Performers relive musical-theatre favourites from their living rooms, in Home for the Holidays
Director Barbara Tomasic and cast look back at Gateway Theatre hits like Sound of Music and Fiddler on the Roof
Performers Lalainia Lindbjerg Strelau and David Adams beam in from home, while Barbara Tomasic (right) helms the show.
Gateway Theatre’s Home for the Holidays is available on demand from December 18 to January 1
FOR MORE THAN three decades, Gateway Theatre has been a busy, crowded place during the holiday season, bursting with activity as it stages a large-scale musical.
Of course, thanks to COVID-19 and strict new public heath orders, its auditorium, lobby, and dressing rooms will sit empty for this Christmas season. But the digital show Home for the Holidays hopes to celebrate the venue’s long musical-theatre tradition virtually.
In the online musical revue, familiar faces from past hits like The Music Man, The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and Annie will sing some of their favourite showtunes from the comfort of their own living rooms.
“It felt like that was something nostalgic or connected to what we’ve done before, especially because we’re pivoting digitally,” says director Barbara Tomasic. “I thought, ‘How can we connect with the community that has been supporting us for so long?’”
Tomasic herself got her start at the Gateway, with her first professional show The Sound of Music. And now she finds herself coming full circle: in June, she became the venue’s new new director of artistic programs.
Tomasic says she’s met many local theatre and screen artists who credit the venue with launching their careers—a fact that hit home when she started preparing this holiday digital edition.
“We went through the shows over the last 30 years and went through all the programs, and it was such a neat celebration of the legacy of the theatre,” says Tomasic, pointing out a lot of the Rogers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe classics featured in Home for the Holidays are from productions that the Gateway staged two or three times over the years.
Actors taking part include David Adams, Angela Beaulieu, Lauren Bowler, Scotia Browner, Oliver Castillo, Bridget Esler, Meghan Gardiner, Tiana Jung, Lalainia Lindbjerg Strelau, Tom Pickett, Chelsea Rose, Jason Sakaki, and many more.
The logistics of having performers sing their favourite songs from home were not simple. Actors had to listen to backing tracks in their ears while they sang, and then those tracks would be edited in later, under music supervisor Christopher King.
Tomasic says the team even went to the trouble of having costume advisors, and there’s a bit of choreography-by-remote.
Still, beaming in showstoppers like “Do Re Mi” and “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” from people’s abodes will have a different feel from a stage under spotlights.
“It’s very intimate and full of heart, because the thing about something in your home is that there isn’t any of the upbeat dance numbers that you’d have onstage,” says Tomasic, “so it has a coziness and warmth and generosity.” Added bonus: you can sing along to your heart’s content from your own living-room couch, and only your roommates, or cat, will hear you.
The homey feel will continue right through intermission, when the patron-services manager will walk adults through a recipe for Jingle Bell (Scotch on the) Rocks and a Holiday Hot Chocolate for kids.
Last year’s production of the Gateway’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, helmed by Barbara Tomasic.
It’s important to note that Home for the Holidays is not just a gift for audiences; it’s helping put to work a bunch of actors at a particularly hard time.
Tomasic knows all too well what the fallout of pandemic shutdown looks like. She was helming the Arts Club’s 12 Dates of Christmas when new health orders on November 19 forced its cancellation mid-run.
“I saw, for artists working contract to contract, how terrifying that would be and what an emotional roller coaster it’s been,” she says. “So I’m glad we were able to give some of them work with this.”
Tomasic is optimistic that whenever this madness ends and the world opens up again, the kind of musical theatre the Gateway has been serving up for a generation will be just the kind of fare people will be looking for.
“Coming out of this time, people are going to be craving joyful experiences, and I do think that's what musical theatre can do: it allows us to feel on a really deep level,” she says. "So this is a good exploration of what we need moving forward--a sense of real togetherness when you sit in a theatre." That's something we can all drink a Jingle Bell (Scotch on the) Rocks to.
More information and tickets here.
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