Two of the Best In the Neighbourhood: An Anecdotal History of 2 Pianos 4 Hands

By Richard Greenblatt and Ted Dykstra

Two of the Best in the Neighbourhood is a backstage account of the creation and continued life of the smash hit play 2 Pianos 4 Hands. (This volume also includes the full script of the play.) With contributions from the principal players of this story, including many from co-creator Ted Dykstra, Greenblatt takes us from the genesis of the idea to the blockbuster cross-Canada tour and to productions in the US, England, and Japan. A highly personal and subjective tale filled with anecdotes that span almost three decades, Two of the Best in the Neighbourhood is a glimpse into a fascinating chapter of Canadian theatre history.

2 Pianos 4 Hands tells the story of Ted and Richard, who grow up as "piano nerds," dealing with pushy parents, eccentric teachers, hours of repetitive practice, stage fright, the agony of competitions and exams, and the dream of greatness. As they mature, they become more aware of the gap between the merely very good and the great, and they come to the humbling realization that although concert stardom may be out of reach, they just might be two of the best piano players in the neighbourhood--and that in itself is worth celebrating.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing
• Release date: Aug 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781990737152

Richard Greenblatt

Richard Greenblatt (born in Montreal, Quebec) is a Canadian playwright who currently lives in Toronto. Greenblatt attended Dawson College. He later trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. In 1975 he returned to Canada and began his theatrical career. Since then he has been acting, directing, writing, and composing music for theatre, radio, television, and film across the country and abroad. He is best known for 2 Pianos, 4 Hands, which he wrote and performed with Ted Dykstra. It won both the Dora Mavor Moore Award and the Chalmers Award.

Book preview

Two of the Best in the Neighbourhood

An Anecdotal History of 2 Pianos 4 Hands

Richard Greenblatt

with Ted Dykstra and Others

2 Pianos 4 Hands

Ted Dykstra and Richard Greenblatt

Logo: J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing.

Two of the Best in the Neighbourhood: An Anecdotal History of Two Pianos Four Hands

first published 2022 by J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing Inc.

© 2022 Richard Greenblatt

Two Pianos Four Hands

© 2022 Ted Dykstra and Richard Greenblatt

Scirocco Drama Editor: Glenda MacFarlane

Cover design by Doowah Design

Cover photo of Ted Dykstra and Richard Greenblatt by Kristina Ruddick

Production photos by Lydia Pawelka (1996) and Rick O’Brien (2011)

Printed and bound in Canada on 100% post-consumer recycled paper.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Manitoba Arts Council and The Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, for any reason, by any means, without the permission of the publisher. This play is fully protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union and is subject to royalty. Changes to the text are expressly forbidden without written consent of the author. Rights to produce, film, record in whole or in part, in any medium or in any language, by any group, amateur or professional, are retained by the author.

For more information about 2 Pianos 4 Hands, please visit

www.2pianos4hands.com

For live stage (or any other) licensing inquiries for 2 Pianos 4 Hands,

please contact Marquis Entertainment Inc. (Colin Rivers) www.MQent.ca.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Two of the best in the neighbourhood : an anecdotal history of 2 pianos 4 hands / by Richard Greenblatt with Ted Dykstra.

Names: Greenblatt, Richard, 1952- author. | container of (work): Dykstra, Ted. 2P4H.

Description: Includes the original play 2 pianos 4 hands by Ted Dykstra and Richard Greenblatt.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220207712 |

Canadiana (ebook) 20220208522

|

ISBN

9781927922989 (softcover)

|

ISBN

9781990737152 (

HTML

)

Subjects:

LCSH

: Greenblatt, Richard, 1952-—Stage history. |

LCSH

: Dykstra, Ted—Stage history. |

LCSH

: Dykstra, Ted. 2P4H—Anecdotes. |

LCGFT

: Autobiographies.

Classification:

LCC

PS8563.R4173 Z46 2022 |

DDC

C812/.54—dc23

J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing

P.O. Box 86,

RPO

Corydon Avenue, Winnipeg,

MB

Canada R3M 3S3

For those in my life who are no longer here, but were, in some way, part of the creation and/or the history of 2 Pianos 4 Hands:

My parents, Selma and John Greenblatt, My piano teacher, Dorothy Morton, My friend, Alan Rickman, And my beloved son, Luke Tobias Lushington Greenblatt.

Two of the Best in the Neighbourhood

Foreword 11

Introduction 17

Dramatis Personae 21

The Birth of an Idea 23

The Workshop 33

The First Production 50

The National Tour 80

New York, New York 125

DC

and

TO

155

England, Home, and Back Again 167

Other Productions 184

Japan, Home, and Back Again 192

The Next Seven-and-a-Half Years 212

The Farewell tour 218

Now 243

An Update 250

Postscripts 251

Afterword 266

Acknowledgements 268

2 Pianos 4 Hands

Foreword 279

Act I 283

Act II 327

Acknowledgements 358

Foreword

Michael Healey

Where does a hit come from?

2 Pianos 4 Hands is a Canadian play with an unmatched record of productions. Its rise and reach are an extraordinary story in our culture. And as you’ll read in this memoir, its path from idea to production was almost comically smooth.

Even before Ted and Richard were finished writing it, its potential as a crowd-pleaser was recognized by people who run theatres and program plays. This group of people is famously risk-averse, skeptical and much more prone to booking hits, not predicting them. But 2 Pianos’ appeal was immediately, undeniably apparent.

And then the potential that people saw in the show was fully and completely realized in its first production. This is, in Canadian theatre terms, a miracle. That was followed immediately by a tour (also unprecedented for a new Canadian play), followed by more productions. And then more productions.

This juggernaut sprang, apparently spontaneously and fully formed, from the minds of two guys in what seems like a completely frictionless creation process, and then proceeded to take over the world.

So, if the path to glory exists, and if the journey can be so apparently straightforward, why don’t all good theatrical ideas grow up to be world-beaters?

Anybody who knows anything about the theatre understands how many opportunities for failure there are between concept and execution. How many ways a good idea gets ruined or worn down or muted or mutated. How many good new plays get a lousy first production or no first production at all. And even if it goes well first time around, how many decently executed new plays struggle to find a second life in our development-focussed, not-for-profit theatrical ecology.

Not to mention all the plays undermined by tragedies of miscasting, or misguided direction, or crummy set design, or under-rehearsal, or an absence of marketing, or mouldy rehearsal halls resulting in cast-wide bronchitis, or or or — all the regular ways a show can come undone in its early life.¹ ² ³

There are, in fact, so many things that have to go right to get a good play in front of people it’s a wonder it ever happens.

Here are (some of) the circumstances of 2P4H’s birth, all the right things that happened, that had to happen, in this order, for it to become the show it became. This timeline begins decades before opening night:

Two people, thousands of kilometres apart, have the same formative experience at the piano keyboard as children. They are lightly traumatized.

They grow up and become artists. They eventually locate in Toronto. They both work in the theatre.

They become actor hyphenates, meaning after training and working as actors, they develop skills as writers and directors. During this period, their paths barely cross.

But they know about each other. Each knows about the other’s piano past. Their respective, mild, piano trauma.

Meanwhile, in ’90s and aughts, Tarragon Theatre becomes the locus of text-based new play development in the country. Under

AD

Urjo Kareda and

GM

Mallory Gilbert, the place is running on all cylinders, making new plays, bringing along artists, its subscriber list booming, its board powerful and happy, every playwright and actor in the country wanting to make work there.

But the real secret of the Tarragon, and the lynchpin in the creation of 2P4H, is that Andy McKim is Associate

AD

there, and curator of the Spring Arts Fair (

SAF

). It’s Andy who invites Ted and Richard to work up their vague idea about their shared mild trauma into a Spring Arts Fair show. You’ll read about Andy and the Spring Arts Fair in the coming pages, but it’s not possible to overstate how crucial the low-stakes audience encounter of that event, and Andy’s gentle prodding of Richard and Ted, are to this show’s development.⁴⁵

The

SAF

performances go well, Ted and Richard and Tarragon are encouraged, and work begins to expand a half hour into two acts.

The act of expanding the play does not ruin the play. It, in fact, makes it better. This is due to the fact that by the time Richard and Ted get into the room to write scenes, they know what the fuck they’re doing. They’re pros.

Ted and Richard were experienced, mid-career artists when they finally engaged with their very good idea. If they had tried to come up with something before getting in a room together in 1994, it’s likely the resulting play would have been less. There is no substitute for time on stage, either as an actor, feeling when your connection with an audience is strong and when it’s not; or as a playwright, sensing when they’re with the play, when they’re ahead of it, when you’ve lost them. Chops, they’re called, and they help a great deal when you’re improvising a scene into existence, guessing what an audience needs next, figuring out rhythm.⁶ Especially when you’re collaborating.⁷

So yes, it’s complicated. Yes, failure is always present, just behind you, wearing socks. And yes, timing is everything. But surely, you say, surely there should be more than one 2 Pianos 4 Hands per generation. Why aren’t there?

The answer, boringly, is money. Not-for-profit theatre in Canada is the

R&D

engine for the entire theatre ecology. New play development is expensive. The more new plays are created, the more chances for the next 2P4H to arrive. Playmaking is a volume business, and public funding drives playmaking in Canada. And at the time of this show’s birth, Mike Harris was waiting vampirically in the wings to cut the Ontario culture budget.⁸

It was annoying to be in the Tarragon trying to work on one’s own stuff during the period when Ted and Richard were developing, and then rehearsing, 2P4H. The walls, as I’ve stated, are flimsy.⁹ Their piano playing could be heard, felt, everywhere in the building. And so could the laughter from the rehearsal hall. Andy, Richard, Ted, and stage manager Bea Campbell all have extremely distinct laughs. It was annoying to be continually jealous of what was going on in there.

Moss Hart said that if you worked in the theatre long enough, you would eventually use everything in your life as material. Ted and Richard, two talented guys possessed of chops and no other clues, took the stuff of their own lives and made a unicorn. Made a thing bigger than themselves. Made a great event of theatre, one that would consume and elevate their creative lives. We are all extremely lucky they were no better as pianists.

Michael Healey is an award-winning playwright and actor.

---

1 The dyspeptic reviewer, the damp reviewer, underfed or overserved reviewer, the reviewer erotically spurned by tonight’s leading actor; the good review unpublished, the good review truncated, the good review in an organ ignored by the theatre-going public, the good review that just doesn’t, for whatever reason, help..

2 Shitty weather, spectacular weather, an intimidatingly fancy venue, a theatre space that, due to age or lack of maintenance, literally repulses theatregoers...

3 A loss of nerve on the playwright’s part...

4 I can’t help it. I have to talk about the Tarragon Spring Arts Fair. Short plays commissioned from dozens of artists; every square inch of the flimsy, dusty building that houses the Tarragon Theatre fair game as a potential performance space. Audience right on top of performers. If a little play you were watching wasn’t working, it’s possible you could be seated next to the dying playwright. Plays that did work were magic. Magic. For the audience, figuring out how to see as many little shows as possible was a skill akin to being an air traffic controller — a dozen people would burst out of one show and flow like a frantic wave toward the next little venue, picking up humans as it went.

5 Andy McKim organized all of it. Months of prep went into curating the two-day event. The entire building was disrupted, regardless of what was happening in the actual theatre spaces. Andy was crazed. Offices were cleaned out, actually emptied out to put in a few chairs and make a tiny acting space. The regular emptying out of offices was, in fact, a great side benefit of the

SAF

for the Tarragon: nothing was allowed to pile up, no heaps of things in corners, no permanent fixtures, the very antithesis of an institution. The most serious theatre in the country got tipped over and dumped out on a yearly basis and was therefore not allowed to take itself too seriously.

6 Or structuring a joke, or coming up with a satisfying ending that’s a mix of the surprising and the inevitable, or creating or releasing tension, or making room for the weird, or killing or amalgamating characters, or selecting one word over another, or, or, or

7 Pure collaboration, 50/50 collaboration, I say this and then you say that/No, I’ll say that and then you say this collaboration is a horrible way to write a play. Richard and Ted might be monsters.

8 It’s worth noting that both Ted and Richard are white dudes, and the Tarragon at that time was largely a place for white artists making things for a white, middle-class audience. This was another way the stars aligned for this play. The broadening of our play development culture more recently to include a much wider range of voices, and the increase in public funds to support those voices, means the possibility of this kind of lightning striking again at the Tarragon, and elsewhere, and more often.

9 So flimsy that one is not allowed to use the toilet in the dressing rooms while a show is on in the main theatre. The audience’s concentration is broken by the sound of rushing fluids. Which actually should be a nice break from its concentration being broken by the trains that regularly trundle by, shaking the building like a piñata at a ten-year-old’s birthday.

Introduction

2 Pianos 4 Hands is, according to many people and certain statistical measurements, the most successful play in Canadian theatre history.

Ted Dykstra and I have personally performed the piece almost one thousand times off and on between 1996 and 2013: across Canada (with multiple runs in some cities), off Broadway in New York City for over five months, at the Kennedy Center in Washington,

DC

, in Birmingham and in London’s West End in the

UK

, and twice in Tokyo as well as three other cities in Japan. We have performed it for five runs in Toronto, with a sixth in the works in 2022. Additionally, there have been literally hundreds of other productions around the world, a few of which one of us directed, and many more with which we had no artistic involvement whatsoever. It has been translated into several other languages. Our latest guesstimate is that almost two million people have seen the show in thousands of performances, and it has played on every continent of the globe, not counting South America or Antarctica, which has yet to build a regional theatre as far as I know.

So, how did this phenomenon get birthed? How did this show become such a mega-hit, which is sadly unusual for Canadian plays, especially a non-musical? How did two freelance theatre artists, both trying to navigate and manage busy careers, produce a work together that would literally take over our lives at various times over the next twenty-seven years, and in a very real sense, redefine whatever artistic legacy we each might earn? But most provocatively for me, how does one truly define success, especially in such a process-oriented art form like the theatre?

I had trained as an actor in England at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, returning to Canada in 1975, and had a relatively strong start to my career. I worked around the country, and was slowly building a reputation, especially as a director of new plays. I was also deeply committed to Theatre for Young Audiences, and believed in its importance to literally change the world by playing to an audience who were in the process of making up their minds about life and politics. I directed a lot at post-secondary theatre schools and universities across the country, as I adored working with young artists. Like many other actors, I did the occasional film and

TV

gig, although I found such jobs artistically unsatisfying.

So, by the early 1990s, I was doing pretty well, I thought. I was acting, directing, writing and occasionally doing some music, mostly in the theatre. I made a decent living—at least enough to own a house in Toronto, have three children, and pay for their extracurricular activities—and looked forward to a (hopefully) long life in the business, when I would eventually die a (hopefully) painless death as a venerable artist.

And then, kaboom! This show happened. Its significant success (there’s that word again) was somewhat unique in the Canadian theatrical landscape, and neither Ted nor I had any preparation for what was to come. Not many Canadian theatre artists do. It changed our lives, and in some ways, Canadian theatre as well.

This book will attempt to trace the journey of this work, but in a highly personal and subjective way. As much as both Ted and I decry the lack of focus on Canadian theatre history, I am not interested in an academic or archival account. This history is anecdotal, peppered with our own perspectives, feelings and ruminations. Of course, as in the play, we don’t always agree on exactly what happened, and when, where, or what precisely was said or done and by whom, as well as what it all added up to. I will totally confront these differences in the following pages, because, as we all know, facts and truth are hardly absolutes and are completely idiosyncratic to the storyteller who relates them.

Besides, the very nature of storytelling often incorporates embellishment—or as my friend David Craig calls it, polishing—which enhances the story, and hopefully improves it artistically over time, even as it might move further away from absolute accuracy. Each draft of the anecdote goes through an oral editing process, often unconsciously, and uninteresting details are deleted, or interesting ones exaggerated, until the story gets better and better. I believe that this tendency is even more prevalent in theatre artists, especially actors and writers. Since Ted and I are both, I can guarantee that most of our stories have become well-polished over the years.

I am the writer of this book, but it is obvious that this is both Ted’s and my story. It would be impossible for me not to involve him significantly in its telling. But as of this writing, Ted co-runs a theatre company called Coal Mine, co-parents a toddler named Henry, and has writing projects which preclude him from being an equal creator of this book. My youngest child is a tween, and I only have my own freelance career to manage, so this book is written by me with his participation. I asked him specific questions about certain events, which I have transcribed and edited. I have also included material from Andy McKim (Consulting Director), Beatrice Campbell (Stage Manager), Steve Lucas (Production Designer), and Judy Richardson, Colin Rivers and Rob Richardson (Producers), and several others.

I take full blame for the take I have on this story. It is told through my perspective of these events, and contains quite a few other aspects of my life. My personality is also very different from Ted’s. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I am more positive than he is, or perhaps the better adjective might be naïve. I am definitely a half-full kind of person. Ted is somewhat more cynical, and his spectacles are a little less rose-coloured. He used to say that he always expects the worst, so that he will be pleasantly surprised if things go well. But he says he’s not cynical, just Dutch.

There were a few moments of significant conflict between us during this journey, and I will try to honestly recount them without being too one-sided. I have also left out personal information about both of us—or any others in this story—with which we or they would feel uncomfortable if revealed.

I am optimistic (of course) that this book will be read as more than simply a memoir. Besides an examination of how this success came to be, I hope to give a glimpse of a certain time in Canadian theatre history. I have always maintained that there was a fair amount of serendipity to our accomplishment. The subject matter, our skill set, the play’s theatricality, our chemistry, input from other collaborators and producers, and the tenor of the times when we wrote and performed it, all conflated to create a perfect storm for the show’s success.

I believe that both the story and the way we created it are uniquely Canadian. One of the play’s overriding messages is that classical music belongs to everybody, not just the great players of it, which seems to me to embrace a particularly inclusive Canadian viewpoint. Similarly, we have often said that the play is a collective of two, employing play-creation techniques that were practised in the halcyon days of Canadian theatre—including improvisation and collective decision-making—by such companies as Theatre Passe Muraille and others. I will do my best to plot how creative and producing decisions were arrived at, and how we each feel about this part of our lives now, almost three decades from its inception.

So, here it is: the anecdotal history of 2 Pianos 4 Hands. Enjoy!

Dramatis Personae

Those interviewed for and quoted in this book who were involved in the creation and/or production of 2 Pianos 4 Hands, in order of appearance:

Ted Dykstra

Co-writer and Performer, later Director or Co-director

Andy McKim

Consulting Director of the Original Production

Rob Barg

Former Corporate Vice-President, Yamaha

Steve Lucas

Production Designer

Beatrice Campbell

Stage Manager

Judy Richardson

Manager and Negotiator, Founder of Marquis Entertainment

Celia Chassels

Acting and Directing Agent for both Ted and Richard

Manny Azenburg

General Manager of the New York Production

Abbie Strassler

Manny’s Co-Worker

David Mirvish

Owner of Mirvish Productions, Producer in New York and in London, England, and later, in Toronto

Brian Sewell

Executive Producer, Mirvish Productions

Tom Frey

Performer and Director in many different productions

Rob Richardson

President and Partner in Marquis Entertainment

Colin Rivers

Partner in Marquis Entertainment

Miyoko Ito

Translator in Japan

1

The Birth of an Idea

First Contact?

I thought I remembered the moment when I first met Ted Dykstra. As I recalled, it was at the National Theatre School (

NTS

) in Montréal where Ted was a second-year acting student, and I was directing a show with the year above his. It was the spring of 1981. Of that I am certain, because I was just about to open my first solo show, Soft Pedaling, at the Toronto International Theatre Festival that summer.

Michael Mawson, a brilliant teacher at

NTS

, had developed an exercise for the acting students which he called vocal mask. This was basically solo pieces, written or compiled and then performed by the acting students. I had mentioned to Michael that I was just about to open my own solo show a few months later. He suggested that I try out the piece for the student body as a one-off preview.

Soft Pedaling is the story of a bored and frustrated rehearsal pianist who fantasizes about being anything other than a rehearsal pianist during endless repetitions of a particular dance sequence. It has a Walter Mitty-like feel, except that all of the fantasies he uses to escape the drudgery of his job are musical. I wrote all the songs as well as the script—with the aid of my then wife Kate Lushington, who directed and dramaturged the piece—and this narrative format allowed me to compose and play a full range of musical genres, parodying such styles as Pop, Gospel, Country and Punk Rock, amongst others. There was even a classical musical sequence at the end of the first act where our hero is entered in the Music Olympics, and wins his fourth gold medal for Canada in the Chopin 60-Second Waltz Race, breaking the world’s speed record and earning almost unanimous perfect scores from the judges. The second act takes place after the rehearsal is over, and has a more serious tone, as we witness our hero trying to write a song to help him deal with the various dilemmas in his life.

I was sure that Ted had seen the show with his fellow students, and was equally sure he didn’t like it, because we had never discussed it. I thought we may have briefly met after the performance, but I didn’t honestly remember. So, for this book, I asked Ted about it.

Ted Dykstra: No, I never saw it. I started at

NTS

in the fall of 1981 and graduated in ’84. I knew of it, because my vocal mask was basically a different version of yours. Mine was also about my relationship with the piano. Assia de Vries [

NTS

’ librarian for many years] showed me the script when she heard what I was doing for my vocal mask.

So, I was clearly mistaken. Just a warning; there may be other such errors. Memory is, after all, fallible, especially the longer one is from the event. I will do my best to research any such failures, or at the very least, provide multiple versions of the same event.

Just after Ted graduated in 1984, he came to Toronto, playing Flute in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in High Park, along with two of his classmates, Michael Riley and Susan Coyne. I didn’t see the show, but I did audition both him and Michael for a play for young audiences I was directing in the winter of ’85 at Young People’s Theatre called Separate Doors about a tween dealing with his parents’ divorce. I offered the part to Michael, but I remember being impressed with Ted, and the final choice between these two talented young actors being extremely difficult. That was, in fact, the real first contact.

Next Meetings

Our paths did not cross for most of the rest of the 1980s. He was at the Shaw Festival in the latter part of that decade, and then did seven productions across Canada of Fire, Paul Ledoux and David Young’s piece about Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart (although the names were changed and the plot was fictionalized). I worked at Young People’s Theatre as Resident Director from 1983 to1986, and as Deputy Artistic Director at Canadian Stage from 1986 to 1990.

I did direct him in a workshop in early 1991 at Young People’s Theatre. The play was Mirror Game by Dennis Foon, and the work had already existed as a fifty-minute school touring show to high schools. This was a powerful piece about the cycle of domestic violence in which a young woman is being abused by her boyfriend, and finally, with the help of her friends, finds a way to escape this awful relationship. Dennis and I had been asked to expand the script to a full-length mainstage show. We had several ideas as to what could be developed, and we used the workshop to improvise new scenes and deepen existing ones.

Ted was one of these actors, and his improvisational skills were evident, as were those of the others in the workshop (Alison Sealy-Smith, Kyra Harper and Jim Warren). When we started, Ted and Jim said that the typical casting would be for Ted to play the abusive boyfriend, and for Jim to play the nerdy protagonist. They asked if they could reverse that type casting, and I instantly agreed. We spent a highly productive week, and by the end of the workshop, the way forward for the new version was clear.

So, You Think You’re Mozart

Chamber Concerts Canada (now called Soundstreams) run by Lawrence Cherney, and Young People’s Theatre (

YPT

), when Peter Moss was its Artistic Director, used to collaborate on certain shows which incorporated classical music. In the early 1990s, the brilliant author Paul Quarrington was commissioned to write a new script, and esteemed composer Louis Applebaum was hired to write original music for a show entitled So, You Think You’re Mozart. It was about a young boy who is having trouble practising the piano and perfecting a classical work of Mozart. The two other characters in the piece are the boy’s eccentric teacher, and the spirit of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who I played, and who appears ghost-like from the piano to help the boy.

There was a decent amount of piano playing needed, and as you can imagine, for me to play piano like Mozart was somewhat intimidating, and a great incentive for me to practise like stink. By the end of the play, and with Mozart’s help, the boy realizes that he has the talent and desire to create his own music, rather than just interpret classical composers’ works. Louis wrote a Concerto which was both not easy and not short, and was inspired by the iconic Hockey Night in Canada theme music, which was to be played by the boy as the climax of the story.

I played the show on two separate occasions: once at

YPT

, and a year or so later at the St. Lawrence Centre, both directed by Peter Moss. I was the only one of the actors to do both versions, and Peter hired Ted to play the boy for the remount. He had learned that Ted had the technique to play the part, and had studied classically long enough to know how to work to master difficult material.

And so, rehearsals started. I remember we had at least one duet on one piano. Peter smartly made sure to give us enough rehearsal time to work on the music. As we each watched the other practise, we were impressed. There are not too many of us classically trained pianist-actors.

Ted: I remember being startled that I was not the only one that could play that well and act that well. I didn’t know you as a classical musician—like, at all. I only knew you as a respected director and actor. And then to hear you play like that, I was like, Wow! That’s the first person I’ve met who can play at the level I can play at, and who makes his living not doing that.

We discovered we had a very similar musical history. We had each studied for ten years with basically one teacher from about the age of seven to seventeen. We had each done exams, competitions and duets. We had each given up our classical training around the same age and pursued rock music, and later acting. It almost felt like we had led parallel musical lives, even though we grew up 3500 km apart—he in Edmonton, and I in Montréal—and I am eight years his senior.

As has happened several times in my life, we said to each other, Hey, we should do a show about this. And then promptly forgot all about it.

Fire

I remember Ted’s performance distinctly as the Jerry Lee Lewis character in Fire. It was electric. His rock and roll piano work and youthful rebelliousness were magnetic. Shortly afterwards, I was hired to play the same character in another production of it in Peterborough, Ontario, directed by Brian Richmond, who had also done Ted’s versions. I felt confident about playing the part and many of the songs, but my ’50s rock and roll piano chops were not nearly as developed as Ted’s.

In preparation for rehearsals, I called him up and asked if he could show me some licks. He was living and working in Stratford, Ontario that summer, and I went down, spending about five hours with him as he generously shared his piano knowledge of this specific and surprisingly difficult genre of piano music. During the run, he showed up in Peterborough with a couple of friends from the Stratford company. He had never seen anybody else perform the role, and he had become synonymous with the character. He hooted, hollered and was the most supportive audience member imaginable.

Ted: It was great fun for me to see. It’s the only production I’ve ever seen of it. I just remember thinking you were great in it.

He and his friends left early the next morning after a long night of drinking and partying, and I heard that his hangover was not helped by being cooped up in a small sports car during a heat wave and a four-hour drive back to Stratford. But I will never forget his generosity.

We met at parties occasionally, or openings, or other such events in the theatre community. Around that time, I decided to leave my agent with whom I had been for about twelve years. I had met Celia Chassels from the agency Gary Goddard and Associates at various political organizations in which we were both involved, most particularly Performing Artists for Nuclear Disarmament. She seemed perfect for me. I asked her if she would take me on, and she told me she would like to, but wanted to check first with Ted, who she also represented, since we were two of the very few piano-playing actors in Canada and might be in competition for certain roles. Without hesitation, Ted said that he had no problem with it.

Andy McKim and The Spring Arts Fair

Andy McKim was, for many years, the Associate Artistic Director at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto. He mostly worked there during the artistic directorship of Urjo Kareda, who was, amongst other things, a brilliant dramaturg. Andy’s responsibilities included working with Urjo on new play development and programming, directing shows, programming and booking all the rentals in the two theatre spaces, and conceiving and curating the Spring Arts Fair. The Fair was a wonderful annual program that involved the neighbourhood around the theatre, as well as every nook and cranny of the building itself, including offices, the box office, hallways, production shops, the courtyards and the lobby. The Spring Arts Fair was a petri dish for new work. Many germs of theatrical ideas were given opportunities to grow and flourish due to this wonderful event. Unfortunately, it no longer exists. It