OLDS — Former Olds-area resident Ryan Maschke has come home to stage the famous Broadway musical Hair, with the help of the Brown Cow Collective right on his family’s farm, just north of Olds.
The live outdoor production held its first performances July 3 and 4. Performances continue July 8-11, as well as July 15-18.
Tickets are available via the Eventbrite website. To get to the farm from Olds, head north out of town on Highway 2A. Then turn right on Twp. Rd. 332. The farm is at the first turnoff on your right; about 60 metres east on Twp. Rd. 332.
The Albertan caught up with the cast as they were rehearsing for the performance at the farm.
Maschke has been acting and choreographing shows in Calgary for several years. He got the idea to stage Hair mostly because he’s always been a big fan of the musical, but also because he saw in it a chance to showcase some Black actors in Alberta.
Although Hair, which debuted on Broadway in 1968 is largely an anti-war show, Maschke said it’s relevant today with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement last year and the lack of opportunity for people of colour even today.
Maschke said he got the idea to stage the show via his company about a year ago when he met several people who became key components of the show.
He saw it as a chance to promote local talent, especially Black and other minority talent -- and give them that all-important experience.
"A lot of our cast actually, this is their first musical -- ever. And it’s killer, like their voices are insane,” he said.
Maschke said he’s always wanted to do musicals and outdoor shows. Plus, his parents have bugged him to stage outdoor shows at the farm, so that’s all come together.
There are about 20 people in the cast, roughly half the size of the original cast.
Maschke, director Sabrina Naz Comanescu, music director Misha Maseka as well as co-choreographers Cindy Ansah and Stephanie Jurkova-Abaco said pandemic restrictions proved to be a big challenge for the company.
Those restrictions forced them to do all the rehearsing, choreography, and music development via Zoom for a couple of months.
When the restrictions finally began easing, they held an outdoor rehearsal at a dog park in Calgary.
“We taped out our stage space and we rehearsed with our masks on and everything,” Maschke recalled.
Maschke plays George Berger in the musical; one of the leaders.
“He’s kind of a hothead, but he’s kind of the psychedelic teddy bear too,” he said with a laugh.
Maschke, now 21, graduated from École Olds High School just a few years ago.
He didn’t take any post-secondary education and got into theatre almost immediately.
Although Maschke is happy to be home for a while, this isn’t where he saw himself at this stage in his life.
“Never once did I think that I would be back to do it. I thought I was going to be across the country by now," he said.
“But I’m very grateful to be back. My mother has been pestering me for years to make it an outdoor theatre space. My dad even was pestering me. ‘We want to have theatre out here.’”
Maschke said he may end up taking some sort of post-secondary education in the future because he’d like to teach and he believes he’d need that training in order to do that.
Meanwhile, working on the musical has been fun – overall.
“It’s stressful, no doubt. It feels like work, but I love my job,” he said. “I get to do theatre. “I get to play pretend all day, but then I also get to make something. It feels like I have a child.”
The show marks Comanescu's debut as the director of a musical. She has previously choreographed and project-managed shows, but not in this capacity.
She has also directed year-end shows at a Calgary dance company, but that was with children, not adults.
Comanescu was born in January, so she said as an Aquarian, she was attracted to the musical, because the Zodiac, and the song Aquarius (Let The Sunshine In) feature prominently in it.
In addition to rehearsing on Zoom with everyone being in different locations, Comanescu cited the current heat wave as another challenge. Everyone has been encouraged to keep drinking water.
A third challenge is that by doing the show outdoors, lighting will basically come from the sun or the moon; not via specially designed lighting.
Comanescu chose to remove all references to Indigenous people from the original play, despite the outrage over the fact that the unmarked graves of at least 1,000 people have been found near former Indian residential schools.
“Unfortunately, the tone that it was written in and how the Indigenous characters were portrayed I thought that it was very insensitive,” she said.
“I don’t know if an Indigenous person would write themselves into a story in that way and so I said ‘absolutely not,’ so I decided to take that out.”
Maseka said creating and rehearsing the music for the show over Zoom was a challenge because of “the delay and stuff. “
Co-choreographers Stephanie Jurkova-Abaco and Cindy Ansah said designing and rehearsing choreography via Zoom was difficult.
"We had to keep in mind that we were teaching in front of a screen, so we didn’t have the luxury of kinesthetic awareness, we didn’t have the luxury of touch, we didn’t have the luxury of clear visual connection in order to relay movement knowledge,” Ansah said.
“And so we had to be really patient, we had to be really understanding. And we just had to be really aware of the different needs – especially with spatial confines. We’re not all in a lovely, large studio, and that’s OK.”
Now that they’re actually at the farm, the ground itself is another issue.
“As movers, we’re so used to not having to worry about where we’re placing our feet on even, nice and buoyant ground – sprung floor,” Ansah said. “So having holes, having grass to be able to navigate, that’s one challenge for sure.”
