There Would Be No TWISI Without the CBC

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation gave me my foundational interest in Canadian stories. 

As a very young child many of my favourite television shows were on the CBC, including Mr. Dress Up, of course, Sharon, Lois, and Bram’s The Elephant Show, Babar, The Raccoons, and Under the Umbrella Tree. As a very little child I didn’t realize that any of these programs were Canadian, I just knew they were among the best shows of the wide array that I was exposed to on other channels, most of which, of course, were American. 

There was one show, however, that I started watching when I was around six years old, that I did know was Canadian because it was set on Prince Edward Island, the land of many of my ancestors, and where my Nanny and Granddad were born and grew up. I’d been to Prince Edward Island, but it was the CBC who introduced me to Lucy Maud Montgomery through Road to Avonlea. It used to be on every Sunday and I would watch it after my bath while my mom brushed and dried my hair. I was absolutely in love with everything about it. I idolized Sarah Polley, and Gemma Zamprogna, and Mag Ruffman, and I knew their names from the credits on the show. I knew Lally Cadeau, and Cedric Smith, Zachary Bennett, Jackie Burroughs, and R.H Thompson’s names as a first or second grader. They imprinted on me hard. 

At seven or eight my mom let me watch the original Degrassi, as long as she watched it with me and we could discuss any issues that might come up that I had questions about. I knew this show was set in Toronto, and even though I’d been there only as a toddler and wouldn’t go again until I was thirteen, my aunt and uncle lived there so the connection to Toronto for me felt strong. I was a Blue Jays fan. I had a stuffed turtle named SkyDome. I loved Degrassi too, and once again, I knew all the actors by name. Through watching Road to Avonlea at the same time I was watching Degrassi Junior High and then later Degrassi High, I was really subconsciously learning a lot about Canada. I saw rural Victorian Prince Edward Island in stark contrast in many ways to contemporary urban Toronto, and that gave me an insight into the way our country had grown and changed over the past century- and yet there was so much in Montgomery’s stories that still resonated. 

When I was eight my best friend, who I often talked to on Monday about last night’s Road to Avonlea episode, gave me the VHS tape of the Anne of Green Gables (1985) television film for my birthday. Both Sara Stanley and Anne Shirley were writers, and I was already writing stories at this point as well, but it was through learning about Anne of Green Gables that I learned that it was originally a novel, written by Lucy Maud Montgomery, and I bought Anne of Green Gables at a book fair, and was frustrated because it was just beyond my reading level at the time. My mom then bought me a version of the story filled with pictures from the film that I read over and over and over. But, I was adamant that I would read the whole novel, and I wanted nothing more than to grow up to be able to write like Lucy Maud Montgomery. 

Of course, I was watching an entire slew of American shows as well that I loved, and since I spent so much time with my Grandmother and weekends with my Aunt and Uncle, my tastes were eclectic. I was watching everything from Full House and Family Matters to Who’s the Boss, and The Golden Girls, Murder She Wrote, and Murphy Brown, and sometimes even Cheers and Seinfeld. I was also watching You Can’t Do That On Television, on CBC, which my mom hated, but I will note that she would have defended the CBC to her dying breath, even though there was one show on there that she thought was crass and stupid. 

When I was ten I started to really fall in love with musical theatre, and this big brass band of an even bigger American world opened up to me and really swallowed me whole all through my teenage years. Stacie Mistysyn and Amanda Stepto were pushed to the side for Bernadette Peters and Idina Menzel. There was a stretch of time in High School where I wanted to move to New York and either be an actor or a playwright there. I was the quintessential Renthead and Stephen Sondheim enthusiast. I was listening to Anyone Can Whistle on my Discman on the way home from school. I had Bernadette Peters’ debut solo album in there as well. I had become a total theatre dork. I ended up going to Dalhousie University in my hometown of Halifax because I really didn’t want to move away from my family yet, and my grandmother’s heartbroken face whenever the conversation of my going away to school arose was too much for me to bear. 

I had a transformative experience, though, the first time I went to New York City. It was 2004, I was nineteen years old, and the very first thing mama and I did the first night we were there was we went to see Bernadette Peters in Gypsy. I was obsessed with Gypsy. They had done it at Neptune Theatre in 2001, and I had seen it more than once, and my mom had gone with at least one of those times. And Bernadette was incredible. The show was incredible. Everything about that production was Broadway caliber, but as I walked up the aisle and out of that Broadway theatre, my first ever, I said to my mom, “I think the Neptune production was just as good.” And she agreed. That was the first time that I realized that just because you’re told everything is bigger and better in the United States, doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t have anything world-class at home. That opened up a new concept to me- that maybe I didn’t have to leave to “make it.” 

Even so, I was unhappy and lost at Dalhousie until my fourth and last year there. I was shocked to find that the course that I loved the most, the one that really clicked something in my brain, was Dr. Roberta Barker’s excellent History of Canadian Theatre. I loved this course. I loved every play I read. I was so excited about it. I added Daniel MacIvor immediately to my shelf of people I idolized, where he could sit among the folks already there like Megan Follows, and Kristin Chenoweth. I think the reason that I continued to gravitate back to Neptune from Broadway, and to LePage from Beckett, was at least in part because I had this foundational love from childhood of Canadian stories, and Canadian talents- that had been fostered by the CBC. And yet, when I first started TWISI in Toronto, my original goal was still musical theatre. I thought that musical theatre needed a stronger advocate in the scene there at the time. Within weeks Richard Ouzounian wrote a review of a show that I had seen where he disparaged it by comparing it to the United States- to New York or Chicago or both. That was all it took for me to take a sharp turn onto the path that I have been on now for seventeen years: advocating for the Canadian Theatre. I was so angry at the audacity of this critic, who was from the United States, to disparage Canadian talent in those terms so flagrantly. I had grown up knowing Canadian talent was superb, and as I grew older the CBC fostered in me a real pride and admiration for Canadian artists. My foundational love of Sarah Polley and Megan Follows especially inspired me to continue to follow their careers beyond their work in television and that has opened up huge new worlds for me: Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz is one of my favourite films of all time. I’ve seen Megan Follows on stage a number of times, including in Alisa Palmer’s production of Cloud 9, which is still one of the shows I cite as my favourite of all time. This production led to me discovering Ann-Marie MacDonald, my favourite contemporary writer, who also inspires me to keep writing stories. 

For the last seventeen years I have been writing about Canadian Theatre in the hopes that those who read my words will decide to invest their time, their hearts, but also their money, in Canadian artistic institutions and all the Canadian jobs that these institutions support. It’s not a coincidence that there is and was so much Canadian programming on the CBC, that you wouldn’t find on other stations, even if they were also Canadian- CBC poured their resources into programming that told Canadian stories, and they have continued to do so with gems like Schitt’s Creek, The Republic of Doyle, Kim’s Convenience, Baroness Von Sketch Show, and Murdoch Mysteries.

I would not be the person I am today if I had been raised solely on Sesame Street, The Adventures of the Gummi Bears, and Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Representation Matters. I saw myself in Sara Stanley and Anne Shirley. I saw myself in Heather from Degrassi, who had the exact same curly hair as me. I saw my own country reflected back to me, and I loved the country that I saw. 

As Ouzounian found out when I was twenty three I will always be a fierce defender of Canadian theatre. Of Canadian artists. Of Canadian work. I will always champion and challenge the work I see, but never in terms of what it might be were it on Broadway, in Chicago, or in Los Angeles. Now is the time, more than ever, for us to all defend every institution like the CBC that invests in Canadian culture, Canadian heritage, and Canadian creativity. We are stronger for it, we are smarter for it, we are better for it. 

Elbows Up.