Robbie Towns, Connor Meek, Devom Brayne, William Lincoln, Kory Fulton in Jersey Boys. Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.
By Liz Nicholls,
Life, like theatre, has its dramatic arcs. Here’s one: I’m sitting across the table with an artist who has heard the close harmonies of Big Girls Don’t Cry (-yi-yi) delivered from stages and in rehearsal halls around the world. Literally thousands of times. For 20 years.
And you think you have Sherry and Frankie Valli’s stratospheric high notes embedded eternally in your brain? Danny Austin has reproduced, re-calculated, rehearsed, and maintained productions of the hit Broadway musical Jersey Boys from New York and London to Tokyo, South Africa to Sydney to Singapore, New Zealand to the Middle East to Vegas. And here’s the kicker: the production of Jersey Boys that opens at the Mayfield Theatre Friday brings Austin back to his home town. Back to the place where a very busy theatre career began.
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“I just couldn’t wait to leave,” laughs Austin, the most amiable of lunch companions, who left Edmonton as a teenager for points east. “And now all I want is to come home, and create work here. I love it!”
The Tony Award-winning 2005 musical, originally brought to the Broadway stage by Canadian director Des McAnuff, has made of Austin an honorary Jersey Boy. Not that Austin could have predicted that, riding the bus across town every morning from Meadowlark to LaZerte high school.
Austin grew up from the five-year-old triple threat-in-the-making who sang and acted, and did gymnastics. “Though I had no vocabulary for dance I could move really well.” And then when Dasha Goody, the founder and long-time artistic director of Edmonton Musical Theatre, came to see his high school’s production of Godspell, she invited Austin to join.
Jersey Boys director/choreographer Danny Austin
In the Austin story the segues are speedy, and the connections are blue-chip Canadian. In 1982 Austin was in Guys and Dolls at the Citadel, “then I got asked to do Rainbow Stage (a venerable musical theatre company in Winnipeg), then at 19 I moved to Toronto, and started training in ballet/jazz.” He spent three seasons in the Anne of Green Gables company in Charlottetown (and a decade later returned as the ‘resident director’ and artistic director of the Young Company there). And after a period of performing and choreographing internationally, including months in Mexico and four years in Japan — “I grew up in Edmonton, and I wanted to see the world!” — he spent seven life-changing seasons at the Stratford Festival.
“Stratford became my university, my education,” says the multi-lingual Austin (he speaks French, Spanish, Japanese, some Arabic). “I’d gotten jobs but I didn’t know the craft.” At Stratford, “I fell in love with Shakespeare…. It’s the most amazing place, and I got to breathe that air…. Incredible art is being created there all the time!”
“You get to do everything!” he says. Shakespeare, musicals like The Music Man, Brian MacDonald’s hit Gilbert and Sullivan productions, classes in stage combat, or textual analysis, or voice work.” Austin did it all. It was when he found himself behind the director’s table as an apprentice, fascinated by the set and lighting, that Austin found his true métier, behind the scenes. “It was what I loved more than performing!”
What followed for Austin was “five years of apprenticeship to directors and choreographers.” And it was his Charlottetown cred working with young actors, he figures, that got him his New York gig as the resident director of the Broadway production of Hairspray, just after that music won the best musical Tony in 2003. “Welcome to the family!” director Jack O’Brien and choreographer Jerry Mitchell, heavy-hitters both, told the brand new New Yorker.
“I discovered I was really good at re-creating someone else’s work, maintaining the integrity of it,” says Austin, exuberant in conversation. “I love working with actors, allowing them to make discoveries, to own the part. Why not? There is a vessel of truth you have to honour, but there are many ways to get to that truth. Everyone’s life experience is different. Which is what makes this so fascinating.”
He’d just set up the Toronto production of Hairspray, a touring company, and the West End production in the U.K., when the Jersey Boys offer came. The choreographer of Des McAnuff’s production, Sergio Trujillo, was a pal from Austin’s Toronto dance days. Austin says he hesitated. But the unique appeal of the Jersey Boys book (by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice), based on a gripping real-life story with real-life characters, won him over. “It’s about family — the family you belong to, the family you choose; it’s about musicians; it’s about life!” he says of a jukebox musical in a league of its own, based as it is on the true story of four guys from the mean streets of blue-collar New Jersey who would become the Four Seasons. As their fame rocketed, “there was a chasm between family and career,” as Austin puts it, and the show reveals.
“All relationships are challenging. But you put a million records on top of that, and see how you handle it.”
The chance to be both associate choreographer and resident director was a big draw for Austin, too. “I could do both!. And getting to be in a room with Des McAnuff, honestly, is a masterclass in directing and theatre. Jaw-dropping.”
What came with the show as well, for Austin, was the “incredible gift” of getting to know the real-life people, Frankie Valli, Tommy DeVito, Bob Gaudio and the rest. Valli, says Austin, “struggled with relationships. He has an incredible work ethic, an incredible dedication to his craft. After every show, Frankie still does a 45-minute vocal cool-down, after all this time….” As for the fractured relationships that are part of the Jersey Boys story, Valli and DeVita still can’t be backstage together, Austin reports.
So the much-travelled Austin is back in his home town, happily “full-circle,” as he says. “I can’t tell you what it’s like to get up in the morning and go to work here (at the Mayfield…. I’m working with people who are so invested…. This is a show that belongs to my heart. I had no idea how excellent the quality of the team would be. I have a lot of love for people who put such effort into it.”
The work continues. There are Jersey Boys 20th anniversary tours to co-ordinate, both in the U.S. and a year from now Britain, with shared design ideas “to be more cost-effective so we can play smaller theatres.”
Right after opening night at the Mayfield, Austin flies to Seattle to rehearse understudies for Jersey Boys aboard a cruise ship to Alaska. But “I want to be here; I want to work here,” he says of Edmonton and his family here that includes his mom and his brothers (he’s even become obsessed with the Oilers since his return). “I’d love to get connected with the Edmonton theatre community…. I’ve got ideas, projects, new material, stories to tell. It’s all about the stories….”
PREVIEW
Jersey Boys
Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre
Written by: Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice (book), Bob Gaudio (music), Bob Crewe (lyrics)
Starring: Niko Combitsis, Robbie Towns, Connor Meek, Devon Brayne, William Lincoln, Kory Fulton, Demi Oliver, Mayson Sonntag, Kristin Unruh, Garrett Woods, Robyn Esson, Jessica Wilson, Caleb Di Pomponio
Running: through June 8
Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca, 780-483-4051
