Austentatious, a musical celebrating community theatre disasters, returns to Calgary stage for 20th anniversary revival

From top left: Doug McKeag, Natascha Girgis, Jessica Jones, Sarah Irwin and Eric Wigston in Forte Musical Theatre’s production of Austentatious.

Musicals tend to come in one size – large, and expensive and complicated – but Calgary composer and playwright Joe Slabe has become the master of the micro-musical.

Slabe is one of the co-creators behind Austentatious, a musical about a community theatre group – the Cochrane Ranche Amateur Players no less -- trying, without much luck, to stage an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

Slabe and his Forte Musical Guild are presenting a 20th anniversary revival of the show, which opens Tuesday at the Beddington Theatre Arts Centre in northwest Calgary, at the home of Storybook Theatre.

“Smaller musicals are a great niche,” Slabe said, even though with a cast of seven characters and a three-man band, Austentatious isn’t actually that small.

Over the last 20 years, Forte has produced a number of smallish musicals that have won plenty of awards across North America, including Crossing Swords, Naughty But Nice, But This is My Day Job and Buy Me a Drink, Joe.

One of those, Naughty But Nice, a musical revue about Christmas that’s honest (with songs such as “Baileys for Breakfast” and “Brendan the Brown-Nose Reindeer”) featured the professional stage debut of Ahad Raza Mir, a University of Calgary theatre student who went on to become one of Pakistan’s biggest TV stars.

Crossing Swords and Austentatious were both selected for the New York Musical Theatre Festival, and won multiple awards -- and mention in a 2007 New York Times article by Anne Midgette about the festival.

“It (the festival) certainly has a bid for some kind of success in Austentatious, about a community theater group staging its own adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Midgette writes. “The press release invokes Waiting for Guffman, and the musical does partake of the sweet, earnest zaniness of a Christopher Guest film, as channeled through The Drowsy Chaperone, another endearing bonbon about the joys of being stagestruck.

“There’s the stoner high school student, the determined but untalented ingénue, the clueless director (“They’ve made a book out of ‘Pride and Prejudice‘?”).

“From the obligatory I-love-showbiz show-stopping song (by Matt Board and Joe Slabe), to the payoff in the group’s final performance, which culminates in a tap dance contest between the Victorian protagonists, Elizabeth and Lydia Bennett, this piece hits its targets, keeps up its pacing and is very funny.”

Slabe is a Calgary throwback to an earlier era of Broadway that they show in those black and white movies about show business types with nice apartments on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the 1960s: he’s funny, catchy and yet, in a very Canadian way, writes fringe festival-sized musicals that don’t break the bank.

“That was always my vision,” he said. “They (musicals) don’t have to be expensive.”

For his 20th anniversary edition of Austentatious, Slabe has assembled what he describes as “Calgary’s all-star acting team.” That includes Elinor Holt, who is reprising her role as Jess, a community theatre lifer, Doug McKeag as the sleazy, narcissistic director Dominic, Natascha Girgis as Emily, the playwright and leading lady, Sarah Irwin as Elizabeth Bennet and Eric Wigston as Mr. Darcy, Jessica Jones as the stage manager Sam and Ethan Vasquez as the town pot head.

And, in a show about a show that goes terribly wrong, Slabe is quick to point out, in a live performance, “You have to go with it (a terrible experience),” no matter what happens.

“The hero is (ultimately) the stage manager,” he adds. “As is the case in real life.”

Classmates

Ironically, the creation of a musical where everything that could go wrong does was pretty much a dream come true for the music students at Goldsmiths University in London where Slabe did his masters in 2005 and created the show with four other students -- Matt Board, Jane Caplow, Kate Galvin and Luisa Hinchliff.

“(We were) classmates that got along well,” Slabe said. “We wrote the show for ourselves. Just for fun -- and then it went on a six-year journey, from school project to London, Philadelphia, to winning prizes at the New York Musical Theatre Festival.

“We (just) wanted to reflect on our terrible experiences in theatre.”

The production also arrives on the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth, which seems like as good a time as any to bring back one of the funniest musicals a Calgary composer ever created.

Austentatious runs through April 19 at the Beddington Theatre Arts Centre, at 375 Bermuda Drive NW.

For tickets and information, go here.