Christopher Gaze, the founder of Bard on the Beach, recounts the thrills and challenges of the first opening weekend of his Shakespearean theatre company in summer 1990 in excerpts from his new memoir, The Road to Bard.
An Elizabethan Spectacle
Our opening night kicked off with an Elizabethan spectacle. Vancouver actress Gillian Barber and a gang of theatre chums commandeered a Coast Guard vessel and set sail in period costume, with Gillian as Queen Elizabeth I and a local actor named John Payne playing Shakespeare himself. The Coast Guard played up to their little pastiche, doing a short tour around the mouth of False Creek before dropping them off. Though Gillian was pregnant at the time, laced into a corset and nearly overcome by fumes from the diesel engines, she managed to make her stately way down to a red carpet on the dock for the cameras. The group then strolled through Vanier Park to the site, where we had various street performers and jugglers entertaining the crowd, and stopped beside the tent to give speeches.
A Family Affair
Finally it was time to bring the audience into the tent. My sons — Josh, who was nearly nine, and Zac, who was seven — had little customized Elizabethan outfits made by Merrilyn’s mother, Gwen, and they handed out programs. Merrilyn was not in the show but supported us with much volunteer time, as did her parents with childcare and other kindnesses along the way. It was a family affair.
Positive Reviews
Once everyone had settled, Queen Elizabeth I and the other actors joined me in character onstage while I made a little presentation about the beginning of the theatre. Finally I stepped aside to let the actors get to work. People loved the show. It had a lightness and gaiety to it and, as theatre critic Max Wyman said in his Province newspaper review, “It was good old-fashioned barn-storming Shakespeare!” Essentially the same assessment was made by the Vancouver Sun’s Lloyd Dykk, a meticulous old-school critic, but in a much more anatomical way: “It’s a very public-hearted show! You are essentially outside in beautiful weather and enough of what makes [the play] great can usually be counted upon to come through …” Coming from Dykk, who could be very cutting, this was a reasonable review.
Unexpected Challenges
Of course, new challenges came along. For instance, the Symphony of Fire ran their second show on either the Saturday or Sunday night following our opening performance. Word had gotten out about the fireworks, and the second crowd to mob Vanier Park was much larger than the first. People had also arrived earlier to get good vantage points. The only problem, of course, was where they might go to the bathroom after a few hours of waiting. Unfortunately, bright blue porta-potties are rather conspicuous things.
People started coming into our site while the show was going on to use the porta-potties. And I thought, My God, we’re going to have to pay for an extra pumping-out. This is going to end badly. So I stopped the next person and said, “Excuse me, could I help you?”
“Yeah! I’m gonna use your loo!”
And I said, “I’ll tell you what, you can use one if you go over to our concession where we’ve got some bits and pieces for sale. If you go and spend some money there, you can relieve yourself in our lavatories.”
This was the start of people tottering into the porta-potties with all sorts of new purchases in hand: Mr. Big chocolate bars, red licorice and goodness knows what else. We made a fortune — or at least enough to have the loos pumped out more regularly!
