Cloud 9

The curtain closes on Cloud 9 (photo: Cylla von Tiedemann)

While it’s hard to believe that we’ll never again hear David Jansen demanding “I WANT MY BEADS!!” in young Cathy’s suddenly husky baritone, CLOUD 9 has come to a close, with the Panasonic soon becoming home to a certain lesbian Jewish Wiccan wedding.

Meanwhile, the CLOUD 9 cast is already busy with new projects. Megan Follows has just begun a workshop of Necessary Angel’s Andromache with Scottish director Graham McLaren. Ben Carlson is off to Stratford where he’ll be appearing as Leontes in The Winter’s Tale and as Touchstone in As You Like It. Yanna McIntosh will be joining Ben in The Winter’s Tale as Hermione, as will be appearing in Dangerous Liaisons as well. And Evan Buliung is the third CLOUD 9 cast member setting up camp in Stratford for the summer; he’ll be portraying Mac in George F. Walker’s King of Thieves.

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For those of you out there who’ve been clamouring and even pleading to hear the lovely “Cloud 9″ song from the production -- well, we have some good news. We grabbed a couple of cameras, headed down to the Panasonic, and recorded the song guerilla-style -- just for you. It’s a little rough, but the compellingly catchy music by Paul Sportelli, John Gzowski and Ben Carlson shines through, as does Ben’s wistful lead vocal.

This embrace will ring a bell for our contest winners – and other fans of Cloud 9

A few weeks ago we asked everyone – our cast, folks on the street and eager theatre fans hoping to win tickets to Cloud 9 – to complete the sentence “I’m on Cloud 9 when….”

This past Tuesday the winners of our lucky draw enjoyed a dinner out, tickets to Cloud 9 and a backstage tour courtesy director Alisa Palmer. One of our winners, Steve Rudman, reported “I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it was as if I was in Paris at a theatre. I was greeted at the door by a person that took me and my guest directly to our seats. The whole evening was spectacular.” Michelle Threndye, another winner, wrote “This is a very witty, charming and sexy play. The cast is outstanding. And it was such a pleasure to meet Alisa – she’s such an insightful director. Thank you for the wonderful night out!”

We’re excited to report that we have another surprise contest winner. So many of the entries were heartfelt, sweet, even funny – we decided to ask cast member and celebrated author Ann-Marie MacDonald to read the more than 700 entries and choose her own personal favourite.

It was Sally Thomas’s submission that caught Ann-Marie’s attention: “I’m on Cloud 9 when I see my tattered life reflected back to me in all its glory!” In acknowledgement of her thoughtful entry, Sally receives a signed copy of Ann-Marie’s acclaimed second novel “The Way the Crow Flies”. As many of you know, Ann-Marie’s first novel “Fall on Your Knees” is currently in contention as part of CBC’s annual Canada Reads competition.

Thanks to everyone for participating.

Director Alisa Palmer

Now that CLOUD 9 is up and running, director extraordinaire Alisa Palmer is finally able to sit back and take a breath. So we took the opportunity to ask her a few questions about some of the more unconventional aspects of CLOUD 9 and her fondness for Caryl Churchill’s work.

A hundred years pass between Act 1 and Act 2, but the characters age only 25 years. Why do you think (playwright) Caryl Churchill wrote it that way?

In an essay about the play Churchill says that while creating the play, she and the actors turned to their own lives for inspiration and discovered that many of them were raised with social and sexual values that were so out of date they might have come from another century. Churchill shows how antiquated the values are that shape us, and she makes an old-fashioned Victorian comedy from the family dynamics in the play. Continue Reading →