Evangeline
Book, lyrics and music by Ted Dykstra
Directed by Bob Baker
Citadel Theatre, Edmonton Canada, to Nov. 22, 2015
Ticket information
Review by GRAHAM HICKS
What’s on at the Citadel Theatre for the next two weeks until Nov. 22, 2025, has a real good shot at being a Broadway hit in a few years.
Dare to dream in technicolour. Evangeline could emerge as a hot Hollywood property, a Disney-style animated movie in the tradition of Beauty & the Beast and Pocahontas.
If I’m a Broadway producer, I’m looking for:
A great love story:
• Evangeline is one of the best. Lovers tragically separated, spending their lives looking for one another.
Great tunes:
• Evangeline is full of them.
Happy, happy:
• Multiple scenes of happy village folks leading the idyllic life, singin’ and dancin’ to beat the band.
Sad, sad:
• Tragedy and mayhem besets the villagers and the hard-luck lovers at every turn. Struggles are endured, emotions are deeply scarred. But by the end, everything, in its own way, is okay.
Targeted audiences:
• A story with appeal to American patriotism and literature, Canadians, French-Canadians, Catholics and Christians in general, family-friendly, It might not go over to well with the Brits, but that’s the price of historical accuracy.
Cool historical angle:
• The Acadian expulsions – the British conquerors kicking out the annoying French settlers (Acadians) in the mid-18th Century, settlers who’d been there since 1604. It’s a rich historical era that has inspired countless film and theatre productions.
Revival potential:
• The Acadian expulsions and the legend of Evangeline was popularized by American literary giant Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem Evangeline in the mid-19th Century and made into several films at the turn of the 20th Century. But it’s basically lain fallow until this musical revival.
Canadiana:
• Always important to get enough Canadian government cultural grants to at least get a project of this magnitude off the ground.
Enough about such cold-blooded assessment of Evangeline’s commercial possibilities.
What we have here, for our own immediate delight, is quite unique in the annals of Canadian culture … Evangeline is genuine, enormously satisfying, Canadian art for the people, not the arts snobs!
I’ve long argued that Canadian art – in the broadest sense – has long catered to a narrow artsy/CBC crowd and therefore been disconnected from average Canadians.
The Citadel Theatre has been a huge exception, with its brilliant artistic director Bob Baker understanding that art, properly presented, can be for everyone, not just the cultural elite.
Evangeline’s equally talented writer, lyricist and composer Ted Dykstra is a consummate artist for the masses. Dykstra, originally a St. Albert boy and still culturally anchored within this community, is best known for the musical comedy 4 Hands 2 Pianos.
Evangeline is Dykstra’s baby, and has been in development almost as long as the heroine Evangeline has been looking for her lost lover Gabriel.
Which must have been hugely frustrating for Dykstra, who, at some point in the back story, lost the backing of Toronto musical-theatre producer David Mirvish to fund and produce this show.
Perhaps this was a good thing. Because this second production of Evangeline – premiered at the Charlottetown Festival in 2013, then re-mounted by the same company for its 2015 season as a co-production with the Citadel Theatre and with Bob Baker directing - working hand-in-glove with Dykstra for a more polished, substantive show.
Truly this is musical theatre at its best – without any conditional nonsense about being “Canadian” (although we should allow ourselves a touch of pride that this is indeed a piece of our own history and our culture.)
Think Les Miserables crossed with Beauty and the Beast, with a huge cast of 26 adult musical actors, 10 youth, and a live orchestra.
Think of gorgeous songs - one after another – with melodies and harmonies and such richness of voice as to make one just happy to be alive and drinking in such aural artistic experience.
Think of all your emotions being pulled into play – not manipulated, but just through the honest telling of a tale, of a people forced at gunpoint to leave their land, separated from their families, thrown in the holds of ships like slaves, the survivors scattered across the pre-revolutionary American colonies.
Then the specific story within the Acadian diaspora, of the perhaps real, perhaps mythical, Acadian couple Evangeline and Gabriel, torn apart after their wedding day with extraordinary dramatic twists that see Evangeline trying to find her husband for the rest of her life while he, wrongly in despair, keeps moving to cope with an emotional void caused by the loss of his Evangeline.
Jeez, I’m tearing up as I write this stuff!
The acting and singing is all quite wonderful. The chemistry, musical synchronicity, and emotion between the two stars - Jose Boudreau (Belle in the Citadel’s Beauty and the Beast, Maria in The Sound of Music) and Jay Davis (in his first appearance here) – is often heaven come down to earth.
Special mention to Citadel veteran actor Rejean Cournoyer, who, irony of irony given his very French-Canadian name, plays the evil English officer Captain Hampson. Cournoyer can brood with the best of them He’s not been this effective since he played Mr. Darcy in the Citadel’s 2008 Pride and Prejudice.
This may sound like a broken record, but it’s so true. Once again, the Citadel is bringing us shows and productions that are as good as, and often superior to, the very best in the world.
You would be doing yourself an incredible disfavour not to get to this magnificent show in Edmonton before it ends its run on Nov. 22. In a few years, you’ll likely have to head to New York to see it on Broadway. Then again, it might be at a movie house near you, as a Disney animated feature film.