Plenty of drama in local theatre thriller

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/01/2022 (1696 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s a ghastly smell coming from the trunk of a red Audi parked by the hot dog place at The Locks on the Red River — it’s the artistic director of the Prairie Theatre Centre with his throat cut.

Final curtain for Gerald Blaise.

Since the body was found outside the Perimeter, the investigation falls to RCMP Sgt. Roxanne Calloway and her sidekick Const. Izzy McBain, much to the chagrin of the city cops in Winnipeg.

Oh, but this is an incestuous world, this iconic concrete-block Winnipeg theatre, where the plots and schemes and jealous zealous hatreds of the actors and off-stage crews and assorted conniving scoundrels dwarf the drama played out on stage before a paying audience.

This is the second adventure for Calloway, promoted from corporal in Winnipeg author Raye Anderson’s 2020 debut novel And We Shall Have Snow.

Blaise was an independently wealthy art collector with a long string of affairs with much younger women and men. Just how consensual some of the relationships were, given his position of power, doesn’t really get explored. Blaise wanted one more five-year extension of his contract, but there was grumbling that he’d gone stale, staging safe old chestnuts and popular musicals and plays audiences had seen as movies.

In Winnipeg theatre? Seriously?

Inheriting everything is his wife Budgie Torrance, a diva and Canadian stage deity with her own roving eye. She was in Regina finishing up a run before returning to Winnipeg to begin rehearsals to play Lady Macbeth, but Calloway reckons there was more than enough time to make the drive and do the dastardly deed.

Calloway is a single mom, her Mountie husband having been killed in the line of duty, and she’s forever asking her sister back in Cullen Village to take care of her child while she braves the roads to Winnipeg. Cullen Village is where the first novel took place, sounding a lot like one of the frozen communities around Gimli.

Misogyny is a constant for the sergeant, dealing with the likes of a dinosaur Winnipeg cop and with the chair of the PTC board, a corporate lawyer who eyes her breasts while letting Calloway know he’s buds with her boss.

Oh, surely people like that don’t exist in Winnipeg?

It would be giving too much away to confide whether there are any more murders. Suffice that there are lots of suspects, weapons lurking everywhere in an old theatre, motives galore, people pairing off surreptitiously or angry enough to kill because someone has forsaken them for another.

Anderson has spent many years running theatre schools and delivering creative learning programs for arts organizations. Winnipeg theatres will be buzzing with folks debating which character they’ve inspired — there’s no warning on the copyright page that any resemblance to persons living or dead is a coincidence.

There’s lots of local colour, though the names are changed. The blizzard that shuts down the city comes immediately after Thanksgiving, which feels a tad early. And one may wonder how a PTC minion can afford to order prime rib each time she dines down the street at Oliver’s, the ornate traditional steakhouse just off Portage and Main.

At times it all seems a little much. One theatre bean counter has been fired for being too ambitious, but the plot demands she be brought back. Her partner is “the local theatre critic” (for whom not specified), whose reviews would influence the financial success of the theatre that employs her. And he has written a play he wants the theatre to produce. Would he review it himself?

Never mind. And Then Is Heard No More is a dandy little Winnipeg mystery that promises many more whodunits ahead, and Calloway is a likeable sleuth. Maybe you’ll even spot yourself in these pages.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin and his wife remember the terror of whether their car would start, in their many years of dashing in six layers of clothing to their secret free parking block on William Avenue at 11:45 p.m. on a January Saturday night.