Wonder down under

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This article was published 06/03/2021 (1726 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Imagine attending a play in an actual theatre.

It is not packed, but it’s not socially-distanced-sparse either, about 85 per cent capacity in a 1,000-seat house. The play is a musical, and the cast is singing their lungs out without masks … and apparently without anxiety.

Now this happens to be a musical about the aftermath of a catastrophe, but the emphasis is on endurance, community, solidarity. The audience — themselves observing a mandatory mask policy — eats it up.

It’s not a fantasy. It is very much a sunny reality in Melbourne, Australia where Come From Away has been playing at the Comedy Theatre since Jan. 19. (Prior to the lockdown last year, it had been playing in Melbourne for almost nine months before being shut down last March.) It’s the only production of the Tony-winning show currently operating.

A witness to all this is Kathleen Moore, a Winnipeg-trained actress who stands in for five different characters in the play by fellow Canadians Irene Sankoff and David Hein about how citizens of the world were forced from their flights to descend on the community of Gander, Nfld. in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Moore lives with her husband David Trimble, a librarian at the La Trobe University in the city of Bendigo, about 150 kilometres northwest of Melbourne “where we just bought our new home.” While she’s performing, she is obliged to stay in Melbourne, going home on weekends.

She is very much aware that, in the eyes of her actor friends around the world, she is living the dream. Like the rest of the world, Australia did suffer through a “severe lockdown” after COVID-19 cases climbed a year ago, she says. But in Australia, the lockdown worked. 

“The numbers kept on going down and down until we got to zero,” Moore says over a Zoom interview. “And then all of a sudden, it was like: We’re back.

“It was wonderful. It was scary, but also exciting as well,” she recalls.

The material of the show, which celebrates kindness and generosity to people in need, resonates powerfully in Australia, Moore says, and not only in the wake of COVID.

“Even just before COVID hit Australia, (there were) bushfires that devastated the country,” she says. “Because of COVID, we tend to forget that that happened.

“The response that Australians had for Come From Away was immediate and very generous and very kind,” she says. “Australians have a connection because they can relate. There is devastation that occurs here and they know how to respond to it and I guess they love that Canadians are the same that way.”

Moore says audiences in that part of the world aren’t usually a demonstrative lot.

“The responses have been very much the same that’s what I hear they are in New York and in Toronto and in the U.K. It’s all like a huge standing ovation at the end,” she says. “And Melburnians don’t stand generally at the end of the show. But it’s just been a deafening response at the end of the show when I’ve been on.”

“Melbourne is very much like Winnipeg in that they love their culture, they love their theatre, and they love their arts,” she says. “They were almost starving, I think.”

• • •

Born in Fort Nelson, B.C. but raised in Winnipeg, Moore became an artist in Winnipeg, first taking musical theatre classes at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet with Brenda Gorlick, then studying theatre at the University of Winnipeg, with additional studies at the Canadian Mennonite University studying opera with Phyllis Thomson. 

“And then I went to the University of Toronto and did a couple of years of their artist diploma program,” she says. On a vacation, she found herself in Ireland where she would meet her future husband.

“I guess we sort of hit it off and we kept in touch,” she says. Once she got back to Toronto, the idea of an Australian trip beckoned.

“I was ready for a change. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do,” she says. “So I thought I’m going to take a year off and I’m going to go to Australia and see this person.

“It was mainly for him that I came to Australia,” she says. “I came for love.”

But she found work there too, after an opera teacher connected her to an audition for The Phantom of the Opera, and she got the job.

“The rest is history as far as my musical theatre career in Australia is concerned,” she says. “I have gone back-and-forth here. I have worked at the (Sydney) Opera House, and I did some work with Opera Australia in the classical part. But mainly, my thing has been through musicals and musical theatre, which I never kind of expected from my training. Classical, that’s me.”

She has been in Australia 16 years now. But she is feeling her Canadian identity in her time with Come From Away.

“I feel very connected to it,” she says. “(Canadian theatre producer) Michael Rubinoff, one of the creators of the show, came over when it opened back in the day when we could travel.

“He was so sweet. He was thanking me and saying: ‘You’re one of us and you’re representing Canada in Australia,’ and he just made me feel so special.”

“I do feel I represent here,” Moore says. “We have flags hanging in our backstage area, the Newfoundland flag, the Appleton town flag, the Gander town flag and we’ve got the Canadian flag.

“And for me, I feel like we’re coming home,” she says. “I look at those flags and I remember who I do it for and who I am representing.”

• • •

Theatre companies travel, especially in Australia, and so Moore is preparing to take the show north to Brisbane in the next few weeks.

“In Brisbane, apparently people don’t wear masks and I don’t know, but it sounds as if it’s almost back to normal,” she says. “Up north, they didn’t have the same numbers we did and they had a couple of shutdowns but for very short periods of time and then they got back to normal.”

“I think there’s a light finally at the end of this tunnel with the vaccine getting out, not only here, but all over,” she says. “Once that hits, people are going to be less afraid and I think they’ll be able to open things up again.”

She now knows what that feels like as a performer, though, as a standby, she can not always go onstage to perform.

“But when I am on, especially now after not being able to do it, and knowing we’re the only ones in the world doing it, it’s actually quite overwhelming,” she says. “When I was first on, I was just in tears at the end. It was just incredible.” 

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing