A new musical for the mouthy red-haired orphan from Green Gables: Bridget Ryan’s OH, ANNE! at Theatre Network

The original musical comedy that launches the new ‘Roxy Remixed’ season at Theatre Network this week has a heroine for our Moment: optimistic, fanciful, plucky, un-squelchable.

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Anne with an ‘e’, the mouthy red-haired orphan from P.E.I, emerged from Lucy Maud Montgomery’s evergreen 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables, and she’s been a distinctively Canadian star ever since. And in OH, ANNE!, Bridget Ryan’s ingenious four-person musical, four early-career actors, all women, re-create Anne’s story and her Avonlea world with East Coast flavours and sounds — the music of sea shanties, traditionally a male preserve, reclaimed from the public domain.

from Coast To Coast To Coast, Jason Carter exhibition at Theatre Network’s Roxy Theatre. Photo by Bridget Ryan

The musical arrives to launch the new Theatre Network season from a sold-out premiere four-month run last year at Canmore’s Carter-Ryan Gallery and Live Theatre — gallery by day, 51-seat theatre by night — started and run by Ryan and the star Canadian visual artist Jason Carter, her creative and life partner. And at the Roxy, OH, ANNE! is paired with Coast To Coast To Coast, an exhibition of Carter paintings and sculptures that has an epic sweep across the country, to capture his vivid images, province by province by territory. They occupy the Roxy’s two floors of gallery, with his light-up sculptures transforming the entire Lorne Cardinal black box theatre downstairs into a magical haunted garden.   

The Battery at St. John’s Nfld., part of Coast to Coast to Coast exhibition by Jason Carter, at Theatre Network’s Roxy. Photo by Bridget Ryan.

The season-opening touch down at Theatre Network for Anne with an ‘e’ counts as a homecoming for actor/ director/ playwright Ryan, who’s from an Edmonton family of theatre artists, the kind that are not only musical theatre blue-bloods but have a tendency to start things. Consider: her sister Kate Ryan (the actor/ director/ playwright who launched Plain Jane Theatre, now the Mayfield artistic director), her mom Maralyn Ryan (the actor/director/playwright who started the St. Albert Children’s Theatre), her late great dad Tim Ryan (who founded MacEwan’s theatre arts department).

Bridget Ryan, writer and director of OH, ANNE!, opening the Theatre Network season at the Roxy. Photo supplied.

This is a long preamble to a morning coffee at Duchess to start a day of lighting cues, as Ryan explains that she moved to Canmore in 2018, after years of commuting. “When Tim passed in 2010 I started to think about legacy,” she says. And an Edmonton day job of being an exuberant supplier of inventive segments for Channel 7 Breakfast TV just didn’t seem to fit that bill.

Edmonton is where Carter, a Woodland Cree from the Little Red River Cree Nation and one of the country’s leading Indigenous painter/sculptors, took the leap, and committed to a full-time visual arts career. When he moved to Canmore in 2011 to open a gallery, his impetus, and big break, was a huge 2010 commission from Calgary International Airport. A large-scale Carter piece, with its joyful, boldly stylized, jewel colour-saturated shapes conjuring Canadian wildlife and landscapes, occupies the U.S. departure chamber, and there are Carter paintings at every gate in the airport extension, 50 in all.     

So Canmore became the Rocky Mountain locale of both a gallery of Jason Carter work and (“on a whim,” as Ryan puts it) “a little 51-seat Off-Broadway-type theatre,” of a kind she knew very well from five years in New York working for producer Richard Frankel and doing occasional cabarets in Don’t Tell Mama.

Ryan’s debut in the new theatre was a cabaret (“two-and-a-half hours long! What was I thinking!”). In 2023, the Carter-Ryan got its first play: Maralyn Ryan, directed by her daughter, starred in the stage adaptation of the Joan Didion memoir The Year of Magical Thinking. And people kept coming — an assortment, Canmore residents, people from Calgary, Canadians, Americans, tourists who visited the gallery, drawn by Carter’s appealing work, and discovered there was a theatre at the back…. “It surprises people, a ‘proper theatre’!.” Its mantra: “no space is too small to think big.”

It’s a ‘proper theatre’ that, since 2024 and an original Ryan four-hander People and Stuff (Maralyn Ryan as a woman trying to get rid of her accumulated stuff to her adult kids, who don’t want it), produces whole seasons of shows. Last fall, in another landmark in ingenuity at the “microtheatre,” Ryan directed a nine-actor production of Sondheim’s Into The Woods, with leading Edmonton actors Cody Porter and Elena Porter as the Baker and the Baker’s Wife. Ryan’s musical collaborator Morgan McKee, composer, jazz musician, musical director, keyboardist  (and “soul-mate” says Ryan), played live; “he went home and iced his hands every night.”

Maralyn Ryan has just started rehearsals in Canmore for her first musical Ain’t We Got Fun, a new Ryan musical spun from that pepper-upper ode to positivity in times that are “bum and getting bummer.”

It’s a crazy busy place, “our challenge to keep creating!” as Ryan puts it with her usual exclamation-mark good cheer, since it’s selling the art that pays for the art, at a gallery-theatre that gets no grants.

The Cheezie Musical, Carter-Ryan Theatre. Photo supplied.

Canadian stories are meat and drink to the indefatigable Ryan and Carter. This past summer, Ryan and composer McKee created another original musical, an homage with some political salt to it, The Cheezie Musical: The Unofficial Underdog Story Of How A Snack United A Nation, inspired by the quintessentially Canadian Hawkins Cheezie. Its six-week premiere run through Aug. 16 at the Carter-Ryan sold out entirely, and it has Toronto dates later this season at Factory Theatre (Edmonton, are you listening?).

“My gawd, we’ve earned their trust!” says Ryan, pausing to appreciate audiences who keep returning to check out the latest at the little theatre in Canmore. “Theatre is so humbling. I never take (the audience) for granted! It pushes us, for sure, to take (that) next risk!” And she’s enthusiastic about the chutzpah of the creative team — “not fearful to get it right,” artists who “say Yes!” to a risk that’s a cool idea. A highly entertaining raconteur, Ryan has riotous anecdotes about New York cabarets to opening-night audiences of four, including her dad, someone’s ex-boyfriend, a guy who couldn’t get a ticket to something sold out next door…. And then, you know what happened?

Jorja Polischuk, Emma Reynolds, Jordan Empson in OH, ANNE!, Carter-Ryan Gallery and Live Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Which brings us to OH, ANNE!, a new take on the Canadian classic novel, and a striking departure from the anodyne well-trod 1965 Anne of Green Gables musical that ran annually at the Charlottetown Festival till COVID and is still a staple there. The Ryan version is very different, with its small and agile cast who play all the characters, and its rollicking sea shanty score. Of a dozen songs in the show, one is a Ryan-McKee original,  The Ballad of Mary McGee, in the classic style.

The  look, too, is very different than genteel Hallmark Green Gables. Carter’s design, a stylized, timbered barn in distressed wood, with an upstage window vista of an East Coast lighthouse (a Carter original), was built entirely of genuine weathered prairie barn timber for the original production. Because the Theatre Network stage is much bigger in both width and height, Carter has redesigned his set to the new scale, tested earlier this month at a Canmore high school.

The new musical is a tribute, says Ryan, to “amazing, strong women,” both Anne with an ‘e’ and the four actors, Emma Reynolds, Abby McDougall, Jorja Polischuk, Jordan Empson who play her, and everyone else who figures in her story, Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert, Diana Barry, Gilbert Blythe….  Having an all-woman cast gives authority to Anne’s story, Ryan thinks. “Her strength is all about optimism, hope, (insisting on) space. Gilbert is not the star!”

PREVIEW

OH, ANNE!

Theatre: Carter-Ryan Gallery and Live Theatre presented at Theatre Network

Written and directed by: Bridget Ryan

Starring: Jordan Empson, Emma Reynolds, Abby McDougall, Jorja Polischuk

Where: Roxy Theatre, 10709 124 St.

Running: Sept. 15 through Oct. 18

Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca