Volume 27 Issue 4 - February 2022

MUSIC THEATRE
Silver linings to the new-year
lockdown blues
JENNIFER PARR
Melissa Morris in Sweetheart
When the rapidly increasing spread of the Omicron
variant and the new lockdown closed down
our performance spaces once again in January,
all kinds of theatre-going plans for the early new year
had to be tossed out. Luckily, resilient companies and
artists didn’t stop creating; their new and growing ease
with filming and streaming, is still providing us with
many ways to enjoy good music theatre in spite of the
pandemic, and to cheer our souls during the coldest time
of the year.
Silver linings
Among these bright spots is the
opportunity to catch filmed versions
of live shows we might otherwise
not have seen. One of these is
prolific Canadian composer Dean
Burry’s Sweetheart, a one-woman
musical about Canadian-born
Hollywood star and brilliant business
woman, Mary Pickford. Burry
is probably best known for his
operas, whether written for children
like The Brothers Grimm, or telling
Canadian stories such as the recent
Dean Burry
Dora Award-winning Shanawdithit, but he has also been a creator of
musicals from the beginning of his career.
GREG WANLESS
I have known Burry since directing his opera for and about teenagers,
Pandora’s Locker, at the Glenn Gould School back in 2008, so I
reached out to him to find out more about this show.
It turns out that Sweetheart is one of his earliest works. “It was
first written in 1997,” he told me, “just after I graduated with my
master’s degree in composition from the University of Toronto, and
was working in the box office at the COC. I was reading all these biographies
of musical theatre composers for inspiration and came across
a mention of Irving Berlin at a dinner party with Mary Pickford.
Remembering that she was from Toronto, I investigated a bit further
and that led to the first version of the show.” That early version only
got as far as workshops with friends, but in 2011 a revised version was
performed in the newly renovated 1920s setting of Toronto’s Spadina
House, with a remount in Haliburton the following summer. That was
that for ten years, until the fall of 2021 when new workshops were
undertaken with director Greg Wanless and actor Melissa Morris,
resulting in a newly revised version that was performed in Kingston
last December.
But why a one-woman version of this story? Well, for several reasons.
“As a young Canadian composer,” Burry told me, “‘economy of means
was always in my thoughts – i.e. how can we do the most with the very
least? I imagined Sweetheart as a female version of John Gray’s excellent
one-man show, Billy Bishop Goes to War. I also just love the theatricality
of this kind of show where one actor plays all the characters to
the point that we believe we see them talking to each other. There
is something magical about that.” And to top it off, “usually, silent
movies [like Pickford’s] were accompanied in the movie theatre by a
single piano and I wanted to create that kind of feeling.”
There is also something meta-theatrical about this reconceptualized
version of Sweetheart: we, the streaming audience, will be watching
on our screens, captured on film, a live show that is itself being
14 | February 2022 thewholenote.com