Dolly Parton's Smoky Mountain Christmas Carol marks a country-flavoured return to musical theatre
The pandemic pause inspired director Bobby Garcia to build shows in a better, more inclusive way
Dolly Parton’s Smoky Mountain Christmas Carol features a cast of 15, with a country quintet sharing the stage. Photo by Moonrider Productions
Director Bobby Garcia has been able to reconnect with Vancouver’s theatre scene during pandemic times.
The Arts Club Theatre presents Dolly Parton’s Smoky Mountain Christmas Carol at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Theatre until January 2, 2022
WHEN AUDIENCES ARRIVE at the Arts Club Theatre’s new Dolly Parton’s Smoky Mountain Christmas Carol, it may take a while to adjust their eyes to the sight of a full-scale musical again.
With 15 performers and a five-piece band—complete with fiddle and banjo—sharing the Stanley stage, it’s the kind of rollicking group piece that has been on hiatus with the pandemic.
Director Bobby Garcia admits it was an emotional experience working with this many performers in the room again. His last show at the Arts Club was the considerably smaller-scale solo Beyond Springhill. But pre-COVID, Garcia, who got his master of fine arts from UBC, has helmed large-scale musicals like Sweeney Todd to Fun Home, In the Heights, and Hairspray. They’ve toured the globe—especially throughout Asia, from Manila to Singapore and Shanghai.
These days, the veteran theatre artist is just as interested in who’s working in the room together and behind the scenes, and how they’re building something new together.
“You go in there and you’re hopefully able to do things better,” Garcia tells Stir on a rehearsal break. “You come back with a better process. I used all that downtime to think about how I would do things when I came back—if I was lucky enough to come back!—to take theatre into the future. One of my personal missions is that we make sure that theatre becomes an inclusive place for everyone. This is a musical about community and family and faith and hope and redemption and the need to reconnect with people: so it’s very immediate in that sense.”
Parton’s musical, which premiered in Boston in December 2019, is set in the 1930s Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, where the living legend grew up. She reimagines Scrooge (played here by Vancouver favourite David Adams) as the miserly owner of a mining-company town, writing many original tunes for the production—and pulling out country gems like “Once Upon a Christmas” (which Parton famously sang with Kenny Rogers).
Garcia likes to call it a “mashup of Dolly and Dickens”. “And it’s a mashup that absolutely mashes perfectly!” he adds.
The hills of Eastern Tennessee were probably not the most diverse place at the height of the Depression. And here, in part, is where Garcia brings his renewed vision to the work. As he puts it, “Our community is diverse, even if it is set in Tennessee.”
The strong cast of local actors—including Andrew Wheeler, Synthia Yusuf, Charlie Gallant, Scott Bellis, and Chelsea Rose—all have to adopt a certain vernacular to evoke the setting and capture the flow of the script and music, however. Enter dialect coach Adam Henderson, who’s been working closely with the team, says Garcia.
“It’s written with colloquialisms of the area—it’s all there,” the director explains. “He’s helped us not just to say it properly, but to understand how the words evolved to how they sound—just to keep the flavour of the place.”
Garcia says the production is joyful, sticking closely to the Dickens classic but “with a lot of surprises”.
Building Smoky Mountains Christmas Carol has been just one more unexpected gift for Garcia, who chose to ride out the pandemic here, after years of living out of a suitcase.
“It’s been great because it's allowed me to reconnect with the community that I’d sort of lost touch with,” he says. “It allowed me some quiet time to reflect, and gather, and find inspiration again.”
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