Northumberland Players Celebrate Half a Century
By Cecilia Nasmith/Today’s Northumberland
Season after season, show after show, Northumberland Players have been part of the community for 50 years now.
One of the upstairs rooms in their home at the Firehall Theatre is literally covered with posters of past productions, with years worth left over and waiting for a decision on where they will be hung.
Valerie Russell and Jack Boyagian, vice-president and president, 50-year member and 26-year member respectively, met recently for an interview, displaying a special plaque commemorating the 10 founding members.
Russell was inspired by her father, the late Ron Templer, who had been active in the Cobourg Opera and Drama Guild. The other initial founders were the late Dugald MacDonald, the late Alistair Blair, Stewart Cunningham, Donald Goldring, the late Dennis and Gail Malenfant, Ron Templer, Nancy Lester and John Winkworth.
Their first production in the fall of 1976 was Woody Allen’s Don’t Drink the Water, and Russell remembers it in terms of those old Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney movies – “let’s all just get together and put on a show.
“We asked our families for $20 each until we had enough for canvas and flats.”
The production was staged at CDCI West. The Northumberland Players story had begun, and it brought forward a number of people who were interested in having a very active theatre group, Russell recalled.
“It wasn’t long before we were doing another production, and it snowballed.”
They incorporated the following year and went on from there. Now they do 10 shows a season in several venues, run a summer camp, have Northumberland Players Youtheatre productions, do outreach and organize workshops.
With kids who grew up in the Northumberland Players family, both Russell and Boyagian are keen supporters of their Youtheatre. Its next production is How To Train Your Dragon Junior, a musical, for which close to 90 young people auditioned.
“Between the camps, which I think had close to 207 kids last year, and the shows we do and the workshops, I think we are on to something here,” Boyagian said.
“Our kids love being part of the performing arts.”
As a former educator, he strongly believes in how important this kind of thing is to their upbringing.
He recalled how kids had little to do during the COVID-19 pandemic. As soon as government guidelines allowed, they began organizing a camp – believing they would be allowed 10 children. Then the guidelines changed and they were allowed only five.
“We ran two camps, five kids coming into the building through separate doorways and the two groups never meeting. We ended up with 10 kids a week in the building, because we knew what that horrible pandemic was doing to our kids. They couldn’t get together, they couldn’t enjoy anything. It was a great success to do that.”
Even today, he continued, “we offer them something no one else does.
“With the declining funding for any arts, there is a very important gap in the upbringing of children. I was an educator for 31 years and taught children, so I know how important the arts are to children, to the growth of their brain. They get smarter, they get confident, they grow tremendously, all parts of their brain firing at the same time.”
Carrying that into the community, they help the two Cobourg high schools with their own theatrical offerings. This year, Cobourg Collegiate Institute is doing Puff and St. Mary is doing Mamma Mia – and having done Mamma Mia before, the Players are a big help with things like sets and costumes.
That kind of thing is what they have in spades at their own space in the Campbell Street industrial mall, a little spot they call The Hub. They now have the space to store high-quality tools, as well as assorted props and costumes, and ample room (with that 20-ft.-high ceiling) to build enormous sets and even stage a quick rehearsal.
They rented space prior to that – and prior to that, used the garages, barns and other space that could be offered privately. Sometimes when they had to build a piece so big they couldn’t stand it up, they build outdoors in the cold and lugged it back inside horizontally.
They previously rented space in downtown Cobourg over the Henley Arcade for their costumes. Now that everything is together in the Hub, they have a corps of about 30 volunteers going through them, cleaning up the costume cupboard.
For Boyagian, having that one spot for everyone to work together is something of a luxury they’ve never known before.
“That feeling of community,” he said, as opposed to having one crew at the Henley Arcade working on costumes, one crew building in someone’s barn, one crew out scouring for props.
“You could be part of a production and never see the other people involved,” he said.
“It’s a pretty cool place to play, creatively.”
Boyagian considers the group to have the qualities of a chameleon, adapting to the many venues they occupy. Dinner theatres, for example, are comedy time.
They typically have three a year at the Best Western Plus Cobourg Inn and Convention Centre – though they run the gamut from rollicking farce to quiet comedy (like such past productions as On Golden Pond and The Dresser).
“It’s hard putting on a show, let alone also worrying about providing dinner for the patrons – that’s their expertise,” Boyagian said.
“The magic and the challenge of that venue is, we literally build a theatre for every single time we move in.”
They have to bring in the ladders and scaffolds to build a stage. They have to get at the lighting infrastructure hidden in the ceiling and bring it out. And the sets have to be built elsewhere, disassembled like Lego, transported there and reassembled. The expertise of these volunteers is amazing, he said, as is the speed with which they manage it.
And it remains extremely popular, he added.
“On our worst day, we have 1,200 people – on our better days, 2,000.”
The Victoria Hall Concert Hall is another long-time venue. A few years back, when musical lawyer Brad Halls retired and returned to his home town of Fergus, Russell said, the December date of his Christmas show opened up and the NP Youtheatre took it for an annual Christmas production that makes room for a larger cast – meaning more young participants. And it often brings people to town from other communities to see what they have to offer.
“It’s a really lovely afternoon to come to Cobourg, have lunch someplace, see a pretty nice Christmas show – everybody feels in the mood,” she said.
In recent years, for the bigger shows where they really do need an orchestra pit, they have moved a few kilometres down the road to Port Hope’s magnificent Capitol Theatre. But Boyagian says they remain committed to Cobourg as well – especially since that’s where their home is, the Firehall Theatre located just south of Victoria Hall.
Until the fire hall on Elgin Street East was built in the early 1970s, this downtown building was the town fire station. John Hubicki and Al Blair worked with the town to negotiate terms under which they might move into this space that had sat empty for so long in 1985.
“John had a vision that this could be our place,” Russell said.
It took countless hours to clean up and build everything the way they wanted it, but the volunteers came through. Boyagian said it was an amazing amount of sweat equity.
It evolved over the years from chairs surrounding a small stage with a home-made proscenium to a place with theatre seating that can be adapted almost to a theatre-in-the-round configuration.
“It holds 50,” Russell said.
“We are very proud of that. It’s a gem.”
It’s a intimate setting that is good for more cerebral offerings like Twelve Angry Men and I Never Sang For My Father – “stories we couldn’t tell anywhere else,” Boyagian said.
“I think we have developed a real talent for choosing the right presentation to go in that space.”
The history of the group has been archived on-line, thanks to a team led by Victor Svennigsen and Don Mann, and it’s a track record to be proud of, though not without challenges no one could have anticipated – like the pandemic.
They definitely showed their mettle during the pandemic. When it was declared, they had just finished a run of Chicago at the Capitol Theatre (if they’d had to cancel that, Boyagian said, it could have been ruinous financially).
They were soon to open All My Sons at the Firehall Theatre and had to cancel it, thinking they’d all come back within a few weeks. But even by the fall, when they would have put on Honky Tonk Angels, things were still on hold, and they had to put some thought into staying alive financially. They gave up space they were renting on Lovshin Road – which paved the way to their finding their way to The Hub (with a lot of help from the Trillium Foundation, Russell noted).
As the months wore on, they thought they might try something outdoors. They applied for a Trillium Grant for outdoor lighting and found two venues – though it meant trotting out and setting out the lighting before each show, then disassembling and carting it away after.
The venues were the Cobourg Yacht Club on the west end and the Lions Pavilion in Victoria Park. They devised safer ways of having people line up and invested in hand-washing stations, and were able to present a couple of shows, including The Graduate and Love Letters.
“It took a small army to put it all together,” Boyagian recalled.
“People were just hungering to go out and have some sort of cultural experience, something where they could see other humans,” he said, estimating that they played to 900 people.
As a precaution, both Love Letters and their first post-COVID dinner theatre The Birds and the Bees starred actual real-life couples.
“I give a lot of credit to the organization,” he continued
“I remember at the time the number of announcements made all over Toronto, the number of community theatres that went under – that’s a long time not to be making money.”
There was also the worry about losing volunteers, but their dedication remained strong.
“Everybody missed each other,” Russell said, recalling a coffee party she and some other volunteers had in a Tim Hortons parking lot, each of them sitting with a coffee on the trunks of their cars.
The play reading of The Graduate they held at the Cobourg Yacht Club was an emotional experience, Boyagian agreed. More than a few people teared up at the opportunity to be around people.
He saw the same with the kids’ programming after two years of COVID. They had sat around for so long and did not spark immediately – but became different people before the camp was over.
“That contribution to the fabric of the community – I think we underestimate it,” he said.
“Some of the best friendships of my life were made through theatre,” Russell said.
That friendship lasts after the curtain drops, with members celebrating life’s good times together and helping each other through the bad.
“We have so many talented people we have drawn from the community – light people, sound people, set designers that did this professionally at one point in their lives,” Russell said.
“We have the smartest volunteers in town,” Boyagian agreed – “people who have moved to the area that have a real love for their art. They don’t want to sit on their front porch and get old.
“We also have very talented people who want to learn these skills and want to be part of something special.”
And a great opportunity to celebrate comes up at their big 50th Anniversary Gala May 22 at Victoria Hall. It will include a brief film on the history of the players as well as a few speakers.
“We just want to celebrate, that’s the main thing,” Russell said.
“We hope people will buy tickets and dance and celebrate.”
Tickets are available now on the Northumberland Players website.
And while the gala will no doubt be the highlight of this 50th-anniversary season, there is still the opportunity to enjoy their dinner theatre Where You Are through May 10, and a play by Warren Graves, The Last Real Summer, at the Firehall Theatre May 23 through June 7.
