September 24, 2012
The GazetteSeptember 21, 2012
By Pat Donnelly
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Canadian stage veteran stages Guys and Dolls at the Segal Centre, her first stab at helming a musical
MONTREAL — When Diana Leblanc decided to switch from the French section of the newborn National Theatre School to the English section back in 1961 after completing one year in French, she was blissfully unaware of the consequences.
“It wasn’t a remotely political decision,” she said over morning coffee at the Segal Centre, where she is directing the musical Guys and Dolls. “I was bilingual and I was attracted to the (English) more introverted way of working.
“The French were lots of panache and extroversion. I felt a little intimidated by that and thought, just to learn my craft, I would be more comfortable with the English. I never thought my life would divide so clearly up the middle afterward. I thought I could just go back and forth. It hasn’t worked that way.”
Leblanc, 69, was born and raised in Montreal. Her francophone father spoke good English and her mother, who was of Irish ancestry, spoke some French. Her first home was on St. Joseph Blvd.
“And then we moved to Cartierville when it was still dirt roads and farmland,” she recalled.
Her last home in Montreal, during her theatre school years, was on Mountain St. She had signed up for NTS after realizing her planned dance career was going to fall short of prima ballerina.
“My home was on the top of Mountain St.,” she said. “My boyfriend (and fellow NTS student, Gary Learoyd) whom I then married (and divorced, long ago) lived on Mountain and Ste. Catherine Sts. And the school was farther down on Mountain St. So my whole life was on Mountain St., with the occasional stop at Ogilvy’s.”
During her third year at NTS, Leblanc received an offer to join the company of the recently launched Neptune Theatre in Halifax. From then on, her theatre career followed an English-Canadian route. This meant settling in Toronto, where she has worked both as an actor (starring in many Michel Tremblay English premieres) and director. She has had a long association with the Stratford Festival that included directing a landmark production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, starring Leblanc’s former NTS classmate, Martha Henry.
She has also worked across the country (Manitoba Theatre Centre, Edmonton’s Citadel, the NAC in Ottawa) and has been very involved with Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre, of which she is a founding member. She also served as artistic director of Théâtre français de Toronto from 1991-1996, making a contribution to bicultural understanding that won her the Prix Alliance de l’Alliance Française de Toronto in 1998.
But to this day, Leblanc has never received a serious offer to act or direct in mainstream francophone theatre in Quebec.
Since 2005, she has directed seven productions for the Segal Centre, beginning with Rose, starring Henry. That was followed by Fallen Angels, The Odd Couple, Tryst, Harvey, A View from the Bridge and, last season, Same Time, Next Year.
And now it’s Guys and Dolls, which she calls “a fairy tale for adults.” Leblanc has already tried her hand at opera and a couple of mini-musicals, but this is her first large-scale musical, with a cast of 24. “What a way to start!” she exclaimed, “It’s a brilliant piece of musical theatre.”
Guys and Dolls, with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser and a book, by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows, based on a pair of short stories by Damon Runyon, won the Tony Award for Best Musical back in 1950.
Since then, this rollicking tale of small-time crooks, gamblers and shady ladies, set in the prohibition era, has become one of the most popular musicals of all time, even among those who don’t like the genre.
For this production, Leblanc has put together a creative team that includes musical director Nick Burgess, choreographer Jim White and designer Michael Egan. She has brought in a Stratford veteran, Scott Wentworth, to play Sky Masterson, the gambler who bets on being able to persuade a starchy young lady (Sarah, played by Tracy Michailidis) to run off to Havana. Frank Moore will play Sky’s nemesis, Nathan Detroit, opposite Susan Henley, as his long-suffering girlfriend, Adelaide.
What was Leblanc’s biggest challenge? “Integrating the dances, the songs and the scenes,” she replied.
Although many of the songs are familiar (Luck Be a Lady, for instance), “This is very much a book musical. There are pages and pages of scenes with no music and no dancing. So you want to make all that seamless.
“I have to say the composer and the librettist have already done that to a large extent. But you want to make songs just come out of the dialogue naturally. And you want the dancing to be an integrated explosion of physicality coming from the physicality of the play.”
Meanwhile, she’s having a great time. “It’s wonderful to come in and hear people singing and watching them dance. It’s a lot of work but it’s a treat.”
Guys and Dolls begins previews Sept. 30, officially opens Oct. 11 and continues through Oct. 28. Call 514-739-7944 or visit www.segalcentre.org