In a unique opportunity for young people interested in acting, the Classic Theatre Festival will be holding auditions for young female performers, aged 9-12, on Saturday, November 1 in Perth. While the Festival has yet to announce its upcoming 2015 summer season, Artistic Producer Laurel Smith is planning one show that features a spunky 10-year-old girl in a number of key scenes. Smith plans to cast two girls to share the role during the play’s 8 times a week performance schedule. “Perth as a community has probably one of the highest-per-capita numbers of people in the country when it comes to community theatre and youth theatre, and we know from our experience of auditioning young people last year for our youth troupe how many people have come through, for example, the Perth Academy of Musical Theatre, which has done so much to provide training and opportunities for young people with a knack for theatre,” says Smith. For next season, the young actors chosen will be working alongside some of the country’s top professional talents in the Festival’s mainstage shows. They’ll also be picking up a paycheque. “Like anyone who works in a professional job, the young female performers who get this job will be getting a paycheque, perhaps a start for saving for higher education a few years down the road,” Smith says. While the Classic Theatre Festival has so far only cast adults in its shows over its five year history, Smith has a great deal of experience working with young people, especially in projects linked to the Toronto District School Board and Arts York, where she developed a number of pieces that brought to life key moments in Canadian history and also spoke to contemporary youth issues. Smith also conceived, dramaturged, and directed last year’s hugely popular Perth through the Ages theatrical historic walking tour, a youth theatre training project that employed a half dozen young people throughout the summer. That project will return in 2015 with new stories and characters, and Smith will be holding auditions for young people for this project in the near future as well. In the meantime, anyone interested in auditioning should submit a resume and head shot no later than October 26 to info@classictheatre.ca.     Continue reading

For someone who hated writing, Frederick Knott guaranteed he wouldn’t have to do too much of it to make a living when he penned his first play, the universally loved Dial M for Murder, which plays at Perth’s Classic Theatre Festival August 8 to 31 (54 Beckwith Street East, at Harvey). Given this is the Festival’s first murder mystery, the company is partnering with the Capital Crime Writers to present a series of mystery/crime author readings throughout the run of the show as well. Originally rejected by eight separate producers, Dial M for Murder was finally picked up for BBC TV, and then found a home on the London stage and Broadway in 1952. Since then, the play has not only been turned into a smash Hollywood movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Ray Milland and Grace Kelly, but has been translated into scores of languages and played around the globe. Knott also penned the enormously popular thriller Wait Until Dark. While the movie remains a must-see for any classic mystery fan, seeing the show live on stage is a wholly different experience, given the intimacy of the audience with the players and the tension that builds as a dogged Scotland Yard investigator hones in on the man plotting murder. “A key aspect of this play that is often overlooked is that it contains within it elements of a love story, as well as the fact that it could have been torn from today’s headlines about women who are forced to defend themselves against acts of violence, but then pay the price of criminal charges and jail time,” explains Artistic Producer Laurel Smith. The Dial M cast is made up of a collection of crackerjack Toronto and Ottawa performers, both newcomers and Festival veterans. The tale follows fading tennis star Tony Wendice, played by Greg Campbell, a veteran screen and stage actor who has worked extensively with VideoCabaret, in Trudeau and the FLQ, Life and Times of Mackenzie King, The Great War, Confederation, Mackenzie/Papineau Rebellion, The War of 1812 (this latter at Stratford Festival), and who has appeared in The Kennedys, Murdoch Mysteries and Against the Wild. The character of Tony is unhappily married and jealous of his wife, Margot, played by Ottawa’s Jennifer Vallance, who recently appeared as Paula in Empire of Sand and Cindy in Sparks (both with New Ottawa Repertory Theatre). Margot Wendice is trying to end a long-distance romance with the lovelorn, cynical screenwriter Mark Halliday, played by Festival veteran Scott Clarkson (previously seen in the Classic Theatre Festival’s The Marriage-Go-Round, Two For the Seesaw and The Fourposter). Determined to bump off his wife and inherit her fortune, Tony hires the unsavoury Captain Lesgate, a perfect role for the versatile Ottawa character actor Richard Gélinas, who starred in last year’s The Star-Spangled Girl. Some mayhem ensues, and Margot, convicted of murder, faces execution. In order to clear up the mess, an intrepid Scotland Yard investigator (played by Toronto’s Clyde Whitham, who recently appeared in Fantastic… Continue reading