Volume 26 Issue 5 - February 2021

First up is Veda Hille and Amiel Gladstone’s acclaimed popular hit,
Do You Want What I Have Got? A Craigslist Cantata, livestreamed
from all around The Cultch venue, with a fresh new perspective on
social isolation. Second, is a bold new actor-musician production
of Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years ‒ an award-winning,
emotionally powerful show about two New Yorkers who fall in and
out of love over the course of five years. And third, a performancecapture
film of the 2015 Broadway musical Allegiance inspired by
actor George Takei’s own experience during the Japanese-American
Internment during World War II.
The opportunity to share the experience of viewing these shows with
others online and to hear from the shows’ creative teams live is exciting.
(For more information please see musicalstagecompany.com.)
Richard Ouzounian
Gershwin’s Magic Key, the first
new release in 20 years from the
award-winning Classical Kids Series,
pays tribute to George Gershwin
AVAILABLE NOW on CD,
Digital Download and
Audiobook.
RICHARD LAUTENS
childrensgroup.com • classicalkidsnfp.org
Right now in the pandemic, I think people
would like to be uplifted, but they don’t want
just fun and games. - Richard Ouzounian
I feel a song coming on!
Establishing this type of connection between audience and a show’s
creative team and company is also my favourite part of the Stratford
Festival’s online programming so far. From early last summer,
Stratford has been giving us free livestreamed watch parties geared to
their filmed Shakespeare productions on YouTube. The parties include
new introductory pre-show (and sometimes also post-show) conversations
among directors and cast members talking about the play, the
approach and the rehearsal process – spontaneous interactions often
including in-jokes and never-before-shared stories.
As the popularity of these Stratford watch parties has grown, so too
has the desire of the watch party attendees to have the Festival do the
same thing with their musical productions. Unfortunately this hasn’t
been possible, as filming most musicals (other than, say, Gilbert and
Sullivan productions) is prohibitively expensive because of the rights
involved. Understandable, yes, but on the other hand, fully 60% of the
people who go to Stratford in normal times every season go for the
musicals!
Knowing this, Richard Ouzounian, former Stratford associate
director, longtime theatre critic and broadcaster, approached
Stratford’s artistic director Antoni Cimolino and executive director
Anita Gaffney with an idea – to create a new musical series inspired
by the cabaret scene he remembered from New York in the 1970s and
80s. “In those days,” he says, “you could go to a tiny club and see a
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