The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
The Reminder is pleased to republish this piece by Julian Kolt, entitled The Glee Club: Recollections of Music and Theatre, from the July-August edition of our sister magazine, Cottage North. It has been condensed. **** Flin Flon is a city that, in its over 75 years of existence, has seen a lot of changes. However, there is one facet of Flin Flon's culture that has held strong since the mid-1940s and likely earlier _ the theatre. Music and acting have long been an integral part of Flin Flon's history, past and present. Though it has certainly gone through times of heightened activity as well as its lesser years, the theatrical community has been present, initially as the Flin Flon Glee Club, and more recently rekindled as the Flin Flon Community Choir. Murray MacDonald, who lived in Flin Flon from 1962 to 1983 and has since moved back, was one of the then Glee Club's members in those earlier days. His first introduction to the community was in the employ of an exploration company that had him spend a couple of seasons prospecting in the surrounding region. He decided to move to Flin Flon, where he worked for HBMS, now Hudbay. Sometime between his first visits to Flin Flon and the moment he settled here, Murray caught one of the Glee Club's performances. 'I was going out with a lady at the time, and I came in from the bush and said, 'Well, what are we doing tonight?'' he recalls. 'She said, 'Well, we're gonna go and see Brigadoon.' 'Oh, the movie's in town?' 'No, no, we're going to see the Glee Club do it.' 'You gotta be kidding me.' Brigadoon is one of my favourites, and I had just seen it in Toronto about a year before at the O'Keefe Centre. So I said, 'WellÉokay.' I guessed I was about to go see some small-town amateurs screw up a perfectly good show. (But) from the opening chorus I was just enthralled.' When his date turned to him at intermission and asked him what he thought, Murray asked, 'How do I get into this group?' Eventually, Murray would get his answer. Soon after he moved up to Flin Flon to work at Hudbay, the general manager of exploration, Ron Price, one of the founders of the Glee Club in 1946, approached him. See 'That's' on pg. Continued from pg. 'Ron came in, slapped a script on my desk and said, 'Read that,'' Murray recalls. 'So I did. The next day, Ron came back in and asked, 'What part do you like the most in there?' and I said, 'WellÉI like BillisÉ' _ the script was for South Pacific. He said, 'Good, because that's the part you're doing.' And that was my first musical. 'It was an interesting exercise because we did the whole thing, and we did it in six weeks and put it on stage!' Murray says the Glee Club was 'a big deal' back in those days. When he later moved to Kenora, Ont., he was still bragging about 'how good it was and how pervasive it was.' 'You could be a sweeper on the mill floor or the general manager of the company, and if you were in the Glee Club, you were (treated the same),' he says. In time, the Glee Club disappeared, however, but in the 1990s was replaced by the musical and theatrical performances of the Flin Flon Community Choir. While living in Kenora, Murray visited Flin Flon and caught the choir's production of Bombertown, a musical that told the story of the Flin Flon Bombers' unlikely Memorial Cup victory of 1957. 'When I came back up to see Bombertown there were six other guys from Kenora with me, up for (a) Rotary (club) conference,' he says. 'When the cast came out and they had a chorus on both sides of the stage, they said to me, 'Wow, MacDonald, you weren't kidding!' It was a proud moment. The quality of the work has always been amazing.' Looking back on his own involvement, one of Murray's biggest performances with the Glee Club was as Tevye in the classic Fiddler on the Roof. 'Playing Tevye was one of the best things I've ever done in my life,' he says. 'It was the best thing for me, personally _ I'm not just talking about my presentation. It's an absolutely amazing part. The role _ the show itself, is so well written. Most musical comedies at some point, either to get a set change in or a costume change or something, throw in a song to cover up the time. None of that in that show. It just went 'bang, bang, bang.'' Murray says the show was so good that the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre sent up reps to view it. They were so impressed that they wanted to bring the show to Winnipeg, but alas, that was not meant to be. Fiddler on the Roof was, however, one of the few performances that toured outside of Flin Flon. 'We took the show on the road to Thompson. It was absolutely amazing to them,' Murray says. 'They hadn't seen anything like it.' Murray was drawn to the philosophy of the Glee Club during his years of involvement. 'Most of us _ practically every one of us in the Glee Club _ held to that old line 'there are no small parts, only small people,'' he says. 'It was true; there were no small parts. I did stage hand, I did stage-managing and everyone was the same. One year you were the lead; next year you were a stagehand. 'And sometimes we did shows that I hated _ Sound of Music, for instance. Don't like it to this day, but we did some remarkable sets! We had an amazing stage crew for that play, including 16 young men up in the flies to change the sets, which rotated. They just sat up there for the whole performance.'
