Hey Viola! paints a fuller portrait of Viola Desmond, who did more than fight segregation
Performer Krystle Dos Santos uses music to fill in the many moods of the pioneering entrepreneur who never saw justice
Using music, Hey Viola! tells the full story of civil-rights icon Viola Desmond. Photo by David Cooper
Hey Viola! runs at the Anvil Centre in New Westminster from October 15 to 25; check venue COVID protocols here
THANKS TO A NEW 10-dollar bill bearing her face, Canada is now aware of Viola Desmond’s civil-rights fight.
We now know that 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 and inspire civil rights in her home province and beyond.
But, as local singer-actor Krystle Dos Santos has discovered creating the one-woman show Hey Viola!, there is much more to her title character’s story.
“We do a full-arc story of her experiences and we set it to the music of her era, the 1930s to the ’60s—and we do more than the Heritage Minute we’ve been given,” Dos Santos tells Stir.
Many who now recognize Desmond from the $10 bill don’t realize she was a pioneering entrepreneur in the Black community. She not only ran hair salons, but a training school to provide local Black women with employment; Desmond herself had been forced to travel as far away as Madam C.J. Walker’s beauty schools in New York because Black women were not allowed into similar classes in Halifax. Later, Desmond also sold her own line of beauty products to women across Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Quebec.
Krystle Dos Santos.
“For Black women, period, in the ’40s that was a big deal,” comments Dos Santos, who received the blessing of Desmond’s surviving nonagenarian sister Wanda Robson to take on the role. “It’s so much fun to feel her success!
“This is her billboard moment, her pride and joy. And there’s kind of a parallel—being able to tell these stories feels like my billboard moment. I’m literally driving around New West seeing myself on billboards for this show!”
But a lot of that success was thrown into disarray by Desmond’s arrest on that fateful night of 1946, says Dos Santos. The story of Desmond takes a tragic turn, one that doesn’t end with the courtroom victory we’re used to seeing in movies.
Desmond says that the parts of Hey Viola! when she sings through that darkness are the hardest emotionally.
“I can’t say that my music career has the same vast scope that she had as a vision, but I can see where her passion was to build this thing,” Dos Santos says. “And the feeling that that might never have been recognized and celebrated would have been gut wrenching.”
Music, she explains, became the perfect vehicle for navigating those feelings through Hey Viola!. Penned with Tracey Power, creator of the Leonard Cohen love-in Chelsea Hotel, the show takes the form of a cabaret set in the famed Harlem nightclub Smalls Paradise. “She would have seen it going to school,” Dos Santos points out.
Krystle Dos Santos as Viola Desmond in Hey Viola!. Photo by David Cooper
Local musicians Chris Davis, Steven Charles, and Mary Ancheta back Santos as she brings to life the music that would have filled Desmond’s home through three decades.
The playlist of spirituals, soul, blues, and jazz—there’s even a little Nina Simone in there—is all right in Dos Santos’s comfort zone.
“Using music to tell the story felt so natural for me because that was my primary craft,” she explains. “However music also does something to solidify or dive deeper into emotions. It really worked well in the sense of feeling the story. And there are so many civil rights songs of her era.”
Bringing it all to the stage has been a bit of a triumph, considering there’s a pandemic raging. Hey Viola! will see its premiere at a socially distanced Anvil Theatre, but back in the spring, it looked like it might never come to life. Dos Santos and Power had worked on it at Kamloops’ Western Canadian Theatre, where it was supposed to debut in September—a show that, much like Dos Santos’s other singing and acting gigs, was cancelled.
“I thought, ‘If this is going down, it’s not going to reset itself,’” Dos Santos recalls. “It was a shock that we were going to move forward—especially with this perfect timing and the Black Lives Matter movement happening.
“It’s striking while people’s awareness is open and receiving to all of this info,” she adds. Some of Desmond’s fight, it appears, still needs to be won.
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