Maureen Rooney and Mhairi Berg in Morningside Road, Shadow Theatre. Photo supplied.
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
The through-line of Mhairi Berg’s childhood was stories — fascinating, first-hand stories told to her by her Scottish grandmother about growing up in Edinburgh.
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“I didn’t realize how important they were to me,” says Berg, “But as I got older I realized they were pieces of her I’d been holding on to.” It’s an inter-generational inheritance that has found its way into Morningside Road, the “new Canadian Celtic musical” by Berg (book), with music by Berg and Simon Abbott that premieres Thursday to launch the Shadow Theatre season. “As I was starting to write the show I came to understand that my grandmother was teaching me things, about how to ‘do’ life, how to live life.”
And if she’d had any doubts about the wider resonance of those afternoons at her grandmother’s house, drinking tea with “a witty spitfire of a woman,” they evaporated in the thought that “ah, this could be a story people could relate to, even though they didn’t live those experiences…. Everyone has someone in their life they’ve connected to, heard stories from that have given them a different outlook on life.…”
For Berg, that someone was her grandmother, “fiery, full of wit and wisdom,” who’d moved to Canada, to Edmonton, from Scotland in the early ‘70s (Berg’s mom arrived as a teenager). And, after the overture (so to speak) just outside Sherwood Park, Berg spent the majority of her kid years in Mexico City. Theatre wasn’t the opportunity on offer there, but she took “the usual” (her words, tossed off casually) piano, dance, vocal lessons outside school. Which will shed light on the startling breadth of the artist’s versatility, as an actor, dancer, singer, singer-songwriter, playwright, composer, musician, sound designer, choreographer….
Josh Meredith and Mhairi Berg, As You LIke It, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang
Consider this expansive career: If you caught Freewill Shakespeare Festival’s music-filled As You Like It in Louise McKinney Riverfront Part this past summer you’ll have appreciated the appealing songs, performed acoustically, that Berg (as the courtier Amiens) wrote for the songs in the good Duke’s country court in the Forest of Arden. If you caught Frozen the Disney musical at the Citadel last season, you’ll have seen elaborate and witty dance production numbers in which Berg had a hand as assistant choreographer.
We return to the Berg story. Back in Canada for high school, she discovered theatre in a full-immersion way, musical theatre to be precise, first at MacEwan U’s theatre department, then a master’s degree in musical theatre from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow. Until she arrived in Scotland, “I didn’t even realize my grandmother had an accent,” Berg laughs. “Ahah, people sound like her here!”
She has Berg’s play Caw-CAW, which premiered this past summer as one of Theatre Yes’s site-specific 20-minute Doorstep Plays, sent three girls on a mysterious, increasingly fractured, camping expedition to redress, or revenge, And now, covering a lot of theatrical ground in high-contrast, a new Celtic musical with vintage flavours.
Mhairi Berg and Evan Dowling in Die Harsh The Christmas Musical, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau
It was doing Grindstone Theatre’s hit all-improvised weekly musical The 11 O’Clock Number that Berg met Abbott. Grindstone’s extremely busy resident musical director/ composer/ lyricist has never met a musical style he couldn’t embrace, witness his original co-creations (with Byron Martin) Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer, Die-Harsh the Christmas Musical, Accidental Beach: A Previously Improvised Musical and GUMS: An Accidental Beach Prequel, ThunderCats in a career that includes 50 shows so far.
Ah, and the fateful words were uttered by one of the two: “it’d be fun to write a musical with you.”
What they needed was a story. And that was something Berg’s storyteller grandmother provided, along with the musical style into which the pair could lean. “I came from a singer-songwriter energy,” says Berg of her origins as a composer. “But because of The 11 O’Clock Number I’ve been exposed to a wide variety of musical styles … super-helpful.” Abbott’s natural terrain is more pop/rock and musical theatre. “For this show it felt right to have Celtic music since it’s set in Scotland, in the past. With influences of jazz, which Simon knows very well. He’s a very smart writer!”
Composer/lyricist Simon Abbott, Morningside Road, Shadow Theatre. Photo supplied.
“We really wanted the songs to feel organic to the story,” says Berg, “to feel like folk songs that belonged to the time, to feel like they’ve existed for hundreds of years, not songs that are placed in the show because it’s a musical…. So when the grandmother (played by Maureen Rooney) starts singing, you feel like ‘o this comes from Scotland; it belongs in her world’.”
The time travel, as Berg describes, was the biggest challenge for the co-creators (and for Berg the actor). “It jumps from the present to the past, her growing up in Edinburgh. I play the granddaughter in present-day Canada, and slip into playing Elaine, the young girl in Edinburgh, all the memories of her being young, every scene going back in time, changing accents.” The third member of the cast, Cameron Kneteman, plays a mysterious character The Lad in that Edinburgh memory time frame in the ’30s and ’40s.
Both Berg and Abbott were “intrigued,” as the former says, “by using fiddle music.” Writing for violin was a first for both. “We have an amazing violin player (Viktoria Grynenko) in the band, so we’ve we’ve been able to experiment. She’s so good she can take whatever we’ve written and use it!”
Directed by Lana Michelle Hughes, Morningside Road is a complex undertaking, dramatically and musically: in addition to songs, there’s dance music. And nearly the whole show is underscored, says Berg of a production with an onstage three-piece band led by Abbott at the keyboard. Since the characters live in different times, “finding ways for us to sing together was definitely a challenge, because we wanted to have those big ensemble moments too.” The band members occasionally join in the singing, to amplify the musical texture.
The first incarnation of Morningside Road, an hour-long version, happened at the 2023 Fringe, and racked up a handful of Sterling Award nominations. What we’ll see come Thursday at Shadow is the full-sized musical. “We haven’t added to the actual story, but we’ve fleshed it out, beefed it up it.”
Later this season Berg returns to Die Harsh, as Holly the estranged wife and a hilarious assortment of other roles (including a tap-dancing FBI agent). And after that she’s in the ensemble of The Wizard of Oz at the Citadel, as well as working on her own new musical for the Citadel’s Playwrights Lab.
Meanwhile, there’s a new Canadian musical to launch. Berg’s grandmother, alas, is succumbing to the dementia, now in late stages, and it’s erasing many of her bold outlines and memories. It’s a hard road. But, says Berg, “this story is a great way for me to handle it all, reflect on it, feel close to her.”
PREVIEW
Morningside Road
Theatre: Shadow
Written by: Mhairi Berg (book)
Music and lyrics by: Mhairi Berg and Simon Abbott
Directed by: Lana Michelle Hughes
Starring: Mhairi Berg, Cameron Kneteman, Maureen Rooney
Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.
Running: Thursday through Nov. 2
Tickets: shadowtheatre.org.
