Calendar Girls spotlights middle-aged women in a heartwarming true story
At the Kay Meek Arts Centre, Leather and Lace Theatre production tells of women who pose for nude calendar to raise money for local hospital
Calendar Girls.
Kay Meek Arts Centre and Leather and Lace Theatre present Calendar Girls as part of the Kay Meek Play Series from January 17 to 21 at 7:30 pm, with additional 3 pm showtimes on January 20 and 21
IN 1999, A GROUP of middle-aged women from Yorkshire, England posed nude for an alternative calendar with their local Women’s Institute to raise funds for leukemia research after one of their husbands passed away from cancer.
Four years later, it was turned into Calendar Girls, a Miramax Motion Picture comedy film written by Tim Firth and Juliette Towhidi, which is now the basis for a play of the same name.
In Leather and Lace Theatre’s upcoming production of Calendar Girls at the Kay Meek Arts Centre, Annie and her best friend Chris embark on a similar undertaking after the former’s husband passes away from leukemia. They assemble members of the Women’s Institute to pose for a nude calendar so they can raise money for their local hospital to get a new settee in its waiting room. To their surprise, the calendar ends up earning far more money than needed, bringing new-found celebrity status and a heap of drama with it.
Vancouver-based actor Erin Jeffery plays one of the women who poses for the calendar, Celia, a trophy wife who’s not quite what she appears to be. Though she dresses suggestively, Celia is smarter than meets the eye, notes Jeffery, and packs a personality full of vibrancy. Jeffery says that the casting for the heartwarming true story offers a type of inclusivity that’s lacking in the industry.
“Being a woman that is 51, there is not a lot of opportunity to do anything substantial on the stage,” she shares. “Calendar Girls is really unique in that it is driven by a pack of middle-aged women. They are the main roles, and the roles are interesting, and they’re engaging, and they’re human. And that simply doesn’t exist in theatre or film. Women vanish after the age of 30, and they don’t show up again until they’re 70.”
Though Jeffery says she hasn’t seen the Calendar Girls film, she does have a personal connection to the story. Her mother, a four-time breast cancer survivor, once posed for an alternative calendar inspired by the original story with the Cowichan Valley Dragon Divas, a dragon-boat team founded in 2003 by women who were experiencing or had survived breast cancer. The women raised enough money to travel to Australia and compete in a world dragon boat competition. In a full-circle moment, Jeffery’s mom has since gotten to watch a recording of Leather and Lace Theatre’s Calendar Girls production.
Founded in 2020 by Vancouver-based actor Sarah Harlow with Victoria Parsley, Leather and Lace Theatre has a mission of producing thought-provoking works that feature strong female characters—take for example its first production, The Tyler Sisters, a play about 40 years of sisterhood.
Alongside Jeffery and Harlow, the company’s upcoming staging stars Christi Arellano, Susanna Bell-Irving, Keri Bennett, Jarod Campbell, Angela Cruikshank, Andrew Fraser, Kennedy Goodkey, Sandra Medeiros, Marcel Perro, Rachel Ruecker, and Yasmin Tayob—all of whom made up the original cast featured in Leather and Lace Theatre’s first run of Calendar Girls in January 2023 at the Deep Cove Stage Society’s Shaw Theatre.
It’s important to note that while the premise of the plot is an alternative calendar, the production has no actual nudity.
“It is creatively hinted at,” Jeffery says. “And that’s really important, too. The audience is going to be uncomfortable if they feel that there is going to be nudity that they aren’t expecting. So it is certainly suggested, but there is none.”
Performing in Calendar Girls, Jeffery reflects, has ultimately increased her network of women in the arts as someone who took a hiatus from acting. It’s a happy occurrence she hopes leads to creating more theatre works of the same vein.
“Age really is nothing but a number,” Jeffery says. “I mean, if you think about the term ‘middle age’, it means the middle. It doesn’t mean your life is over, it means there’s so much more. There’s more to be striving for, there’s more to be moving towards. There’s still validity, and vibrancy, and life. And I think so often, not only in just women, there is a lack of value as people get older. There’s wisdom every so often considered, but life is a young person’s game—and that doesn’t have to be true.”
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