We’re invited to a ’60s party: Cocktails at Pam’s, Teatro Live! revives a signature Lemoine comedy. A preview

Forty years ago a theatre company blithely outside the Canadian theatre mainstream invited Fringe audiences to a ‘60s cocktail party.

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In Cocktails at Pam’s, dressed-up people kept arriving at Pam’s place. Gimlets and gibsons got made, along with small talk. Canapés got passed around. Charades … well, I’m getting ahead of myself.

The hostess with the most-est may not have realized it at the time (she was pretty busy with vases for the flowers). But Pam’s party was the birth of a Teatro tradition, born in 1986 at the fifth Fringe when Teatro Live! was still called Teatro La Quindicina.

Stewart Lemoine’s signature Teatro comedy — a play? a real-time party onstage? performance art? — was revived every five years. And the last time we saw Pam and her guests, a decade ago, it was to hoist a highball to the opening the new Varscona Theatre, built from the very bricks of the old, and to celebrate Teatro’s 30th anniversary. “Finally, in 2016, we didn’t have to rush to take the set down!” says Lemoine.

Some things have changed in 40 years, needless to say, including the company title, and the name of the venue (formerly Chinook). The Teatro revival, the show’s sixth, that opens Friday on the Varscona stage has an all-new cast of 11 (!), mostly Teatro faves. Shannon Blanchet as Pam presides, in the role originated and played in every revival till now by Davina Stewart. Teatro’s resident costume designer Leona Brausen, an expert in the mid-century look, is no longer onstage in the role she originated (and played every time out after that, till now): Pam’s best friend, the dauntingly chic Sarah Black. “Big hair and disdain,” as Brausen describes Mrs. Black. “Super-judgy and impatient…. Stewart wrote it with me in mind.”

In this latest incarnation Rachel Bowron and Mathew Hulshof are the Blacks. And, says Brausen, amused, “Rachel gets (director’s) notes with ‘more Brausen, less Brausen’.”

Playwright Lemoine is remembering that sold-out 1986 premiere, the first time that Teatro, born at the first Fringe in 1982, had been in an actual theatre (“we lucked out!”). It was in a double-bill with his pocket musical What Gives?, in which Brausen was Allure Potemkin, and her dance number Baby Legs was a showstopper.

The queue for tickets, in that pre-advance tix era, was “crazy,” says Lemoine. “And it felt like an epic run for us,” since the Fringe holdovers, at the Citadel that year, gave the show an extra week of sold-out performances, followed by another show at Spruce Grove’s Horizon Stage.

“The cast size, at 11 startlingly large for a Fringe show, followed on the success of Lemoine’s 14-actor musical (with Gary Lloyd) My Miami Melody the year before, “which finally got us known as a Fringe act worth checking out,” as he puts it.” The tickets were five bucks, “so if everyone got $150 at the end of the Fringe, that was all right.”

What set Cocktails at Pam’s apart, he figures, was “the real-time aspect. Lights up, the party happens, and goes and goes till it’s done. No scene changes; the actors don’t play multiple characters…. It’s really happening right there in front of you and never stops.”

Not even for a story, unlike another defining Teatro show of the era, Lemoine’s The Vile Governess and Other Psychodramas, an “Ibsenesque romp” as billed, that had a Toronto run. “All our plays were ‘maybe the Fringe isn’t the best place for this’.” In the case of Pam’s party, “there was furniture, a bar, there were people wearing period costumes and putting on extensive makeup — in the Fringe’s 30-minute turnaround between shows…. We were the people who mistook the Fringe for Broadway.”

Davina Stewart (centre) as Pam, in the 2016 revival of Cocktails at Pam, Teatro Live! Photo by Andrew MacDonald-Smith

Lemoine started writing it, he recalls, “not for the Fringe or with a production particularly in mind, but as an exercise in keeping a thing going. I remember thinking ‘I’m just going to start a party and keep adding people to it — that’s how a party works. And I don’t really have to think about the plot,  just follow the party trajectory…. And when there’s enough people there I’ll figure out what the consequences are’.”

“It was just going on,” in a way that’s often been compared to Seinfeld, “and I noticed that it should have some sort of consequences, a major incident…. I took a big swing!”

What did Brausen think the first time she read Cocktails at Pam’s?. “Hmm, I know I liked it. It was fun. A bit Seinfeld, the characters are all likeable, and dis-likeable. It was, still is, my favourite Stewart comedy…. Smoking, drinking, hors d’oeuvres — it was everything I wanted in theatre!”

The costumes she’s assembled for the new cast, including the shoes, are all originals from the treasure trove of ‘60s pieces in her basement. Ah, the footwear, those crazy, torturous pointy shoes that have contributed to the bunion epidemic world-wide, plus “little kitten heels that get brittle and break off, says Brausen, who’s all about authenticity in garb. She’s dressing Virgil Black (Hulshof, back from Toronto for the run), as per Cocktails at Pam’s tradition, in a black Nehru jacket with a ‘60s pendant…. And “he has the pointiest men’s shoes; they could take the eye out of a bug in a corner.”

Wigs are a Brausen specialty. And when actors use their own hair, no follicle is safe. “Mat is so trusting; he let me cut his hair with seam ripper scissors!” says Brausen incredulously. “Severe bangs!” And as an extra spritz of authenticity, Brausen is toying with the temptation of giving the cast a few squirts of the Fabergé 60s classic Tigress backstage. Ah, the sweet smell of excess.

PREVIEW

Cocktails at Pam’s

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written and directed by: Stewart Lemoine

Starring: Shannon Blanchet, Rachel Bowron, Kendra Connor, Belinda Cornish, Cathy Derkach, Oscar Derkx, Mathew Hulshof, Bella King, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Kristen Padayas, Troy O’Donnell

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 8e Ave.

Running: Friday through July 26

Tickets: teatrolive.com