Director, actor, playwright and composer Allen Desnoyers said he didn’t have to think twice about the concept for his next touring show when he visited the Canadian Museum of Immigration at the historic Pier 21 in Halifax, N.S. in 2017.
The prolific three-time Jessie Richardson nominee, formerly a co-founder of Vancouver’s Pacific Theatre, and creator of the dinner theatre in Rosebud, Alta., had wanted to write a show about the experience of refugees as one of his pocket musicals for his Canadiana Musical Theatre Company.
“I’d wanted to do a show on the refugee theme because of the Syrian crisis, when refugees started arriving in Tsawwassen, near my home town in Ladner,” he said.
But his visit to Pier 21, “where a million people emigrated to Canada – but also where the troop ships embarked, as Canadians went to fight in the Second World War,” provided him with the key location he needed to express his ideas and explore another aspect of Canadian history.
The result, the three-player musical Pier 21 – which has racked up some 300 shows across the country both before and after a two-year COVID layoff – is coming to White Rock’s Oceana PARC Playhouse on Saturday (Nov. 11) for a 4 p.m. matinee and a 7:30 p.m. evening show.
Featuring Desnoyers and actor-singer-dancer-musician cast mates Alexa Ewart, from Nova Scotia and Haley Allen, from Smithers, B.C., it’s a fast-paced, 50-minute extravaganza blending traditional Celtic-style music with the swing accents of the Second World War era.
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The versatile trio play a total of 18 characters in a series of vivid snapshots of the period, seen through the focal point of the historic pier, with an additional pull to the heartstrings from the emotional quality of Desnoyers’ original songs and lyrics.
In a departure from typical Remembrance shows, theatre-goers are invited to “experience the adventures, heartaches and hopes of refugees, immigrants, orphans, and war brides, as they come through the gateway to Canada to make a new life in a new land.”
But the show also focuses on the Canadian soldiers leaving the pier to help in the fight to free Europe, and also entertainers doing their bit by performing for soldiers, sailors and air force personnel on CBC radio.
It’s not just a re-imagination of the past, Desnoyers said – the show was also inspired, in part, by interviews with real people, now deceased, who lived the real-life situations portrayed.
One of the inspirations was Dutch war bride Aleyda Campbell, of Cochrane, Alta., who had married Canadian soldier Colin Campbell, one of the troops who liberated her small hometown of Oos, Holland, in 1944.
The other was Canadian Women’s Army Corps member Doris Gregory, from Vancouver, who was one of those who contributed their talents as entertainers in concerts just back of the front lines.
“I met Aleyda in the fall of 2018,” Desnoyers said, recalling how moving her recollections of the liberation of Holland were.
“She lived on a farm and her father had one of the rare radios around – the Nazis might have killed him if they’d found out about it. After the liberation he used to invite the Canadian soldiers to listen to the broadcasts from the BBC and other networks, and that’s how she met Colin.”
I spite of all the shortages of food they had endured, Aleyda’s family saved up their ration coupons so that they could invite some of the Canadians for a Christmas dinner that year.
“That’s how important the liberation was to them,” Desnoyers said. “When my actors heard her stories they were weeping.”
Although she passed away a year and a half ago, Aleyda had seen the show, Desnoyers said – as had Gregory, who passed this spring at the age of 102.
“Coincidentally her memorial is being held Nov. 12, the day after our White Rock shows,” he said, remembering the author and activist as “delightful”.
A UBC graduate who had won some notoriety by challenging gender segregation in classes at the university before her army service, Gregory recalled her experiences in her memoir How I Won the War For the Allies: One Sassy Canadian Soldier’s Story.
While strongly rooted in the past, Pier 21 is also a “particularly timely show given our current world situation,” Desnoyers noted.
One scene – already part of the show in 2019, depicts Ukrainians fleeing the Nazis in Poland after already escaping Russian aggression in their homeland, many years before Putin’s invasion in February 2022.
Special performances of Pier 21, specifically staged to raise funds for relief for Ukrainians again fleeing their home country, have raised tens of thousands of dollars, Desnoyers added.
For tickets ($30), visit whiterockplayers.ca or call 604-536-7535.