Published on May 15, 2012 by Carla Allen

Th’YARC manager Sandy Fevens spouts superlatives when it comes to describing The Whimsy State or the Principality of Outer Baldonia. The play takes place on May 17, 18 and 19 at Th’YARC at 7:30 p.m.

Topics : 

Principality of Outer Baldonia , Pepsi-Cola Bottling Company of Long Island , Royal Palace ,Outer Bald Tusket Island , Nova Scotia , New York

Read More: http://www.thevanguard.ca/Arts/2012-05-14/article-2978758/Play-based-on-Outer-Bald-Tusket-Island-at-Th%26rsquoYARC,-May-17,-18-and-19/1

Sheldon Davis as Ron, Graham Percy as Russ and David LeReaney as Elson in The Whimsy State or the Principality of Outer Baldonia by AJ Demers. Photo by Benjamin Laird.

Sweet Humpback Jesus! Whimsy Baldonia Sure is a Whopper!

Posted: May 10th, 2012 by Amanda Campbell

Nova Scotian fishermen are known for telling tall tales, but the one that AJ Demers presents in The Whimsy State or the Principality of Outer Baldonia is a remarkable mostly true story from Yarmouth that has since drifted into obscurity. The play comes from the Lunchbox Theatre in Calgary and plays this week at Eastern Front Theatre’s Supernova Festival.

In 1948 two Nova Scotian fishermen and an American lawyer and lobbyist for the Pepsi Cola Company declared an island 15 km off the coast of Yarmouth a sovereign nation, with a flag, its own currency and a Constitution which gave the fisherman the freedom to “lie and be believed” and also to be “expensive and hilarious” among other things. The island was called The Principality of Outer Baldonia and eventually it would declare war on the USSR.

AJ Demers certainly honours the rights of the citizens of this principality to be hilarious in this play, for it is a fascinating story told in the most delightfully silly of ways. In Demers’ well crafted dialogue and the way director Pamela Halstead anchors the story, you can almost smell the sea breeze wafting off the three actors.

These actors, Graham Percy as “Prince of Princes” Russell Arundel, Sheldon Davis as Prince Ron Wallace and David Lerigny as Prince Elson Boudreau are absolutely perfect in bringing all the emotion, imagination and gusto needed to make this fun story fly. Percy is enterprising and cheeky as Russ, the leader of Canada’s smallest neighbour, whose zest and spirit endears him to his friends and the audience even whilst making ridiculous and brazen declarations to other nations that the two Canadians would never dream of. Davis evokes all the sea shanties of the east coast as Ron Wallace, who tells of catching the devil fish and humbly tries to placate his friends. LeRigny’s Elson is the more practical and excitable one of the group, who routinely makes up for his wife’s absence by nagging the others in an endearing curmudgeonly spirit. LeRigny also makes a hysterical Spanish Ambassador to the United Nations, which is a cross between Yosemite Sam and Ricky Martin. Karen Johnson-Diamond rounds off the cast playing both Russell Arundel’s receptionist at the Pepsi Cola Company, who is able to communicate such joy and loss without words and the Soviet Ambassador, who is fraught with all the silliest and most cartoony Russian clichés, to perfect effect.

The Whimsy State or the Principality of Outer Baldonia is a really fun way to spend sixty minutes in the theatre. The story it is based on is in itself outrageous and stranger than fiction, which gives liscense to the artists to not be afraid to go really big and to explore every potential for laughter, which serves this whimsical tall tale very well.

This is a play that I would recommend to anyone who wants a night out with lots of laughter and one that I think people who may not frequent the theatre, or even those who think they don’t like the theatre, would really enjoy. And for all the curious among you who may want to learn more about the real Principality of Outer Baldonia, I say, “look it up, it’s history.”

The Whimsy State or the Principality of Outer Baldonia plays at the Neptune Studio Theatre (1593 Argyle Street, Halifax) as part of Eastern Front Theatre’s Supernova Festival at the following times:

Thursday May 10th at 9:00pm

Friday May 11th at 7:00pm

Saturday May 12th at 9:00pm

For more information or to book your tickets please call 902.429.7070 or visit this website. 

SuperNova Theatre Festival

History and whimsy unite in The Whimsy State

Play leaves you laughing…and wondering

POSTED BY KATE WATSON ON THU, MAY 10, 2012 AT 11:45 AM

I think it’s likely that a large portion of last night’s The Whimsy State audience rushed home to look up the Principality of Outer Baldonia on Wikipedia. (I know I did!) That’s because this tale of three men who formed a micro nation off the coast of Nova Scotia in 1948 is supposedly based on a true story, but is so far-fetched that it’s hard to believe. Well, apparently you can believe it. And veracity aside, it makes a charming play filled with characters who you’d love to raise a pint with. Graham Percy as the American lawyer who is the mastermind of the plan plays good-natured optimism to a t. David LeReaney and Sheldon Davis are the two grizzled Nova Scotia fisherman who get behind the dream. Their hilarious turns of speech were one of the many highlights of the show. The cast is rounded out by Karen Johnson-Diamond who does a memorable job as both a tempestuous Russian diplomat and a frosty secretary. Whimsy State is a lovely marriage of comedy and history. Highly recommended!

http://www.easternfronttheatre.com/index.php/supernova-theatre-festival/

Read More: http://www.thecoast.ca/ArtAttack/archives/2012/05/10/history-and-whimsy-unite-in-the-whimsy-state

Graham Percy as Russ Arundel in The Whimsy State or the Principality of Outer Baldonia by AJ Demers. Photo by Benjamin Laird.

Outlandish tale of Nova Scotia history a must-see

Whimsy State an energetic, fantastic story

Sorry about the blurriness – I was having trouble getting my camera to focus. Lights maybe?

Cowtown to Nowtown – North America’s newest urban playground

Richard White, For the Calgary Herald

Calgary’s 20th century nickname, Cowtown, fits with the commonly held perception that the city is more like Houston and Dallas, than “hip cities” like Austin, Portland, Frankfurt (Germany) or Lyon (France). Nothing could be further from the truth.

Over the past 25 years, Calgary has evolved from a pastoral prairie city into a colourful cosmopolitan centre.

Calgary boasts one of the best theatre scenes of any city its size. Did you know Lunchbox Theatre is the longest running noon-hour theatre program in the world? Or that the Centre has over 3,200 seats in five performance spaces making it one of the largest performing arts complexes in North America?

Calgary also has the “hottest 10 weeks of winter” when you combine January’s High Performance Rodeo and February/March’s Enbridge playRites festivals. Recently, Calgarian Mark Lawes, Theatre Junction’s artistic director, was named one of six artistic laureates for the City of Paris for the coming year. Need I go on?

If music is your thing, we have everything from the Calgary Philharmonic at the Jack Singer Concert Hall to opera and broadway musicals at the Jubilee Theatre.

Calgary has a long blues history, having Canada’s oldest blues bar at the King Eddy Hotel. While it closed in 2004, plans are to incorporate it into the iconic new National Music Centre which will include one of the world’s largest collection of keyboard instruments — including Elton John’s first piano.

Blues, roots and folk music continue to thrive at Mikey’s Juke Joint, Blues Can and Ironwood. Every June, the Sled Island Music Festival takes over 30 downtown venues to celebrate emerging music, film and visual art. Each July, the Calgary Folk Music Festival converts downtown’s Prince’s Island into one the world’s most intimate downtown folk venues. Calgary is a music city.

Speaking of festivals, Calgary hosts more than 20 major festivals each year. In May, the Lilac Festival along Fourth Street in Calgary’s tony Mission District attracts more than 100,000 Calgarians to celebrate the beginning of spring.

In the summer, there is a festival every weekend from the iconic Calgary Stampede, to Afrikadey, Taste of Calgary, Calgary International Children’s Festival, BBQ on the Bow, Calgary International Film Festival and Wordfest. Calgary is a work hard, party harder city.

One of the biggest changes in Calgary over the past 25 years has been the maturation of its urban villages surrounding our downtown.

Inglewood, Calgary’s original settlement still has its early 20th century Main Street, which is now full of funky shops like Recordland (rumoured to have more than one million used records), a Harley-Davidson dealership/restaurant and Crown Surplus store (Cher shops here when in town). In 2004, Air Canada’s EnRoute magazine identified Inglewood as one of Canada’s top 10 “coolest neighbourhoods.”

Kensington is Calgary’s bohemian village where SAIT and ACAD college students hang out with oil patch execs in Calgary’s oldest café culture (it predates Starbucks). Kensington is home to The Plaza, Calgary’s oldest art house cinema and where Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie hung out when he was in Calgary filming The Assassination of Jesse James.

Uptown 17th (aka The Red Mile) captured the world’s imagination in 2004 when 30,000 Calgarians converged on it every night after each Calgary Flames playoff game. It offers an eclectic collection of shops and restaurants, including Calgary’s best sports bar, Melrose Cafe & Bar, and the yoga crowd loves to hang out at the Ship & Anchor pub. Bet you didn’t know there are more than 50 yoga studios in Calgary’s city centre.

The Beltline is Calgary’s highrise, multi-cultural condo village. Here you can find a pickup game of soccer at Haultain Park or see couples sharing a romantic meal at Boxwood in Central Memorial Park.

On 11th Avenue, you can still find remnants of Electric Avenue made famous during the 1988 Winter Olympics for its vibrant bar scene. Elsewhere on 11th Avenue is our Design District with its abundance of furniture and home accessory boutiques, as well as art galleries.

Downtown’s Eau Claire neighbourhood is where the rich and famous live and play. It lies next to the Bow River Promenade where thousands of walkers, cyclists and skaters play year round. In the summer, the sights, sounds and smells of festivals and events every weekend on Prince’s Island and Eau Claire’s Festival Plaza flood the area.

Calgary has also emerged as a design city with new iconic architecture by world famous architects including Norman Foster’s The Bow, a 58-storey office tower and Santiago Calatrava’s controversial pedestrian Peace Bridge.

But the most uniquely Calgarian buildings are the locally designed saddle-shaped Scotiabank Saddledome (Graham Edmonds Architecture) and the Lego-

inspired Alberta Children’s Hospital (Kasian Architecture) which had children acting as “advisers.”

Indeed, Calgary is one of North America’s newest urban playgrounds.

Cowtown has transformed into Nowtown, as one of the world’s best places to work, live and play.

Richard White has written on art, architecture and urban culture for more than 20 years.

Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/sports/Cowtown+Nowtown+North+America+newest+urban+playground/6548676/story.html#ixzz1uJFmvBHA

Jeffrey Neufeld, Pianist, and Christpher Hunt, Actor in Dad's Piano by Dave Kelly. Photo by Benjamin Laird.

Dad’s Piano tells tale well

Piano and story go hand-in-hand in almost perfect harmony in the play that premiered on Monday at Lunchbox.

The music is mostly by Beethoven, Schumann, Bach and Chopin, performed by concert pianist and local business exec, Jeffrey Neufeld.

The 12 scenes comprising the spoken end of things are the work of Calgary TV personality-turned-actor-turned-playwright, Dave Kelly.

The solo actor playing the multiple narrators who bring Kelly’s script to life is Christopher Hunt. And the show in which everything comes together is Dad’s Piano, a memory play that lingers in the mind, a small masterpiece with a big heart.

Kelly’s writing throughout Dad’s Piano is direct, unaffected, and honest — and played that way by the very talented Hunt who here seems a master at giving depth and weight to his characters through the barest economy of gesture, movement and vocal means.

Indeed, the whole production — three years in the making, we are told — is such a model of simplicity and conciseness that the humour and warmth of the piece, its quiet joy and gentle sadness, offer special eloquence and meaning to any theatregoer who has loved and lost a father.

The string of short stories that speak of Paul’s relationship to his father, and of his relationship in turn to his own son, Nick — and of the connection of all three to the piano — open with Paul’s reflections after being told his ailing father hasn’t long to live.

Paul’s monologue is the beginning of a journey of family reminiscence that also incorporate the perceptions of some who had dealings with Papa, Paul and Nick Weiss — everyone from Paul’s piano competition adjudicator and the dying Papa’s hospital nurse to Nick’s hockey coach (who wryly observes, in one of the comic bits peppering Kelly’s musical drama, that coaching is like being in a dog park: “I know the names of all the dogs, but I don’t know the owners”).

The piano voice in all of this — the beautifully paced play is directed by Kelly’s brother Rob, involved in the Dad’s Piano project from the outset — belongs to a Fazioli, a handmade, Lamborghini of an instrument provided by Irene Besse Keyboards.

The apt playlist Neufeld performs — and performs well, with an ear for balance between instrument and actor — includes a movement from a Beethoven sonata (the Op. 53) that takes on a recurring thematic role as the piece Papa loved best, Paul tells us.

Other pieces illustrate or define a mood, with only the positive note that sounds near the conclusion of Dad’s Piano (Latvian composer Georgs Pelecis’ variegated New Year’s Music) ringing not quite true in context, because of its comparative length.

Trimmed, or replaced entirely by something more from Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood (say), this musical part of the play wouldn’t seem to have had the last word in a show that Paul’s epilogue crowns perfectly.

Lunchbox Theatre presents Dad’s Piano by Dave Kelly through May 19. Tickets: 403-265-4292. Four and a half out of five.

bclark@calgaryherald.com

Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/entertainment/Piano+tells+tale+well/6555807/story.html#ixzz1tvRkjoS4

Rob Kelly, left, is directing Dad’s Piano, a musical drama written by his older brother Dave Kelly. Photograph by: Stuart Gradon, Calgary Herald

Relationships are key in Dad’s Piano (with video)

What if a piano were more than just a prop? What if it was a character, too?

That was the question, several years ago, that ignited the muse of Dave Kelly, better known to Calgarians as the onetime host of Breakfast Television, that led him to write Dad’s Piano.

The question may not have originated with Dave, but rather with his brother (and director of Dad’s Piano) Rob, who’s a decade younger than Dave.

“Rob has a buddy, Jeff Neufeld,” Dave says. “He’s the piano player in the show now, and we were sitting around back then, and he sort of wondered about — we all said, wouldn’t it be interesting if there was a play where the acting and music were equally important?

“Where the musical playing, in this case of Jeff on the piano, wouldn’t just be underscoring or wouldn’t just be mood, but would actually be part of the telling of the story?”

Well, short of enlisting Pixar to give the piano a set of teeth and some punchy dialogue to deliver, it seemed unlikely, until Neufeldt, an accomplished pianist, played the Kelly brothers a piece of classical music before explaining that it was the song his dad asked him to play at his funeral.

“Which seemed sort of sweet,” Dave says, “but also kind of intense,”

It also caused Kelly to sit down and begin writing monologues about what might be said about a Dad’s life at his funeral. Soon, after enlisting the help of actor Christopher Hunt — who just played about 50 different roles in The 39 Steps — the Kellys had themselves a piano story.

“It’s a full kind of story,” Dave says, “about how this piano was the thing that tied this guy and his dad together.”

“But (it’s) also the thing that shattered their relationship, and how they dealt with that over their life.”

And while the story behind Dad’s Piano isn’t exactly autobiographical — the Kellys’ father is alive and well and living in Edmonton — the piano has, in fact, played a pretty significant role in the family’s life.

For one thing, the Kellys — all 10 kids — grew up in Edmonton in a house without television. Instead, there was this piano.

“Dad taught me the chords,” Rob says. “He was really big into Wilf Carter and other country singers from the ’30s and ’40s.”

Second, Rob grew up playing the piano, even studying it in university, before suddenly stopping midway through his third year at the University of Alberta.

“I was in therapy a lot then,” Rob says, “realizing this (studying piano) wasn’t fitting for me, and this was right around the same time I had quit going to church, probably the year before. Within a year, I had moved in with my girlfriend. There were a lot of really significant things going on in my life when I quit piano.”

(Dave, on the other hand, played piano for a couple years before switching to guitar, and appears to have emerged from the piano experience emotionally unscathed.)

And if the piano isn’t necessarily a character in each of our lives, it still remains, even for kids these days, one of those linchpins for families: the first place where your child starts to learn how to practise, how to follow through and occasionally even how to creatively express themselves.

Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/entertainment/festival-guide/Relationships+Piano+with+video/6532287/story.html#ixzz1tvX7inZs

and check out the video: http://www.calgaryherald.com/entertainment/festival-guide/Relationships+Piano+with+video/6532287/story.html#ooid=BmczhsNDr6NgScagezF2C7gvo51i2B6E