing any new Canadian work,” says Stephen Heatley, who became artistic director of Theatre Network in 1982.
In 1997 Ray Storey’s South of China was the first Canadian play to première on the Citadel mainstage in 17 years.
Theatre Network, Workshop West, Northern Light, Catalyst, the Phoenix: “people called us The Not-The Citadel theatres,” says Heatley, now chair of the theatre and film department at U.B.C. “It was an opportunity to have a theatre culture actually connected to the community, and provide opportunities to people.”
By the early ’80s oil boom, caffeinated by a new theatre festival called the Fringe, smaller companies proliferated. Edmonton was solidifying its reputation as a capital-T Theatre Town.
Meanwhile Shoctor waved his “world-class” mantra, and dismissed the little guys. “Not international calibre,” he’d say on an expansive day, and “church basement stuff” the rest of the time.
By 1982, Edmonton director Bob Baker was back in his hometown from the freelance life in Vancouver. And he was fanning the ashes of a nearly expired little theatre into flame. The Phoenix caught on, with hip, provocative, Off-Broadway-type shows. And the Citadel, in a particularly dull period, looked big and lack-lustre in comparison.
Phoenix parties were inked on every social calendar in town. When one of them happened to coincide with a Citadel opening night, Baker was bemused to get a stinging “how dare you?” note from the Citadel’s then-general manager Wayne Fipke, accusing him of sabotage. As Baker would later say, “little David down the street was getting on Goliath’s nerves.”
For only four years of the ‘80s did the Citadel have an artistic director at all, and he was, by Shoctor’s admission, “a dud.” The rest of the time, Shoctor played artistic director himself, with Fipke as the general manager. The English director Gordon McDougall of the Oxford Playhouse, a surprise choice since he was a virtual unknown, was “a major disappointment,” as Shoctor admitted in a Journal interview. “The man could not put a season together.” Subscriptions, which had reached an all-time high of 22,000, slid.
The most spectacular flop was the $1 million Duddy, based on Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. It didn’t even finish its Canadian tour.
Duddy! the Citadel musical based on Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
The real highlight of the decade was the opening, in 1984, of the Citadel’s Maclab Theatre, a first-class Shakespearean thrust stage — a stage that invades the audience which wraps around it — set down in a garden with a lot of trees, the Lee Pavilion. That stage is one reason that Robin Phillips, the legendary English classical director who’d restored the lustre of the Stratford Festival in the ’70s, finally said Yes to Shoctor in 1990, after a decade’s string of No’s.
“He fell in love with the theatre!” Shoctor declared, and added, “what director wouldn’t?”
Phillips brought a design sensibility — uncluttered, exquisitely lit — with meticulous stagecraft and attention to acting. Stars still arrived from elsewhere — including the Midas of the Musical himself, Andrew Lloyd Webber, to see Phillips’ 1991 re-work of his musical Aspects of Love, before it left on an American and Australian tour. But the stars were mostly Canadians — Brent Carver, Albert Schultz, Joseph Ziegler, Susan Wright, Fiona Reid. The plays and adaptations of Canadian playwright John Murrell, a Phillips favourite, hit the mainstage. Local actors were included in casts and some found themselves in lead roles.
After Phillips’ departure in 1995, the biggest theatre in town gradually became its dullest. Under Duncan McIntosh, Shoctor’s first Canadian-born choice for artistic director, audience numbers and enthusiasm dwindled.
Baker was sitting in his garden just outside Stratford, Ontario when he got a call from Shoctor in the summer of 1998. He had just resigned after eight strenuous years as artistic director of Toronto’s largest theatre, Canadian Stage. He didn’t want another artistic directorship, much less at a company where no artistic director had lasted longer than five years.
By October, dramatic irony had set in. The director who had once run a hip alternative to the Citadel, was back in Edmonton, planning his first Citadel season. Baker says he looked at “a company that hadn’t been hiring local in big roles,” and went for the gusto, both in programming and casting.
The cast of Baker’s inaugural production in 1999, Steve Martin’s quirky comedy Picasso at the Lapin Agile, had four local actors: John Kirkpatrick, Stephanie Wolfe, Julien Arnold, and John Ullyatt. Ron Pederson starred as Jack in the dark Stephen Sondheim musical Into The Woods, which Baker bravely programmed at Christmas.
When Baker reopened the Rice Theatre that season, it was with a Phoenix-type show (the violent, darker-than-dark Ben Elton satire Popcorn), and the cast was entirely local. And the snazzy white leather set, blood-splattered nightly, was designed by an Edmonton up-and-comer, Bretta Gerecke, resident designer at Catalyst Theatre.
The MacLab Theatre in the Citadel Theatre
Things have changed. Baker auditions across the country, and he’s well-connected. But the doors of the Big House are not shut to local talent as they once were. There are Edmonton stars among the actors who get juicy leading and character roles, Ullyatt, Arnold, and now Andrew MacDonald-Smith among them. Cory Sincennes is a rising star designer. When the Citadel revives Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in January, in honour of its origins 50 seasons ago, two of the country’ most accomplished actors, Tom Rooney and Brenda Robins, will arrive from elsewhere to play George and Martha. But Edmonton’s James MacDonald will direct.
The term “regional theatre” so resisted by Shoctor — “we are national! international! I’ll say so with my dying breath!” he told me in the ‘90s — is still thorny. Programming for a big house like the Citadel has to appeal to a broader demographic than smaller “boutique” theatres entertain — especially in an era when “art is under siege from technology and the culture of attendance is universally under stress,” as Baker puts it.
Shoctor’s dream of exporting shows to Broadway has evaporated. In these economically fragile times, when costs sneak up and government grants haven’t increased in a decade, the Citadel is more connected than ever with theatres across Canada. Sharing productions makes sense — especially for a massive multi-theatre playhouse where just replacing the glass windows had a $9 million price tag. Baker is of two minds, though, he says. “Co-pros are double-edged, fraught with compromise” if a theatre aims to be directly responsive to its own community.
“To me, from its inception, the Citadel has provided the foundation for artists and artisans to lay down some roots here, live, raise families” says executive director Penny Ritco. “And whether it’s the young artists we train, exchange with artists who come and work here or are in co-productions, we’ve had an impact on the rest of the country … With Joe’s international aspirations, his drive to bring international artists here and take shows elsewhere, the Citadel was never going to be an average regional theatre.”
Ritco’s particularly proud of the Citadel’s Academy which embraces a theatre school and a young company. It has a new-play development arm that propels scripts onto stages across Canada (though infrequently onto Citadel stages). And there’s the Citadel/ Banff Professional Program, which refreshes the skills of mid-career theatre pros at the Banff Centre, then propels them onto the Citadel mainstage in large-cast productions like last season’s Arcadia or next April’s West Side Story.
There have been disappointments. The Citadel can no longer afford to produce plays in its intimate Rice theatre, where Baker once did provocative, challenging shows with multiple warnings — “the kind of shows that don’t have to satisfy such a broad range of audience,” he sighs. “It got too expensive to subsidize, except with one-person productions.”
The Rice is now The Club, an elegant cabaret space where musicians and actors bring revues or chamber pieces (The Craigslist Cantata, Winners and Losers). That’s where marionettiste Ronnie Burkett has located his X-rated Daisy Theatre cabaret for the past two seasons.
Quantity is down from the old 13- or 14-production seasons. But as for quality? The Citadel has got its “must-see” groove back. New Canadian plays are not a startling rarity on the Citadel mainstage, witness Vern Thiessen’s Einstein’s Gift and Vimy, for example, and more recently Tom Wood’s Make Mine Love. “The level of production is on a par with the best of the country,” says Baker confidently.
Julien Arnold (left) as “Bottom” and Lora Brovold (right) as “Titania” in the Citadel Theatre’s 2012 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Big-name musicals are invariably the hottest box office. Ritco cites The Sound of Music, Beauty and the Beast, West Side Story, as Citadel best-sellers. In that lucrative company they are joined by the Citadel’s original adaptation of A Christmas Carol, a 16-year seasonal tradition that sold more tickets last year than ever before.
“But I still find it astonishing that 50 years ago, a theatre here opened its doors with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” says Ritco. It has crossed her mind to challenge theatre-goers with a cheeky ad to dare theatre-goers — “Who’s afraid of a three-hour play?” — when the time comes to revisit George and Martha this season.
“Along with blockbuster musicals and Shakespeare, the Citadel has always retained the right to do theatre for serious hard-ass theatre lovers. We have to!” Ritco declares vigorously. “It won’t be on our watch that goes away!”
FIRST RAVE REVIEW
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the debut production at Edmonton’s new, professional Citadel Theatre, opened Nov. 10, 1965, in front of “a glittering audience of formally dressed patrons,” as the Journal’s society pages had it. In the Journal the next morning, the theatre reviewer of the day, Barry Westgate, was fulsome, under the headline Extraordinarily Fine Theatre:
“It didn’t take long for the bitterness to intrude. And somehow the bright new decor, the shiny excitement of the opening night elite just as quickly fell away. There was a malignant air, spread through and through the intimate auditorium scant minutes after Citadel Theatre flicked the switches for the first time on professional theatre in Edmonton …
Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is not the sort of thing to easily make friends. No benign influence this; no kindly introspection. But done well, the controversial bestselling drama has a magnificent intensity, a macabre magnetism that strikes deeply at the rawness of privacy usurped, the exposed nakedness of feelings stripped.
What an effective way to open a new enterprise. What a convincing fashion in which to present the label of the type of theatre Joe Shoctor and his minions intend for Edmonton from the stage of their exciting little playhouse …”
FIVE SHOWS TO SEE: 50TH ANNIVERSARY SEASON
1. The Centrepiece: Evangeline, a new and epic Canadian musical. Creator Ted Dykstra, who’s originally from St. Albert, was inspired by the 1847 century Henry Wadsworth Longfellow narrative poem, set during the expulsion of the Acadians from Canada by the British in the mid-18th century. Bob Baker directs the Citadel-Charlottetown Festival co-production starring Josee Boudreau, Jay Davis, and Brent Carver. Running Oct. 31 to Nov. 22.
Adam Brazier and Chilina Kennedy in Ted Dykstra’s new musical Evangeline, as produced by the Charlottetown Festival. Photo courtesy Charlottetown Festival.
2. The Gut-Gripper: Back after 50 years, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the Edward Albee drama that launched The Citadel. Bernard Engel directed it then (and starred as George). This time, the director is Citadel associate artistic director James MacDonald and his production stars Brenda Robins and Tom Rooney. Running Jan. 23 to Feb. 13.
3. The Fantasy: Alice Through The Looking-Glass, the hit Stratford Festival/ National Arts Centre production of the Lewis Carroll adventure. Jillian Kelley’s production, designed by Bretta Gerecke, gets a local cast. Running Feb. 27 to March 20.
Alice Through the Looking-Glass, 2014 Stratford Festival. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann.
4. The Contemporary Broadway hit: Other Desert Cities by Jon Robin Baitz, directed by Brenda Bazinet. Running April 9 to May 1
5. Things That Go Boomer: Boom, Rick Miller’s multimedia, multi-character fantasia of the Baby Boomer quarter-century, its spokesmen, musicians, philosophers, opens the season Sept. 19 to Oct. 11.
The season also includes: The Gay Heritage Project, a production from Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times in which three former Edmonton theatre artists Damien Atkins, Paul Dunn, and Andrew Kushnir wonder whether there’s a “gay heritage” (Feb. 10 to 27); Chelsea Hotel: The Songs of Leonard Cohen by Tracey Power, a production from Vancouver’s Firehall Arts Centre (Jan. 13 to 24); Bob Baker’s Citadel/Banff production of West Side Story (April 23 to May 22). And the 16th annual return of Bob Baker’s production of A Christmas Carol, adapted by Tom Wood, starring James MacDonald as the old skinflint (Nov. 28 to Dec. 23).
ARTISTIC DIRECTORS: TRIUMPHS AND TRAGEDIES
The Citadel has had a long line of artistic directors. Here are some of the memorable productions of the various regimes.
1965-1966
John Hulbert — Notable production: Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Directed by Bernard Engel, who also starred as George, opposite his wife Bette Oliver as Martha
1966-1968
Robert Glenn — Notable productions: Death of a Salesman, Albee’s mystifying Tiny Alice
1968-1973
Sean Mulcahy — Notable productions: Brian Friel’s The Philadelphia Story, Sean O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman, Brendan Behan’s The Quarefellow. And the Citadel’s first Shakespeare, The Tempest and Othello.
1973-1978
John Neville — Notable productions: Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, The Rivals, Citadel’s first mainstage Canadian play Michel Tremblay’s Forever Yours, Marie-Lou. On alternative stage Citadel Too: Canadian content including Babel Rap, Battering Ram, Hosanna. Opening the new Citadel complex on Churchill Square in 1976: Romeo and Juliet, followed by Equus, later Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (starring Neville and Peggy Ashcroft), Pygmalion.
1978-1980
Peter Coe — Notable productions: Harold and Maude (starring Glynis Johns), Richard III (starring Ron Moody), Flowers For Algernon and Hey Marilyn! (musicals with hopes of Broadway), A Life. In the Rice: Mister Lincoln (starring Roy Dotrice), Billy Bishop Goes To War (starring John Gray and Eric Peterson).
1981 to 1984
Joe Shoctor (producer) — Notable productions: The Dresser, The Lark (directed by Nicol Williamson), Death of a Salesman (starring James Whitmore and Audra Lindley), the first International Children’s Festival, Duddy!
1984 to 1986
Gordon McDougall — Notable productions: Peter Pan (first up on the new Maclab Theatre stage), Mephisto, A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Top Girls, Pieces of Eight
1987 to 1989
William Fisher — Notable productions: Loot, Nothing Sacred
1989 to 1990
Richard Dennison (producer) —Notable productions: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Crucible in rep (directed by Robin Phillips), Breaking the Code (directed by Bob Baker)
1990 to 1995
Robin Phillips (director general) — Notable productions: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Aspects of Love, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III, The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Cyrano de Bergerac
1995 to 1999
Duncan McIntosh — Notable productions: Othello, Three Tall Women, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Of Mice And Men
1999 and continuing
Bob Baker — Notable productions: A Christmas Carol (now in its 16th season), Cabaret, Present Laughter, Blithe Spirit, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, West Side Story, The Drawer Boy, Vimy, August Osage County, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Death of a Salesman, One Man Two Guvnors.
In the Rice: Popcorn, The Pillowman, Shining City, Frozen, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Shape of Things
STAGE BY STAGE
1965: a 277-seat ex-Salvation Army citadel ($100,000 plus $150,000 in renovations).
1976: Citadel Phase II, a $6.5 million brick and glass playhouse on Churchill Square. It contains three theatres: the Shoctor (a 685-seat proscenium theatre), which opened with John Neville’s production of Romeo and Juliet; the Rice (a flexible, 250-seat studio), Zeidler Hall (a 240-seat auditorium).
1984: Citadel Phase IIa: The $9.5 million Lee Pavilion, a tree-filled garden, contains the Maclab Theatre (a 685-seat thrust stage theatre), which opened with Gordon McDougall’s production of Peter Pan, and the Tucker (a 150-seat amphitheatre surrounding a reflecting pool).
1989: Citadel Phase IIb: A $3 million expansion that included a larger production shop and a complex of rehearsal and audition rooms.
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO JOE SHOCTOR
“I couldn’t get Canadian actors to come here from Toronto. Oh Gawd, they said, what if I miss a radio commercial!?”
“The Pope won’t go to Sarajevo, but if there’s a director there, I will.”
“If someone opens a plastics plant with three people and an extruder, it’s a big deal. We employ over 500 people a year. We’re an industry. We throw millions into the economy!”
“Asking a theatre critic about a play is like asking a priest about sex. Think about it… Regards, Joe.” (cheery greeting card with tulips on the front, from Shoctor to Journal theatre critic Liz Nicholls)
“When I asked if John Neville might be the right guy for Edmonton, there was a roar at the other end of the phone. ‘Are you crazy? Are you smoking pot or something?’”
“We’ve been lucky with Sean and John and Peter Coe to have the right man at the right time. That’s why it takes us so long to find the right artistic director. I won’t compromise.”
“We’ve created not a regional theatre, but an international one — one of Canada’s national theatres. That’s my opinion. And I’ll live or die by it.”
“We’ve got the best theatrical facility in Canada, maybe North America. It’s acknowledged by everyone who comes here. They’re open-mouthed. You can’t turn that over to a kid just out of school. Or someone who’s directed four plays in a basement somewhere. C’mon!”
“OK, Duddy needed a lot of work. But Pieces of Eight was nearly ready. A production that could have been great! It could have gone from here and been one helluva show in New York. And you guys (the local critics) ruined it!”
“I’ll tell you the philosophy. Put the bums in the seats. You can do the best theatre in the world: if there’s nobody sitting there watching it, what are you doing it for?”