(Backstage at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, photograph by Edward Burtynsky.)
In the sixth grade, I played Lysander in the Iles Elementary School’s presentation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was as professional a production as you’d imagine it to be. The fairies danced to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”; Hermia, Helena, Demetrius, and I wore pyjamas (it was nighttime, you see, and we were very sleepy); and Christie Walden’s memorable Titania looked like a twelve-year-old cross between the Bride of Frankenstein and Diana Ross on the cover of Why Do Fools Fall in Love?
I wasn’t cut out to be an actor, and it was my second and final appearance on stage. (The year before, I’d played a senile mountie in a show about an old folks’ home. My job was to intermittently wander across the stage singing, “I love the North.” Video survives.) In fact, I’ve grown to vaguely dislike the theatre. I prefer my artifice in the form of anapests and enjambments, and I do not like being seated in a crowded room. In high school, I tried to avoid the theatre kids, and was largely successful. I went to one play in university, and only because a friend was playing Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, a role that I knew (from reading, not seeing) that I liked. While she was good, I enjoyed the version in my head better.
(An alternate explanation for my reluctance to watch things on stage: my parents were relentless patrons of musicals, and as I child I sat through an almost unbelievable number of them. I have seen Cats probably six times, in three different countries. My brother had a Starlight Express t-shirt.)
Because of all this, I was surprised to enjoy Robert Brockhouse’s new book, The Royal Alexandra Theatre: A Celebration of 100 Years, as much as I did. This is probably because the book is almost as much about Toronto itself as it is the theatre. Cawthra “The Boy Millionaire” Mulock opened his Royal Alexandra in 1907, when the city had a population of less than half a million and was just the second largest town in Canada. The theatre’s one hundred years have seen Toronto grow around it, and Brockhouse’s approach keeps the theatre firmly in that context. Most welcome, too, is the detailed history of Honest Ed Mirvish’s ownership of the Royal Alexandra, which he purchased in 1963 for a low-ball offer (what other kind?) of $215,000. (It would be hard, wouldn’t it, to write a book dealing with Ed Mirvish that isn’t sort of awesome.) The Royal Alexandra Theatre, then, works as the story of the building but also account of Toronto’s cultural history; it should find fans in the aisles and the streets.
Throughout, the book is lavishly illustrated with archival photographs and candid shots. Its crowning glory, though, is a new commissioned photo essay by Edward Burtynsky, which captures the theatre in stately glory and its backstage in charming squalor. Thanks to Mirvish Productions, McArthur & Company, and Edward Burtynsky, we’re pleased to present a few of these new photographs in an online gallery.
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