Hey Viola! returns to the Anvil, with music-fuelled story of a civil-rights trailblazer, starting March 16
Viola Davis’s fight to sit in a movie theatre mixes with gospel, jazz, and freedom songs
Krystle Dos Santos stars in Hey Viola!
The Anvil Theatre presents Hey Viola! from March 16 to 27
THANKS TO A 10-dollar bill that now bears her face, Canada is has become aware of Viola Desmond’s civil-rights fight in the 1940s.
But in the musical Hey Viola!, inspired singer Krystle Dos Santos, working with theatre artist Tracey Power (creator of the Leonard Cohen love-in Chelsea Hotel), shades in the hopes, fears, family, and working life of a woman who stood her defiant ground in a movie theatre one night.
In 1946, almost a decade before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in Alabama, Desmond was dragged out of a segregated movie theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. She had dared to sit in the whites-only section. Desmond was thrown in jail for the night and charged with a minor tax violation. And she would go on to battle the act of racial discrimination to Canada’s highest court.
In a creative touch, Dos Santos and Power have set their show in a cabaret in the famed Harlem nightclub Smalls Paradise. And the production, which is back after debuting here for a run just before the world shut down again in fall 2020, melds art history lesson, character portrait, and musical revue, making moving magic onstage.
The music, a range of Nina Simone hits, gospel, jazz, and freedom songs, features a live onstage band, and weaves into the narrative unexpectedly well. (You can read our review from the original run here.)
It's a compelling true-life story and an important show that didn't quite get its due during COVID—and there are some stunning arrangements for indelible songs like “Sinnerman” and “Mississippi Goddam”.
Related Articles
