Goal-den moment

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Revamped musical The Boys in the Photograph hopes to score with audiences (KEN GIGLIOTTI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS)

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Michael J. Whitfield (left) the lighting designer and Ben Elton. (KEN GIGLIOTTI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS)

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Richard McMillan plays Father O’Donnell. (KEN GIGLIOTTI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS)

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Tony LePage as John Kelly, left, and Erica Peck as Mary McGuire. (KEN GIGLIOTTI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS)

The Boys are back. With its official opening tonight, Manitobans are the first to get a look at the nearly new Andrew Lloyd Webber/Ben Elton musical The Boys in the Photograph.

With its official opening tonight, Manitobans are the first to get a look at the nearly new Andrew Lloyd Webber/Ben Elton musical The Boys in the Photograph.

The Manitoba Theatre Centre is closing its 51th season with the $1.4-million premiere of the touched-up Photograph, which was originally titled The Beautiful Game when it ran for 11 months in London in 2000.

The script and score represented unfinished business for the Lloyd Webber/Elton team and they chose out-of-the-way Winnipeg to quietly redevelop the work, with a new name, new songs and upbeat ending. Producers from Toronto, New York and London will be watching to see whether The Boys in the Photograph will take its place alongside such Lloyd Webber mega-hits as Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita or misfires like Whistle Down the Wind, The Woman in White and Song and Dance.

Elton, the 49-year-old Londoner who wrote the book and lyrics, is also directing the rookie-laden, all-Canadian cast, which has endured six weeks of rehearsals, twice the length of a typical preparation period.

To put you in the picture, here is what you should know about The Boys in the Photograph:

Not that Elton

ANDREW Lloyd Webber may be the first name in musical theatre but his Boys partner, Ben Elton, is much less known on this side of the pond.

Back home in London, he may be as celebrated as singer Elton John, since both are rich, successful and shortish.

"In Britain, I'm nearly as known, but he's like the Queen Mother now, since he played at Lady Di's funeral," says Elton, who soon turns 50.

Benjamin Charles Elton is a one-man entertainment industry with a glittering array of careers as a TV scriptwriter, standup and sketch comedian, bestselling author, and musical director and book writer. By the age of 40, his output included seven novels, four plays and 11 television series as a writer.

Think of him as the English cousin of American funnyman Steve Martin. Both are beloved for their early work, Martin on Saturday Night Live and the baby-faced Elton on the British version called Saturday Live. The latter's legacy will include his writing on the brilliant Blackadder TV series starring Rowan Atkinson.

While Martin moved into movies, Elton began churning out popular novels. What he does is news and he never leaves the public eye. He is a regular on TV talk shows and his name is also in the newspapers. As a commercial success, he is often snickered at by the higher brows in Britain.

"My country has a tradition for giving you the stick if you do very, very well," he says. "I get called a sell-out because I was identified as an anti-Thatcher comedian, but I was never as left as the left thought, or as reactionary as the left now pretends I am."

His first three novels, Gridlock (1991), This Other Eden (1993) and Popcorn (1996) all went to the No. 1 slot in the United Kingdom. Elton wrote and directed the film adaptation of his novel Inconceivable, which was released under the title Maybe Baby (2000) starring his pal Hugh Laurie and Joely Richardson.

The graduate of the University of Manchester has written three plays for London's West End, including the stage version of his book Popcorn, which won an Olivier Award for best comedy. Besides We Will Rock You, which is still running in Toronto and London, he penned Tonight's the Night, based on the songs of Rod Stewart.

Elton wrote the synopsis for the story of Lloyd Webber's sequel to The Phantom of the Opera and is in talks with NBC about his cop series.

Who are you?

ELTON has assembled a pretty green cast, with 21 of the 25-member cast making their MTC debut. The lead couple, soccer hunk John Kelly and the pretty Catholic teen Mary McGuire, are played by Tony LePage and Erica Peck, both unknown around here -- although the latter has been making loud noise as Scaramouche in Elton's most successful jukebox musical, We Will Rock You (based on the music of Queen), now in its third year running in Toronto.

Last month, Peck was the surprise choice to play Mary, mostly because she seemed otherwise engaged as punk misfit Scaramouch. But Elton wanted her again and Toronto's Mirvish Productions allowed her to take a leave of absence to do The Boys before rejoining WWRY May 26.

The new role has required an extreme makeover.

"I was singing and dancing in front of 2,000 people in a very short red leather skirt and basically a bra, a huge purple wig and awesome cowboy boots," says the vivacious 22-year-old brunette, who sports two nose rings in one nostril and a stud in the other.

"In this one I get to wear sweaters and long skirts and get to be pretty conservative. I was very eager to show that, although I started in a rock-pop show, I'm a legitimate vocalist."

Her casting continues the whirlwind blowing around the Toronto talent. The classically trained singer discovered musical theatre after she got the part of Eponine in a high school production of Les Misérables. The following summer she ascended to the Top 40 at Canadian Idol before getting the boot.

"I said then that there are going to be a lot of no's -- you know that when you go into singing -- and I'll just have to wait for my yes, and it did come," says Peck.

She attended Sheridan College, where her rebellious spirit was not always appreciated.

"In my second year I broke the rule and went to the We Will Rock You open call," she recounts. "I missed my clown exam to do my last callback. The next morning at 7:30 I told Sheridan I had to leave the program and by 10:30 I was at a press conference, arm in arm with members of Queen and Ben Elton."

Local heroes

MTC's go-to guy when it comes to sets and costumes is designer Brian Perchaluk, who has been assigned the most prominent role among the homegrowns on The Boys in the Photograph team.

Actors Carson Nattrass, Laura Olafson, Adrienne Merrell and Justin Stadnyk are the Winnipeg content in the 25-member cast, but all are performing ensemble parts. Perchaluk, who becomes MTC's most frequently used designer with Boys, has been tapped to create the look of the musical set in 1969-72 Belfast, Northern Ireland.

There's honour in being asked and pressure knowing the theatre world is watching. It's hard for the 51-year-old Perchaluk to repress thoughts of what a success could do for his career.

"It has been an issue but I've tried not to deal with any of that, the what-ifs," says Perchaluk about his 56th assignment for the 51-year-old theatre. "The show is not going anywhere if it's not good."

"It's not a normal MTC show. The stakes are higher for everyone."

His set depicts a crumbling, poor Belfast neighbourhood where the local soccer lads play on ill-kept fields and where their girlfriends come to cheer them on.

"The set should be a supporting player and not a look-at-me set," says the Roblin-born Perchaluk, who designed the Keanu Reeves Hamlet, M. Butterfly and Richard III starring William Hurt. "It has to change quickly and fluidly. I don't want the action to come to a grinding halt for a change. It all has to happen in time to the music."

Nor are his costumes all that flashy, as they straddle the miniskirts and flared-pants era of the late SSRq60s with the lamentable polyester of the early SSRq70s.

"It's fun to revisit that period for those of us who lived through it," says Perchaluk.

Light it up

ALTHOUGH lighting designer Michael J. Whitfield would rather remain backstage in the dark, The Boys has thrust him into the spotlight.

The lighting budget for the revamped Ben Elton/Andrew Lloyd Webber musical is the biggest in MTC history. Every light it has is in use, and on top of that, special remote-control moving lights have been rented for the big first-act rock number, Born in Belfast.

"This is the most complicated rig I've had at MTC," says Whitfield, whose 21 MTC credits include hits such as the Keanu Reeves Hamlet, Camelot, Dracula, Evita and last season's Fiddler on the Roof.

In the big scene, Irish soccer players and their girlfriends are wondering if they have a choice to flee the deepening strife of Belfast.

"They dream of being in a different world, and we take them to that world with a rock SSRqn' number with all its attributes," says the 65-year-old, Victoria-born Whitfield. "That's where we will use those moving lights that can change patterns, colours, positions and shapes to create more variety and excitement."

Lighting designers by nature make an ephemeral contribution to theatre. While a set designer's contribution can be captured in drawings and a mock-up, or the sound designer's with a tape of sound cues, a production's lighting only exists in the moment on stage.

Nor does the silver-haired Whitfield want spectators to be aware of his work.

"I don't want people coming out of the show whistling the lights," says Whitfield, who has enjoyed a 35-year career not only in theatre but in opera and ballet throughout North America. "In lighting, the best compliment you can receive is no compliment.

"If the lighting has been totally integrated and hasn't called attention to itself and totally supported the show, then you've done your job. If someone notices the lighting, you've taken away from the show.

"We are the unseen hand."

The Boys in the Photograph opens tonight at MTC Mainstage and runs to May 23. Tickets are $41-$86 at www.mtc.mb.ca or 942-6537.

kevin.prokosh@freepres.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 30, 2009 E12