Vancouver stage icon Norman Young's legacy stretched from UBC theatre to the BC Entertainment Hall of Fame, and beyond
His Orpheum tours were legendary, and his volunteer work touched countless local cultural groups
Norman Young in Beckett 19: or some such semblance. Photo courtesy Theatre at UBC
VANCOUVER THEATRE icon Norman Young’s legacy stretches across the city’s arts landscape, from the UBC theatre department to the BC Entertainment Hall of Fame to PAL Vancouver.
The Vancouver-born theatre historian and teacher, who passed away April 9 at 94, had served as director of organizations including the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company, the Vancouver Museum, and the Vancouver Children’s Festival.
His Orpheum tours were legendary; one Tripadvisor review deemed them a “hoot”.
Among the countless other posts amid the artist’s longstanding involvement in theatre, academics, and the volunteer community: director of Crusaids Canada; organizer of 50 Years of Freddy Wood at UBC; former member of the Canada Council for the Arts; chair of the BC Arts Board; chair of the Vancouver Civic Theatres board; founder of the BC Arts Festival; member of the Vancouver Foundation Cultural Grants Committee; cohost at CBC Television; and fundraiser at the BC Paraplegic Association.
He remained a professor emeritus at UBC.
One of Young’s favourite claims to fame was taking the Orpheum stage at just 10 years old—the beginning of his long love affair with the ornate landmark, not to mention with stage performance itself.
As he remembered on a Museum of Vancouver virtual museum post, he was there to enter a yo-yo contest—an Ivan Ackery event to attract children and their families to the venue.
“The yo-yo was the rage anyway, and it became a special rage, in some ways, in Vancouver,” he recalls in the oral history. “So, if you were a kid, you’d go to a corner grocery store and you’d sign up for the Cheerio Yo-Yo contest. And you buy your yo-yo there, and you play 10 specific yo-yo things: walking the dog, cat’s cradle. And you go in the contest.
”And there I was, on the stage at the Orpheum Theatre, doing it. They did 10. If you missed, you got off the stage, like a dance marathon. Down until one guy won.
”I think I might have been on there when there were still 50 people. But I played the Orpheum when I was 10 years old. Have you got that on your resume?”
Details of a memorial have not yet been announced.
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