Musical tale of emancipation a real tour de force

Aspiring reporter Annie Londonderry (Berkley Silverman) has a story to tell the readers of the World, so she arrives at the newspaper’s headquarters, the tallest building in New York City in the year 1894.

Dressed to stunt on Manhattan publishing magnate Joseph Pulitzer, Londonderry, like The Music Man’s Prof. Harold Hill, knows the perfect pitch is as much in its delivery — disguised, exaggerated, situational — as its velocity and release point.

To borrow a snippet of ballpark scout-speak, Londonderry — and by extension, Winnipeg Jewish Theatre’s Canadian première of Ride, by British playwrights Freya Catrin Smith and Jack Williams — displayed elite stuff on opening night, from the moment Silverman and co-star Colleen Furlan squeeze together for an elevator ride to the top of the world.

It’s the mid-1890s, and Pulitzer — a Hungarian-born Jew who’d been rejected by Austrian, British, and French militaries before fighting for the Union Army in the American Civil War at 17 — is engaged in friendly fire with William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal.

In order to get an inside edge on subscriptions, both newspapers were engaged in a tug-of-war, leading them to consider for the first time the benefit of co-ed rosters.

Enter the globe-trotting cyclist Londonderry, who represents the suddenly viable readership demographic of a young woman on the go.

Much of that background is alluded to through animated slide decks on the ornate boardroom’s LCD wallpaper. Meanwhile, Pulitzer’s voice is rendered in the garble of the adults in Peanuts cartoons, pointing to the play’s intention of reeling in the audience with the clarity, complexity and the expansive emotional range of women’s voices standing alone.

Especially in the Berney Theatre, the WJT’s 200-seat performance space at the Asper Jewish Community Campus, Silverman and Furlan, are able to quickly and effectively forge connections with the audience, forming a tandem to be reckoned with across this 85-minute triple-threat triathlon directed and choreographed by Lisa Stevens.

In her Winnipeg stage debut, Toronto’s Silverman crafts Londonderry as a multivalent dynamo, while Furlan makes the most of her role as Martha, a Pulitzer secretary thrust into supporting roles by Londonderry’s sprawling oratory.

A fixture on Rainbow Stage, Furlan’s voice is her most well-known instrument, but with Martha, the Winnipeg-raised performer gets a much-deserved showcase for her entire skill set.

In a bigger venue, the finer notes of Furlan’s performance don’t get enough notice; her voice always reaches the back row, but in the intimate Berney setting, one gains deepened appreciation for the pinpoint control of her facial expressions, the embodiment of her characters’ shifting posture and her supreme comedic chops.

Even when Silverman is in her deserved spotlight, Furlan never takes a moment off: this is a story of inertia, contortion and the desire for motion, and Furlan’s steady command of the shapeshifting Martha allows the narrative to keep pace with Silverman’s mile-a-minute sprint.

With tight, understated work by music director Konrad Pluta’s three-piece band — featuring Josh Bellan on guitar and Seth Zosky on percussion — Silverman and Furlan deliver a masterclass during their standalone numbers, but especially when merging into harmonious lanes. There are several “pinch-me” moments of musical theatre at its finest.

Though the musical’s Jewish themes aren’t immediately made explicit, that’s thematically in keeping with the migratory struggles of the seemingly limitless Londonderry (Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, according to her passport) to break free from both antisemitic stereotype and the marginalization of the refugee, to roll toward the cultural acceptance and religious freedom sought by Jewish American dreamers, to live a life of promise without bending too far toward one of compromise.

Williams’ and Smith’s layered reveal of Londonderry’s origin story — one defined by involuntary movement and the rigorous expectations of domesticity placed on Yiddishe mammas — is later in the production beautifully rendered through an impassioned tenement lullaby underneath a billowing clothesline. (Kate George’s nested costume design is a lesson in sartorial history: as the trip goes on, the skirts are ditched for pantaloons.)

WJT’s best production since 2022’s Narrow Bridge, Ride is a much-appreciated springtime reminder of how far we’ve come and how much further we have yet to go.

winnipegfreepress.com/benwaldman

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