Rainbow Stage director seizing the season

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This article was published 11/07/2018 (2989 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In his first official year as the artistic director of Rainbow Stage, Carson Nattrass is facing the conundrum with which most first-year ADs must contend: the plays of his inaugural season were programmed by someone else.

Ray Hogg, the former artistic director who abruptly departed the job in September 2017 to return to Montreal, is the guy who devised the 2018 Rainbow slate: Breaking Up Is Hard to Do (July 9-22) and Beauty and the Beast (Aug. 14-30).

It’s not a grim prospect. Both shows are safe choices. Beauty and the Beast, last produced at Rainbow in 2009 and previously in 2004, is a proven Disney commodity. Breaking Up, a jukebox musical structured around the songs of ’60s pop star Neil Sedaka, is a pop-laced confection in the vein of the 2017 Rainbow hit Mamma Mia!, albeit targeted to an older crowd.

(The music of ABBA topped the charts a full decade after Sedaka resided there.)

But “safe” isn’t necessarily the best option for an artistic director out to prove himself.

“I’m trying to find my voice in a season that I inherited,” Nattrass says. “And I think the way that I approached that, the second I sat in the seat, was to highlight this community here.

“In this and in both shows, I’m focusing on a creative team entirely made up of Manitobans and a cast entirely made up of Manitobans.”

That is a point that should be well taken in these parts. In the years the Toronto-born Hogg was artistic director, a few plum roles would often be outsourced to Toronto actors when it seemed apparent that many parts, such as the romantic leads of the other 2017 show Little Shop of Horrors, might have been better served by local actors.

Nattrass doesn’t say this, of course. But he does assert his commitment to Winnipeg talent, which he has seen first-hand in his years as a busy working actor.

“I’ve been blessed to have a career across the country and I have a lot of perspective of the talent in this town,” he says. “And it’s extraordinary. It’s in the extreme.

“It’s like how certain areas of the country breed great hockey players,” he says. “There’s something here, whether it’s the years the Royal Winnipeg Ballet has been here, with retired dancers opening schools.

“We have a huge dance community and — everyone knows — an incredible music community and we are the birthplace of professional regional theatre in Canada, so Rainbow Stage encompasses all three of those communities.”

Nattrass says that commitment has led him to hiring people to work outside their comfort zones for his first season.

Local actor-playwright Debbie Patterson has been celebrated for her one-woman show Sargent & Victor & Me delineating the conflicts of living in Winnipeg’s West End, encompassing her own battles with multiple sclerosis. At first blush, she seems a counter-intuitive choice to direct the weightless rom-com premise of Breaking Up, depicting the romantic hijinks of a Catskills vacation resort, circa 1960.

Nattrass says Patterson is there to bolster the acting part of the triple-threat equation.

“Let’s say a 20-year-old dancer comes to musical theatre,” he says. “They will have been dancing since the age of three and if they also sing, they’ve been singing since the age of five.

“But acting is something that can sometimes be missed in our genre,” he says. “Debbie Patterson is a National Theatre School-trained actor and a leader in our community and someone I want to connect our musical theatre community with.

“She is someone who is going to fight for the play within what could be another jukebox musical,” he says. “You don’t want to avoid the heart, and that’s what she’s there for, to connect our cast and the audience to the heart of this play.”

Nattrass will announce his own upcoming Rainbow season, the 2019 program, in August. And he does so keenly aware that, while Canada has been producing excellent, critically acclaimed musicals of late, Rainbow has been historically shy of putting them on under the Kildonan Park dome.

“With the energy of Come From Away or (Britta Johnson’s) Life After at Canadian Stage, or Onegin touring out of Vancouver, there’s lots of great stuff happening,” Nattrass says.

“The idea of moving towards new work is one of the most exciting things to me. I have about three or four projects that are on my desk that need the support and that’s the next step.

“I’m already thinking of 2020 and 2021,” he says. “I’ve been thrown in the deep end, but thankfully, the experience has allowed me to keep my head above water and it’s also been very enjoyable.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @FreepKing