Amanda and Shirley Campbell seeing their last play together- A Christmas Carol at Neptune: December, 2019.
The first theatre performance that I remember attending was in Grade Two, at Open House at school, and it was a play other kids my age were performing in. I’m sure I was partly envious that my friends were in a play and I wasn’t in it, but my memory of it is of being confused and not really liking it. I would have been watching it with my mum, so she likely clocked that I wasn’t having a terrific time. I also hadn’t seen a lot of musical videos as a very young child either- I tended to like watching the same videos over and over and the ones I remember loving the most were the original Freaky Friday with Jodie Foster, a series of Welcome to Pooh Corner and Sesame Street videos mom had taped off the TV, Disney’s Robin Hood, and this very specific Bambi videotape that was all about the Five Senses, where I learned that if Flower has a stuffy nose she can’t smell or taste properly.
At my Aunt Carol and Uncle Don’s house they had a series of Walt Disney Sing Along videos, which I loved to watch while I was there, and those, along with The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast (which I also loved), were the closest thing to a musical that I remember seeing until this day at Open House in 1992.
The first theatre production I remember loving was either the Grade 4-6 production of Anne of Green Gables or the Grade 7-12 production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, whichever I saw first, almost exactly a year later. I was also in my first musical, The Kitchen Clock, at the same time. I saw both those productions during school, and while I’m sure I told my mom about them, it wasn’t until the Senior High School did Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat the following year and I went to see it a second time with my best friend on a sleepover that I think my mom realized that I was actually really excited about the theatre.
A month or so later mama took me to Neptune Theatre to see Les Misérables, and that was the first time I remember going to the professional theatre. I read the programme voraciously over and over again; I had everyone’s names and theatre credits memorized. I named one of my Skipper dolls Cosette and mama bought me the 10th Anniversary Concert from Royal Albert Hall on VHS tape and I watched that on repeat for years. That summer when mama picked me up from Big Cove Sleepaway Camp she told me she had a surprise- we were driving directly to the Pictou ferry and going to Charlottetown to see Anne of Green Gables at the Charlottetown Festival. I couldn’t have been more overjoyed. We came back with the cast album on cassette and an Anne of Green Gables doll for me from the Anne of Green Gables store, and I think maybe an Anne of Green Gables parody shirt from Cows. Again, I wore the programme out from reading it so much. The following summer I directed a production of Anne of Green Gables with my dolls and stuffed animals. I wrote the adaptation in a scribbler from memory, staged the entire thing basically like a puppet show, and wouldn’t let my Anne of Green Gables doll play Anne because she had an “unfair advantage.”
I didn’t want to take theatre classes at Neptune because I was too shy and scared, but I also wanted to because I was envious of the girls who got the lead parts in the musicals at school. My mom took a gamble and signed me up for a musical theatre class the summer that I was eleven. When we got there on the first day I stood at the bottom of what seemed like an endless staircase at a bicycle repair shop on Barrington Street and I didn’t want to go up. My mom knew just how to push me to do the things that I didn’t quite have the courage to do on my own. Angela Gasparetto was at the top of the stairs, and she probably saw that I was being pushed ahead by my mom, and I remember she was so kind and enthusiastic that I felt that it was okay for mom to go and leave me there. Neptune became so much my home after that that my classmates at school teased me because it was all that I would ever talk about. I was Neptune Theatre School’s little PR machine.
I took it for granted that whatever show I wanted to see at Neptune, mom would buy me a ticket. I remember sometimes they came as Easter gifts or something, but usually I remember just saying, “Marla is going to be in this” or “Raquel is going to be in that,” and I would have a ticket. Sometimes we would go together and sometimes she would let me go by myself, which ended up being the perfect training ground for what ended up becoming my job. This was before cell phones, so I think I used to have to call her to come and pick me up from a Neptune payphone.
One of the times I remember her being the most upset with me was when I snuck into Jesus Christ Superstar after intermission so that I could see Heather Rankin perform Act Two of the show for a second time. I was supposed to go meet a friend after the matinee (mom and I had already seen the show together), and then mum was going to pick me up- but somehow the timing got messed up and when I arrived it was just intermission, so I went in with my friend and sat in an empty seat at the back of the balcony. I think I was sixteen. When mom came to pick me up, I wasn’t in the lobby, and she was frantic trying to figure out where I might have gone or what might have happened to me. Jeremy Webb happened to be in the lobby and mom asked if he had seen me. He hadn’t, but he told her the show was still going on in Fountain Hall. She wisely decided to stick around and see whether I had somehow weaseled my way in. When I came out and saw her face, relief, but also rage, I remember being so embarrassed. I just needed to see Heather Rankin play Mary Magdalene again. We laughed about that for years afterward, especially after Heather and I ended up becoming friends.
She never monitored the content of the shows that I saw. Rocky Horror. Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Les Liaisons Dangereuses. She trusted my judgement. I supposed as far as hobbies that teenagers have, she got lucky, she knew where I was, I was home by eleven, I was maybe drinking a root beer in the lobby. When I came home she listened to a detail review of the play. I don’t remember ever disliking anything I saw. I always found something to enjoy about everything. I was just so grateful to be there, and I was there because of my mama.
From the time I was a toddler I had always wanted to be a doctor (and a farmer), but my mom had never held onto this as anything more than the whim of a kid- even when I was in Junior High. I think she expected it was likely I would change my mind. When I then decided that I wanted to be an actor instead, she never even flinched. Other relatives harped on me about practicalities and economics, but my mom just rolled with the punches. Every Christmas and birthday she ordered more obscure musical theatre CDs for me from HMV, she paid for ballet and jazz classes, voice and piano lessons, and she encouraged me when I felt like I was hopelessly behind everyone else in dancing and theory, and I choked during every single Kiwanis Music Festival performance.
University was a long, hard, dark time for me. I decided I didn’t want to be an actor after all, but I had no idea what I did want to do, and mama said that was okay, because I was just eighteen years old, and that I would figure it out. I think she was always gently trying to guide me toward writing: either playwriting or academic writing, or creative writing, but she never pushed me or interfered too much in my own discovery process, she was just endlessly supportive and patient and wonderful. She dove me to Wolfville to take me to ATF, she drove me to Chester to take me to the Playhouse, she drove me to Antigonish the summer that Raquel was there, we must have gone to see Anne of Green Gables fourteen times. She waited around in the car while I chatted with friends and the actors I idolized at stage doors, only honking at me if she had a dire parking issue.
Mama was right, everything ended up making sense that day in my dorm room in Sorbara on Bay Street in Toronto in 2007 when I looked at the empty Starbucks cup on my desk and called my new LiveJournal blog The Way I See It. Or, at least, it all made sense logically and theatrically and poetically, it didn’t make sense financially. But for fifteen years, with some financial help of my amazing mama, I managed to mostly keep TWISI afloat. The truth is that my mom was as much a part of TWISI as I am. She was my silent partner, the slyest of investors, my biggest champion, and absolutely the reason why I’ve been able to live a life where I have followed my heart and followed my dreams.
So, this World Theatre Day, I salute one of the biggest supporters of the Canadian Theatre and the Atlantic Canadian Theatre who never ever set out to intentionally to do so, but whose love of the theatre came unbridled from her huge, unconditional love of me. Here’s to the woman who pushed me ahead of herself and told me to write, made it possible for me to go and see the play, who told me to be brave and open hearted, told me to go to Toronto, to come home, to never stop believing in myself and in TWISI: to Shirley Campbell, my mama.
If I have made any impact on this community since I first bounded into Neptune Theatre in 1994, it is because my mom bought me a ticket.
