Alligator pie playbill

PL AYBILL alligator pie

ALLIGATOR PIE Poems by Dennis Lee Created by Ins Choi, Raquel Duffy, Ken MacKenzie, Gregory Prest and Mike Ross ( CANADA 2012 )

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a pproxi m at e ru n ni ng t i m e: 1 hou r t her e w ill be no i n t er m ission

A MESSAGE FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

ARTIST NOTE: MIKE ROSS Oh, about 12 years ago or so I inexplicably started writing songs to Dennis Lee poems. It wasn’t a tribute to a man whose work I had devoured as a child, like so many of you here to watch this show.

I (and please forgive me this trespass) grew up in New Jersey… born in Canada (so at least I have that) but raised in South Jersey. So Dennis Lee’s stuff did not once enter my consciousness in those “Dennis Lee” years. In a fluke-y twist of needing some words to fill a melody I had been writing I threw some of Dennis’ verse in to play stand-in until I wrote something better. Something better never came because what that had created was immediately irreplaceable. This project snowballed until it was an album. Then it snowballed some more and it became a show that Lorenzo Savoini and I created called Civil Elegies, directed by Albert Schultz. And now I guess it was time for some more snowballing and so Albert put five of us together, called us the Creation Ensemble, and tasked us with taking Dennis’ entire body of children’s verse and creating a world. So now I have partners in crime. Ken, Gregory, Raquel, and Ins. Four of the best people I have ever known in my life.

What a joy!

I have been dreaming of a Creation Ensemble for several years… ever since Mike Ross came blasting out of our first Academy and began galvanizing our company with musical invention. The idea was to bring a group of deeply gifted people together, all graduates of the Soulpepper Academy, and all in possession of certain vital traits: abandon, invention, and generosity of spirit. Raquel, Ken, Ins, Gregory and Mike are five ridiculously gifted creators and performers. They are also five of the sweetest people you would ever want to meet.

Although the plan is that this ensemble will work on many projects, it felt appropriate to have this one be the first. Dennis Lee is a national treasure.

His whimsy and word magic has awakened and tickled the fancies of two generations of Canadian children, and it has been a very moving and joyful experience to watch these five grown artists return to a state of playful wonder in the presence of Dennis’s shimmering poems.

Welcome to the playground.

MIKE ROSS, Creation Ensemble

Albert Schultz,

& Slaight Family Director of Music

Artistic Director

p roduc t ion s p on sor

CREATIVE TEAM

ALLIGATOR PIE

Creation Ensemble

Production

Ins Choi Raquel Duffy Ken MacKenzie Gregory Prest Mike Ross

Adam Harendorf Sound Designer

Ken MacKenzie

Lighting Designer

Ashlyn Ireland Stage Manager

Kate Duncan

Assistant Stage Manager

Creation Ensemble

Set & Prop Design

SOULPEPPER PRODUC T ION Jacqueline Robertson-Cull

Head of Hair & Makeup

Janet Pym

Wardrobe Coordinator

Geoff Hughes

Cutter

Ana-Claude Biron Dresser

Greg Chambers

Props Builder

Mike Wharron

Scenic Painter

Kaileigh Krysztofiak

Assistant Technical Director

Lisa Summers

Scenic Painter

T

he Garland/Schultz Artistic Development Fund has made a significant contribution to the life and work of Soulpepper. Established in 2007, this fund provides the means for Soulpepper to invest in the areas of Artistic Engagement, New Creation, and the dissemination of Soulpepper and our productions.

Since 2008 the Garland Schutz Fund has made possible the commissioning, development and production of the following: Civil Elegies Dennis Lee (Mike Ross, Lorenzo Savoini) Parfumerie Miklós László, (Adam Pettle, Brenda Robins) The Aleph Jorge Luis Borges

Blink Soulpepper Academy A Month in the Country Ivan Turgenov (Lazlo Marton, Susan Coyne) Ghosts Henrik Ibsen (Morris Panych)

(Michael Levine, Daniel Brooks, Diego Matamoros)

Dybbuk Aton Piatigorsky,

Fronteras Americanas Guillermo Verdecchia

(David Buchbinder, Allen Kaeja,

The Cherry Orchard Anton Chekhov

Albert Schultz)

(Daniel Brooks, Soulpepper Academy)

Window on Toronto LázlÓ Marton & Soulpepper Academy (re)Birth: E.E. Cummings in Song Soulpepper Academy Kim’s Convenience Ins Choi Alligator Pie Dennis Lee (Soulpepper Creation Ensemble)

Soulpepper extends our deep appreciation to Kevin and Roger Garland for establishing the Garland/Schultz fund with a $1 million lead challenge gift, as well as the many donors who subsequently took on the challenge by adding their support to the fund.

Poems by Dennis Lee are used with the permission of the author and publisher HarperCollins Canada.

i l l u s t r at ion : b r i a n r e a

BACKGROUND NOTES

M

illions of children are introduced to Dennis Lee’s poetry in their beds. A certain hour comes and they must stop playing and surrender – kicking and screaming all the way – to the end of another day. The sweet, funny, crooked, crafty rhymes of Alligator Pie and other Lee books, have accompanied several generations of Canadian parents and children as they replay the age-old bedtime rituals.

We only have to look at those beds and the poems begin floating through our memories. There’s an irresistible verve and love of wordplay in Dennis Lee’s writing. Margaret Laurence described its pitch-perfect beat perfectly: You can almost hear the skipping rope slapping the sidewalk.

When asked about when Alligator Pie was first published, Dennis Lee has been known to say: “Over a century ago, my dear.” His math may be a little shaky (the book came out in 1974), but we know what he means. In that year, Pierre Trudeau was Prime Minister. Richard Nixon was about to take his last ride on Air Force One. Alanis Morissette was newly born. In that faraway disco era, Dennis Lee had a road to Damascus experience with a famous nursery rhyme superstar. It wasn’t pretty.

The father of young children was shocked into action when he realized that, “Mother Goose was an imperialistic conspiracy and I had this profound cosmological insight with it: That it was all a plot to infiltrate the brain boxes of two-and-a-half year olds and make us think we lived somewhere else and that our own time and place had no right to be played upon by the imagination.”

Alligator Pie is the first main stage offering of our Creation Ensemble, a company of five multitalented graduates of the Soulpepper Academy.

In its inaugural run last year, audiences embraced Ins Choi, Raquel Duffy, Ken MacKenzie, Gregory Prest and Mike Ross as they clowned, sang, joked, riffed, and rollicked through their own hell-bent for election adaptation of Lee’s beloved poems. And we said what every child says when the last page is turned: One more time! One more time!

So perch on the edge of your seats and prepare for a riotous, rambunctious time. By the end we know you’ll agree: Give away the green grass Give away the sky But don’t give away my Alligator Pie.

Au thor Biography Dennis Lee is Toronto’s first Poet Laureate, an Officer of the Order of Canada and the author of timeless children’s collections such as Alligator Pie, Garbage Delight, Jelly Belly, Bubblegum Delicious and The Ice Cream Store. He has received many honours, including the Vicky Metcalf Award for his body of work, and is also an acclaimed poet for adults. His poetry is anthologized and read around the world.

So our poetic firebrand set about writing for and about here-and-now Canadian children, using Canadian place names to boot: a revolutionary act at the time. Lee describes his books as “hell-bent for election rides of feeling, thought and exploration.”

A poetic ride with Dennis Lee always includes story poems, tender lullabies, poems that are jokey and even rude, and, to his readers’ particular delight, a few subversive, nasty little rhymes too – just to goose Mother Goose. Each poem stands on its own but a sense of continuity carries the reader – and listener – easily, breezily from beginning to end.

Background Notes by Paula Wing

THANK YOU FOR AT TENDING!

416 866 8666 soulpepper.ca Young Centre for the Performing Arts Toronto Distillery Historic District

Soulpepper Theatre Company is an active member of the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres (pact), the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts (tapa) and Theatre Ontario, and engages, under the terms of the Canadian Theatre Agreement, professional artists who are members of Canadian Actors’ Equity Association. Scenic Artists and Set Decorators employed by Soulpepper Theatre Company are represented

by Local 828 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. 

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