PL AYBILL SPOON RIVER
SPOON RIVER Adapted by Mike Ross & Albert Schultz Composed by Mike Ross Based on Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters }{
approximate running time: 1 hour and 45 minutes. there will be no intermission
ARTIST NOTE: MIKE ROSS Spoon River feels like a show I’ve been preparing to compose my whole life without realizing it. Looking back, a very specific chain of events and experiences led me to the moment that Albert Schultz, after a meeting (I forget about what) told me to hang back for a second. He’d had an idea for something that might interest me and before he rushed off to his next thing he tossed an old copy of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Antholog y on the table in front of me. I had never heard of it. He gave me the quick rundown and took off. Nancy Palk was there too and her eyes lit up with glee that I hadn’t read it. So I took it home and started leafing through it. A lot of the composing work I do is taking other people’s words and setting them to music. I’ve done a lot of work with Toronto’s first poet laureate Dennis Lee, guided a collective ensemble setting of E.E. Cummings poetry to music and quite a few other similar projects. When the going’s good I get a sonic image that comes to me when I read the words on the page. It’s not the song that’s coming to me, it’s what the song sounds like. Then I write the song from there, if I can hang on to that image. That’s how I work, anyway. Never in my life have I had a stronger image come to me than I did when I picked up Spoon River Antholog y.
The image (not the songs) of the entire show was suddenly and permanently in my consciousness. Frankly, I don’t know if that will ever happen again. Albert Schultz does a lot of things right. But perhaps the best thing is pointing people towards their strengths. He can identify what you’re good at and draw that out. That’s what led him to making sure that book made its way into my hands. Two workshops later with the best actors and musicians this country has to offer and I’m proud to present my first full-scale musical. I have felt support from every inch of this building; the crew backstage, the designers, administration upstairs, the food and beverage, box office, and building maintenance staff (you think I’m kidding!), and finally the performers - Albert and I leading a graveyard full of 19 of the most gifted, giving, funny, thoughtful, and hardworking people that I have ever known in my life.
MIKE ROSS, Slaight Family Director of Music, 2014 Resident Artist
p roduc t ion s p on sor
CREATIVE TEAM
SPOON RIVER
CAS T Frank Cox-O'Connell
Gordon Hecht
Colin Palangio
Mikaela Davies
Stuart Hughes
Nancy Palk
Oliver Dennis
Richard Lam
Gregory Prest
Raquel Duffy
Anthony MacMahon
Mike Ross
Peter Fernandes
Diego Matamoros
Brendan Wall
Katherine Gauthier
Miranda Mulholland
Hailey Gillis
Oyin Oladejo
Produc t ion Albert Schultz
Adaptor, Director
Mike Ross
Jason Browning Sound Designer
Kelly McEvenue
Adaptor, Composer, Arranger, Music Director
Alexander Coach
Ken MacKenzie
Movement Coach
Erika Connor
Dialect Coach
Set & Lighting Designer Costume Designer
Andrea Nann
Diane Pitblado
Robert Harding
Stage Manager
Laurie Merredew
Assistant Stage Manager
Erin Brandenburg
Assistant Director
Jordana Weiss
Apprentice Stage Manager
SOULPEPPER PRODUCT ION Jacqueline Robertson-Cull
Head of Hair & Makeup
Geoff Hughes, Joanne Lamberton
Cutters
Barbara Nowakowski
First Hand
Natalie Swiercz
Props Builder
Emma Zulkoskey
Wardrobe Intern
Dresser
Mike Keays
Carpenter
s p e c i a l t h a n k s: D on f i n l ay son , t h e s h aw f e s t i va l , ry e r son t h e at r e sc ho ol
i l l u s t r at ion : t h e h e a ds of s tat e
Greg Chambers
Wardrobe Coordinator & Wigs Running
Sorcha Gibson
BACKGROUND NOTES
W
hen Spoon River Antholog y was originally published in 1915 it was a sensation for many reasons: its range of personalities, their sometimes shocking honesty and the innovative free verse the poet made his own. Critics called Edgar Lee Masters “the natural child of Walt Whitman.” Based on “the faithful and tenderhearted souls” he had known in his youth and grounded in the Midwestern values Masters grew up with, Spoon River sings small town life in all its diversity, richness and idiosyncrasy. More than 200 so-called ordinary people speak from the heart about their loves and losses, regrets and triumphs. Masters’ miniatures illuminate individual souls but come together to evoke the emotional landscape of a whole town.
TIDBITS • S poon
River Antholog y was first submitted as a few poems to Reedy’s Mirror, a St. Louis magazine, under the pseudonym Webster Ford. Masters did not claim authorship of the book until 1916, after it had become a big hit.
• E dgar
Lee Masters liked pseudonyms. He published newspaper articles and essays under the name Dexter Wallace.
• S poon
River has had many incarnations in different media. In 1956 it was set as a song cycle in German by composer Wolfgang Jacobi.
• I n
Au t hor Biograph y
1985 British composer Andrew Downes set five of the poems as a song cycle.
Edgar Lee Masters was born in 1868 in Kansas. He had a “scrappy and unmanageable” childhood in western Illinois, which included the untimely deaths of his brother and one of his best friends. He was called to the bar in 1892 and opened his own law firm in Chicago the following year. There he met and married Helen Jenkins in 1898. They had a long, miserable marriage, a bitterly contested divorce, and three children. All of his adult life he maintained dual careers as a lawyer and writer, an effort that sometimes overwhelmed him, though he had success at both. His years spent defending the poor and downtrodden at the law firm of famous attorney Clarence Darrow were a legal high point. Masters produced a steady stream of forgettable poems, plays, and journalism until 1915, when Spoon River Antholog y was published, to huge critical and popular acclaim. He continued to write poetry, plays, novels, and biographies (notably of Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain) but nothing ever equalled his Spoon River success. In the ’20s he moved to New York City, and had a late-life second marriage and son. He received the Poetry Society of America Award in 1941. When he died in 1950, he was buried where he grew up in Petersburg, Illinois, among some of the people he’d immortalized in Spoon River.
Tidbits & Background Notes by 2014 Soulpepper Resident Artist Paula Wing
THANK YOU FOR ATTENDING!
416 866 8666 soulpepper.ca Young Centre for the Performing Arts Toronto Distillery Historic District
Soulpepper 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 are represented by Local 828 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. 
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