Christopher Gaze is Sharing What It Takes to Build a Theatre Festival That Lasts
About This Episode:
Christopher Gaze is the founder and artistic director of Bard on the Beach, Vancouver’s beloved outdoor Shakespeare festival now in its 37th season. In this conversation, Christopher talks with Phil about how a $35,000 co-op startup in 1990 grew into one of Canada’s largest theatre companies, drawing 80,000 people a season to a pair of tented stages in Vanier Park overlooking English Bay and the mountains beyond.
This episode explores:
- How Bard on the Beach began in 1990 with $35,000, a Canada Council Explorations Grant, and a company of 27 co-op members
- The influence of mentor Douglas Campbell: his force field in the audition room, his wilderness years, and why his name is on Bard’s second stage
- Programming a season: from Douglas casually suggesting Twelfth Night over the phone to today’s collaborative circle of senior theatre practitioners
- Goblin Oedipus, Antigone, and how Christopher was famously wrong about Goblin Macbeth (it sold out before opening night)
- And much more!
Guest: 🎭 Christopher Gaze
Christopher Gaze is best known as the Founder and Artistic Director of Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival, which celebrates its thirty-seventh season in 2026. He hosts the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s popular Tea & Trumpets series and also their annual Traditional Christmas concerts.
Connect with Christopher Gaze:
📸 Instagram: @gazechristopher
📖 Buy The Road to Bard (Harbour Publishing)
🌐 Website: bardonthebeach.org
📸 Instagram: @bardonthebeach
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Transcript
[Phil Rickaby]
Hello, welcome to Stageworthy. I’m Phil Rickaby, the host and producer of this podcast. Stageworthy is Canada’s theatre podcast, and on Stageworthy I talk to theatre makers of all kinds, from actors to directors to playwrights and more.
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You’ll find a new donation link that’s there for those who don’t want to or can’t commit to long-term support but would like to leave a tip or a one-time donation. That’s there for you as well. But let’s get into it.
My guest this week is Christopher Gaze. Christopher is the founder and the artistic director of Vancouver’s Barred on the Beach. He also released a memoir, which I think is so important.
I wish there were more memoirs by Canadian theatre makers, because I think that the lessons of the past need to be passed on to the future of theatre makers. So I’m so grateful to Christopher for publishing that. I’ve read it.
It is a great read. So if you have the opportunity to get a hold of that, have a look at it. I’m going to leave a non-Amazon link to it in the show notes, so you can pick it up there.
You can also find it on Amazon if you so chose. But let’s get into the program. This is my conversation with Christopher Gaze.
Christopher Gaze, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate you make some time. I know that you’re a busy man.
You are in the middle of Barred on the Beach’s 37th season. And Barred is an institution in Vancouver, but not everybody will have heard of it. So give me a little bit about what is Barred on the Beach?
[Christopher Gaze]
Well, it may not be quite, if you’re not familiar with it, what you think it might be. No, we’re not playing around in the golden sand of Kitsilano in Vancouver. We’re in a park that just looks over English Bay.
It’s not far from the Barad Bridge, a few hundred yards from there, but it looks out over English Bay, over the park, the mountains beyond, and then the sun going down over there. That’s the view out behind the main stage theatre, which we call the BMO Main Stage. That’s the big theatre.
Then the smaller theatre is about 90 yards away. That’s the Douglas Campbell Theatre. We have a village in between, and it’s been going 37 years.
We’ve had two and a half million people there over these years, and we employ about 300 people a year. We have 350 volunteers who help to do all the tasks that might be done at a theatre, like tickets and serving tea, coffee, wine, beer, all that, and getting people to their seats. Of course, they’re looked after by management.
But that’s the general thing, and we put on four productions, which is what it’s all about. And it’s the most extraordinary, and it’s unique, and it’s a wonderful, wonderful experience. Being there and spending an hour, say, before the show and having a picnic, whatever, and then seeing the show, it’s a wonderful time for people to get together.
It’s a whole experience, not just going to see a show.
[Phil Rickaby]
You are the founder and the artistic director of Bard on the Beach. How did this come to be? How did you decide, and how did you make it happen, the founding and starting of Bard on the Beach?
[Christopher Gaze]
Well, I write about this, actually, in my memoir, which was published June 2nd, not very long ago. And I think it was always in me to try and chart my own course and create something perhaps bigger than myself just being an actor, perhaps take more control of one’s life. As an actor, you are here, there, and everywhere, a sort of peripatetic life, which is a wonderful life.
I’ve devoted my life to the theatre. But this way, you get to, in a sense, call the shots with a lot of other people, and you’re employed. You don’t have to go out and look for it as long as you behave yourself and do a good job.
On you go. But I had, ever since I was a younger man, I’m 74 now, but I came to Canada 51 years ago now. And I think the man who believed in me all those years ago, when I was just 23 years old, I’d worked for him in England, Douglas Campbell.
He was a prodigy. His mentor was Sir Tyrone Guthrie, who was the first artistic director of Stratford, Ontario. He thought I, I guess, had the right stuff to be an entrepreneur and create a theatre company and sustain it.
And he never said those words to me, but I know he had a promise in me. And I think the influence of the Stratford Festival, of course, as an idea, beginning in tents, as they did from 1953, and then the big theatre opened in 57. It stayed with me all those years.
And it’s this alfresco experience of this tented experience, this sort of festival experience. People love it. Tents are, most often we find ourselves in tents for parties, banquets, weddings, and circuses.
And so it’s a good time. And so that’s more or less, and then of course, the nuts and bolts of finally making a decision at a certain time in my life. In 1989, my father had died the year before, and he had a belief in me.
He was 68 when he died, but I think he thought that I had potential to do something important in my life. And, and I think death is a curious thing that way with people that you love. It’s a, it’s a kick in, it’s grief, of course, and a kick in the rear end of, what are you going to do with your life?
And, and just a year or so later, I got on the train and started to create this.
[Phil Rickaby]
I feel like, like Barn on the Beach is one of those institutions that I don’t even know if we could even create that now. That the 90s and that era of Canadian theatre, when I was basically graduating from theatre school at the time, but that we’ve sort of stagnated, that it wouldn’t be possible to start something like Barn on the Beach, at least at that scale, and run it even for a year anymore, because the funding just isn’t there. What was the confluence of events that allowed it to happen for you at that time?
What was there then that we don’t have now?
[Christopher Gaze]
That, that very first year, 1990, when I, I had directed the year before a group of mostly UBC students, not all, but mostly really, really fine young people. I’d been in the business for 17 years, but they were keen and we’d put on this production under Milkwood. And I just thought they were so, they were entrepreneurial too, well-organized.
So I said, I have this idea, help me. And, and we, and they did for that first year. And we did it, we got it on, we raised money.
You, you, you mentioned, of course, that’s key. We raised $35,000. We all individually, certainly I went to my doctor, my lawyer, my insurance broker, and asked for $1,000 each and got it.
And, and two of them wrote an application to the Canada Council. There was a grant in those days, Phil, called the Explorations Grant with Canada Council to explore, as I think you’re suggesting, an idea. And, and we, they had this idea, which was, they cleverly called it Bard on the Beach.
I didn’t, I didn’t invent that name. Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bard on the Beach. And, and so that’s what we did that first year for $35,000.
Now what I, my experience had told me, don’t push this because I’d been involved with three other festivals in very recent years, 1980 and 81. That took two years for it to sort of go down. And that’s in 1982 in Lennoxville, Quebec.
The first one was in Edmonton. Then was Lennoxville, Quebec, 1982. That collapsed during the season.
And then the one, the Shakespeare Festival in Vancouver, 83, 84, collapsed in the middle of the season. And I thought I’d figured out why. Again, I was an actor in those companies.
I was not management. What I believed in the creation of Bard was that we do this organically, steadily and slowly, slowly. Our audience starts to understand who we are so that it becomes a tradition for them to come to us.
And that’s what we did. And nobody, it wasn’t a get rich quick campaign. And we were all in the first two years, we were a co-op.
So we all, 27 of us earned $1,200 each because we made money in that first year, 6,000 people had come. We got $1,200. Second year, we got $2,000 each.
And then Canadian Actors’ Equity said, hey, you’ve proved yourself now. No concessions. You have to pay people.
And so in 92, we paid people.
[Phil Rickaby]
Now you mentioned the Douglas Campbell stage and you’ve mentioned Douglas as a mentor to you. In your book, you tell the story of meeting him and going to audition for his company. And sort of being intimidated by that voice.
And I know that voice. When I was in theatre school in my third year, he directed our Winter’s Tale. One of the joys of my life is to have been directed by Douglas.
He was a wonderful man. And he acted as sort of a mentor to you. What did you know of before you had actually met him?
And did you get what you expected?
[Christopher Gaze]
Well, when I went to audition for him, as you read in the memoir, on that day in 1973, summer of, maybe about this time of year, thereabouts. I didn’t know the man, but I’d heard, obviously I knew who I was auditioning for. I’d heard that he had been closely associated with Sir Tyrone Guthrie and the creation of the Stratford Festival.
And he’d also been the artistic director of the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. So he was a big guy and he presented a sort of force field around him. And he’d sit back there and say, hello there.
What are you going to do for us today? You know, just this charisma and this imposing sort of danger, really. An amazing voice.
By the way, where were you at theatre school? Where was that? I was at George Brown College.
And he directed it. Wow. Wow.
Wow. What a treat for you. It was.
It was. It was wonderful. Did you play the shepherd?
The old shepherd?
[Phil Rickaby]
I was Polonius and one of the shepherds on the island. So yeah, no, it was wonderful.
[Christopher Gaze]
That was good parts for you. Anyway, a long time ago. But nevertheless, we know the force field around that man.
I’ve been able to write about him and thank you for reading, by the way. And people are enjoying it very much. The memoir has done very, very well.
I think it’s a good thing in Canadian theatre to get that down. Douglas tried for years to write a memoir. And I think he was given money to write the memoir, but he never did it.
Anyway, I’ve done it. And I’ve been able to write about him and his impact not only on me, but on hundreds, maybe thousands of people like you and me right across this nation and beyond. A major impact player.
I was intimidated by him. Everyone was intimidated by him. But he liked me and I would go with him whenever he was very open to inviting me.
I mean, I was years younger than he was. Must have been 50, whatever age he was, 53 or something when I first met him. At least 20 or 30 years older than me.
30. But he liked me because I listened to him and I could drink with him, not stupidly. He drank a lot, as you know.
He came from that era. But I had what I had and kept reasonably sober and just listened to these marvelous stories, which he loved to tell. And always the idea of let’s do something.
What should we do? What should we do? He loved all that.
Loved it.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. Yeah. I can remember just every rehearsal with him was always a joy to just sit through.
And then at a break when he started telling a story, we’d just sit there wrapped.
[Christopher Gaze]
I know. I know. Do you know, Phil, one thing, and if I was Douglas now and you were interviewing him, he was very good with people who were taking an interest in both him and the theatre.
But he got very irritated if you didn’t really know. If you hadn’t done any research, for instance, on me or on him and just found out just a few things about his life. He would then say, now, listen, if you’re going to interview me, you need to do some homework.
And he’d get after them. I heard him do it many times. And people, oh, hello.
And I’m interviewing you. And what do you do in the theatre? And that would irritate him.
Yeah. Oh, of course. Yeah.
Of course it would.
[Phil Rickaby]
Now, when you opened a second stage for Bart on the Beach, you named that stage after him. Was that largely because of the experience that you’d had knowing him? Was it his impact on the theatre in Vancouver, in Canada?
What was it that drew you to name that second stage after him?
[Christopher Gaze]
We had no name for it. And we talked about it before because he had started. I phoned him in 1990.
Well, probably 1990. But yes, I did. I phoned him in 1990.
I said, I’ve started a theatre company. He said, well done, dear. Call me when you need me.
And that was that. And then later in 1991, when we’d had a successful second season, 11,000 people had come. And now we were going to the third season.
I thought it was time to call him. And I said, would you like to come out here? And he said, yes, yes.
What are we going to do? And in those days, now it takes us three months to figure out what we’re going to do next year or the year after. We’ve really so much thought about it all.
In those days, he’d say, what do you think, Christopher? Have you done Twelfth Night yet? I said, no, we’ve just done Dream.
And as you like it. And he said, well, we’ll do Twelfth Night. All right.
And what should we do with that? Do you like The Tempest? I said, well, it’s very good.
He said, all right, let’s do that. Anyway, so there was a season. And so he directed The Twelfth Night.
And then Scott Swan directed The Tempest. But now he was in. And these were difficult years for Douglas.
Having been there at the beginnings of Stratford, he had strong feelings about the way Stratford should be run, what kind of repertoire they should be playing and programming. And he had very strong feelings about that. And he just wasn’t afraid of anybody.
And he’d take them on. And finally, it all played against him. And Stratford just said, OK, OK, OK.
And so he was kind of on the outs. I mean, I don’t know what year you did. He came to you in theatre school.
But I would have probably been about ninety, ninety one, ninety two. Exactly.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah.
[Christopher Gaze]
Those were the those were Douglas’s. I would describe them and his family would say kind of his wilderness years. Yes, he was able to do your show.
He was able to come to us. Ninety two. And he came in.
Ninety two. Ninety three. Ninety four.
He played Lear in ninety four for us with Alan Scott directing. He came in, directed Hamlet and played the ghost of the gravedigger. Ninety five.
Ninety six. He he directed both shows, Much Ado and the other one, I’ll think of in a moment. And and so he’s major impact player.
And by the time ninety six was over, we did Much Ado and The Merchant of Venice in ninety six just came. And he figured out that he’d been ill and he didn’t know it for years. He kept going to sleep.
And of course, it was diabetes. And but once he sorted that, he came alive again and and he was invited back to Stratford and he put on, of course, the Oedipus there in ninety seven. He’d slimmed down and he was just in top condition.
And so those wilderness years, both with you and with us here, he started to find himself again. And then he had a few very good years before old age finally came.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. I mean, you mentioned him falling asleep when we were he was you know, we would be in rehearsal for The Winter’s Tale and he was dozing off then as well. So he would be sitting there.
It became almost like it was amusing in the way that you’d be doing a scene, you sort of look over and think, I think he’s asleep. And then the scene would end and he’d go, well, that was excellent. And then he’d start giving notes and he’d be like, was he asleep or was it like what’s going on?
But, you know, I heard later that he’d had diabetes and that that he’d gotten it under control. And and I was so happy to to to hear about about how he how he’d recovered from that.
[Christopher Gaze]
Yeah. Yeah. And he had you’re quite right.
He had that facility as the scene was going on and you’d look over and back there and you’d go, oh, God, the bugger’s not listening. And then he’d do exactly as you said now. Oh, good.
But I now listen, Phil, when you’re doing that line and you’d be in there and jump right on it. And yeah, we did it. I don’t know.
[Phil Rickaby]
I don’t know. It’s some kind of like sixth sense of the scene. You alluded to the way that plays were chosen in those those early days and then how Douglas suggested those those plays.
But I’m curious about how what is the process of selecting the plays now? You can’t just like decide now. You said it takes three months to decide the plays.
What is the process of deciding what is going to be the season that year?
[Christopher Gaze]
Well, it’s it’s interesting now. I mean, obviously, I’m in these senior years. Suddenly, here we are.
So Clare Sakaki, who is the executive director of BARD, and we’re very, very fortunate to right behind this wall here, really running BARD on the beach. Obviously, I still have my position here, artistic director and founder of the company and all that and year 37. So it’s anyway, Clare has very cleverly put a whole circle of people around me, including herself.
A very fine theatre practitioners that are well known here in the West, Meg Rowe and Dean Paul Gibson and and several others, Jonathan Ryder, Susan Miyagishima, Jessica Chambers. And and they we meet and we talk about every aspect of individuals. And plays, plays and players.
And our best guess of what’s going to draw what is adventurous, try and look at all the risks we’re taking in terms of this play or that play. And it’s more complicated these days also in the casting, because since the pandemic, we we could have done this years and years and years ago, but we never did because understudy world, you put it in a budget and X thousand dollars, you stick it in there. We’ll have understudies next year.
And then the first thing that used to get cut would be understudies because now we’ll get by and Christopher will go on and and I played the queens and the princes and the young lovers. And and of course. The audience accepted it, very often enjoyed it very much, especially when I was playing some wicked old queen, I mean, a queen queen.
And and but the time came when that really couldn’t happen anymore. And so with pandemic, we had to stop doing the understudy thing. It’s a huge piece of work.
It is huge. You said, well, why don’t you just hire all those people and then they can sit at home and get the call and come in? And so, well, yes.
But who’s going to pay for that? We have a very big company and to sort of double it up, it’s not just not going to anyway. So we found ways of doing it, but it’s a real science attached to it.
I don’t do it as Susan and Dean and others do it. Thank God. And I and so the right thing is when you look at me and you think, well, what about succession?
How come you’re still the artistic director? Well, I like it. And the company likes me.
No, I have made it and it’s an open conversation here. I don’t hide away hoping that no one really notices that I’m, you know, in my getting towards my mid 70s. I said, look, I don’t want to be the last person to find out.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I want to talk a little bit about about this year’s season.
You have on the Shakespeare front, you have Merwizer, Windsor and Macbeth. I spoke with Stephen Drover earlier this summer. And so those are the two Shakespeare’s.
And this year you have you have Antigone. So I talked to Ming just a little while ago. And you also have Goblin Oedipus.
Now, is this the first time that you’ve done Greeks at Bard? Is that correct?
[Christopher Gaze]
No, we did. This is Strata a few years ago. Again, another adaptation of that.
Yeah, it’s I mean, it’s a good question. The reason is, though, as I think many people have sort of wondered about it, but it really does seem to fit together at a point where we wanted to have we have a relationship with Rebecca Norton, a really great theatre maker of of this country. And she and Bruce Horlack, her partner in it, or all this created this strange phenomenon of these goblin shows.
I mean, at Christmas time coming up, they’re doing one at the the Mirvish’s.
[Phil Rickaby]
I am looking forward to Goblin Christmas, Carol. I really am.
[Christopher Gaze]
Yeah. Yeah. So it’s a phenomenon.
And, you know, they do it in Stratford. They do it here in Calgary and other places. And Goblin Macbeth a couple of years ago was a huge success here.
I mean, my expertise in programming was greatly tested then, because when I was told about that, Dean and Meg and others said, we should do the Goblin Macbeth. I said, what’s that? And they said, it’s those people with these goblin things on.
And I said, well, you can’t possibly. That’s nonsense, a ridiculous idea. And and of course, finally, over weeks, I was persuaded it was a good idea.
And it was the first and only production that we have ever done at Bard that sold out before it opened. So that’s some of my expertise in programming. You can’t always be right, of course.
[Phil Rickaby]
I mean, you have to you have to you have to like I mean, who could think unless you knew that this absurd idea would be the thing that it is, because it is absurd. It’s like the most surreal concept, high concept, ridiculous idea. And yet it works.
[Christopher Gaze]
It does work. It does work. Well, of course.
And it’s the players. It’s the players. I mean, Rebecca and Bruce and Ellis, too, who does the music with them and plays smaller parts, but nevertheless is part of the group.
It’s them. They’re so clever at the improv side of it. Whenever that happens, stuff suddenly happens.
And they’re very, very clever at working it around. Yeah. Anyway, so the Greeks.
So we knew we wanted that play and they wanted to come. So that was good. And what to do with that?
Kate Besworth, who wrote a piece that we were going to do in our 2020 season called Done, Undone. And all about Shakespeare, do Shakespeare, not do Shakespeare. And well, we know what happened in 2020.
The season was canceled. So in 21, we asked Kate to make it a film. And so we produced a film of Done, Undone, which was, you know, something to do in the pandemic.
We did that. But we had a relationship with Kate, not only as a playwright, now she and Ming Hudson, who directed The Antigone in our 19 season when we did Shakespeare in Love. And they’d become tight girlfriends and had come up with this idea of let’s adapt Antigone.
And so could be a small cast. And we had a small cast for The Goblins. And because of finances these days, we used to have cast of 10, 12 or more in that, in the Campbell Theatre.
But now two, three, four, five, top weight. Until we recover ourselves and recover the audience that we used to have, we used to have audience of 100,000 pre-pandemic, 80,000 now. And that’s a million dollar gap.
We have a budget of $10 million. So that’s a serious number. And so we have to try and save money wherever we can.
So anyway, having said all that, that’s how we thought, well, we’ll do the two Greeks together. We’ll just make it a little Greek season in there, something different. It won’t be next year.
We’re not always going to do Greek plays. It’s not happening next year. We’re doing other plays next year.
Yeah.
[Phil Rickaby]
You know, my question was going to be like, which came first, Antigone or Goblin Oedipus? But they complement each other so well. You were mentioning the numbers, and I think one of the things that we keep hearing from theatre companies is that, is the attempt to how do we get back to the audience that we had before the pandemic?
Audiences haven’t come back in equal numbers to pre-pandemic. It is the challenge of all theatres, I think, to recover the audience and to bring them back. Are you seeing an increase?
Are you seeing a slow return? Are you seeing the numbers increase or is it plateauing out? I’m just always curious about what theatres are seeing in terms of the audience.
And before we talk about getting them to return, what’s the current state?
[Christopher Gaze]
I’m not going to say a flat line. We’ll have 80,000 again this year, as we did last year. But I’m very much looking forward to the time when I can be talking with you and saying, they’re coming back.
We had 87 last year. We hope to have 92 next year and on and on and build that audience to the heights they were before. But for us, everyone has a marvelous time.
It’s not because they’re not enjoying it, they’re loving it. But things have changed. We’ll never get back those 20,000 people, by the way, in my view.
They’re gone. We need 20,000 new people. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[Phil Rickaby]
I think that is ultimately the question. Accepting that percentage of people who we’re not getting back are gone, and how do we bring in the new audience, the audience that hasn’t been before? How do we capture new theatre goers?
And I think that is a long-term conversation to have for every theatre company. I assume with the plays that you’re doing, that the people bring their kids as part of the experience. And as well as doing nighttime wine and bar kind of things, there are also events that they bring their children.
How essential are those family units coming to Bard on the Beach for the future of the company?
[Christopher Gaze]
Well, of course, it is the future of the company, and it is the enlightened moms and dads, grandparents, uncles, aunts, whoever bring the children, they think it’s important that the kids should be exposed to this kind of thing, culture in general. And frankly, whether it’s Bard, whether it’s the symphony, the opera, the ballet, art galleries, these are the riches of life. You know this, but that needs to be held nationally as an icon of good living, the soul of the city, of the arts, truly.
And it’s never regarded that way by the funders. They do their best. I’m talking about the city, the province, the government, the Canada Council.
They do their best with all the good reasons, but they have a certain amount of money, and they give it out in the way they give it out. But it needs to be a national sensibility, how important these things are in our lives. So we’ve expanded up.
We used to have two family days. This year, we have three family days. So it’s a wonderful thing where you bring your two little children, and you can have a baby in arms.
You can have a four-year-old or a seven, nine, 11, whatever year old. And there’s also in the Bard village, which can house a thousand people before you come in to one of the theatres, there’s all sorts of activities to attract young people and give them a good time before they come in food and stuff and tattoos and photographs and stuff to play with and goodness knows what. And then the show, and it’s unusual for the actors.
But curiously, I have attended, and I read the reports from the shows. It’s a funny old thing. You thought, you’re going to bring a baby in?
And because the bottom age here in regular performances is six years old. But you think, well, a baby’s going to come in. It’s going to burst into tears in 10 minutes time if it hasn’t already.
But I think that’s fantastic. They would become sort of transfixed by the stage and all these people moving about and talking and some of them singing sometimes and it’s colourful and there’s something for them to look at. And it really goes along very smoothly.
Anyway, that’s the way of bringing kids in. And of course, we do lots of performances for students in June and September and 10,000 of them. And we just cram them full.
And it’s very important. And a lot of Bard education, the brand of Bard education is a very big part of what we do, by the way. And that’s a heavily funded part of our fundraising.
Why would you give money to Barn and Beach? Well, you might give it for many reasons. One of them might be, I think education is important.
And I think accessibility to what you do, what we do, this might help. And your $500, your $5,000, $50,000, whatever it is person might give, makes a massive difference because then we can, that money then helps us to say, well, you can all come for nothing. Come on in.
It’s all paid for. And we do a lot of that.
[Phil Rickaby]
It’s so important because there are a lot of barriers to people coming to the theatre. I think sometimes that is one of the things that I think stands in the theatre’s way, is somebody works for the full day. Then you want them to go and see a show.
So, do they go home and change? Then they have to go home, change. Do they have dinner at home?
Do they go out for dinner? And then how much time is that? What time does the show start?
Are they going to have time to do all the things? What about the kids? What about getting home?
There’s so many questions. And sometimes it’s just a matter of, well, it’s easier to just stay home.
[Christopher Gaze]
I know. I know. I know.
And of course, everything you just said and the lure of the fact that the television, as opposed to 30 years ago or less than that now, way less, where you can watch cheers and this and that, commercials. Now, you can watch anything you want. And it costs you, if you have a couple of streaming services, it’s going to cost you less than $30 a month.
And what’s a 30 ticket cost? What does parking cost? What does a dinner cost?
And a bed, a babysitter, a dog looker after, whatever, the parking. And so, these things all start to inform people about, especially most people are on budget of some kind. And so, it just seems easier not to, but I hate saying every word I’ve just said.
But these are real things, real things, but we’ve got to make sure that when they come, what we do is worth it.
[Phil Rickaby]
Number one, I think that’s the thing is you need to give people something they feel is worth it. I also think one of the things just generally in the theatre is we have to relearn how to talk about the theatre, because we know that people will pay for an experience. People will line up for an experience.
They will line up to take a picture with a thing. They will hear, for a while, they were paying like $50 a pop or more to go see Projected Van Gogh on giant walls. So, we know that people pay for an experience.
And so, if we could communicate to them what the experience of theatre is and how to bring them in, how that is something you can get, it’s better than Projected Van Gogh. It’s so much more than that, that if we could communicate that experience, that maybe they will come for the experience and then become lifelong theatre goers.
[Christopher Gaze]
Yeah, that’s right. Very well said. And one of the reasons, I mean, I can give all sorts of sad stories about why we’re not completely filling up our theatres like we could fill them up, but we do very, very well.
I mean, 80,000 people is a lot of people, is a lot of people. And we’ve become one of the biggest theatre companies in the country. In four months, we have 80,000 people, June, August, September.
It’s astonishing. But it’s a thing. It’s a thing.
[Phil Rickaby]
I want to get to your Order of Canada, and I want to save that, because that’s a big deal. I think we should close with that. I do want to talk a little bit about your theatre origin story, because you, I don’t want to say that you didn’t grow up in a theatre family, because you did in a way, because your parents were theatrical people.
They loved the theatre and they participated in the theatre, but they were not professional theatre people. So a twofold question for you, what was your first exposure to theatre? Because I know that your first production, you were six, I think.
But what made you want to make theatre your life’s work?
[Christopher Gaze]
I think, well, my mother’s intense love of it all. I remember they were part of an amateur dramatic society. My father was chair of it.
He was a businessman, a beautiful man. My mother was secretary. It was called the Whips, which stood for the West Horsley thumping players.
But they had great leadership in that amateur company. And there were a couple of people that had access to the West End and had been involved at high levels in the theatre. They lived in the country where we lived.
And they were part of the Whips and put on shows there. And so when I was just a young guy, say eight, to be able to be in the and watch my mom and dad from behind the curtain there, watch them on the stage. And then the director of the production allowing me to pull the, we call them the tabs or the curtains.
And it was a huge job for me. It was unbelievable. I mean, who’s pulling the curtains?
Me. And she trusted that I’d do it right because I was just crazy about it. But I watched my parents.
And I remember being, I think I came home on, we used to call them exayats, from boarding school for half a dozen hours on a Sunday. And my mother picked me up and she said, dad’s down at the village hall putting up a set. And so I went in through the crash door thing and I went in and this, just a village hall, flat floor and seats that were just put in a line and a stage.
We’d seen these places, lots of them. And they’re institutional. Anyway, so there I was amongst these chairs.
They’d turn the lights down. The lighting person was sorting out the lights. And it was in the days when you had the lights right in front of the stage, they’re shining up at the actors and the ones shining down.
And they were blue and red and yellow. And it was shining onto the stage. And all the dads were on stage, putting wallpaper on flats.
And anyway, somebody came alongside and said, you like this, don’t you, Christopher? And I said, yes, isn’t it wonderful? And they said, you know, some people do that for a living.
And I said, what do you mean? They said, well, they do that for their work. And I said, do you mean they get paid to do that?
He said, yes. And I remember thinking, that’s what I’m going to do. So it was a big moment.
And shortly thereafter, my father, I asked him what it would take to get into the family firm WHGays and Sons, which was quite a big company, big company. And he said, well, you need to study civil engineering, go to university. And I remember thinking, oh, my God, I just can’t do that.
I was not a good student. I just wanted to be in the theatre all my life. I’ve just been devoted to it, passionate about it.
And here we are today, all these years later.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. I want to list off some honors that have been bestowed on you, because they’re nothing to sneeze at. You have the Order of Canada, you’re a member of the Order of the British Empire, the Order of British Columbia, Canada’s Meritorious Service Medal.
What does it mean to you to receive these honors?
[Christopher Gaze]
Well, June was an extraordinary month for me to be in the King’s Birthday Honors List and receive the MBE. My memoir came out June 2nd. The MBE, June 13th, the Order of Canada, June 26th.
I mean, it was fantastic. And what does it mean to me? I’m just deeply grateful that my contribution has been good for the theatre.
We serve the theatre, not ourselves. We serve the theatre. And that’s all I really want to do, was to make it happen and make it marvelous.
And I am deeply honored, deeply grateful that I have been recognized. Of course, I am deeply touched by it, especially at this time in my life, that to be told that, hey, you’ve done something that was special. Well done, and thank you.
And so I say to all those people who helped me be where I am today, thank you. I could not have done this alone. No man is an island.
A lot of people have lifted me up, pushed me on, believed in me, stood in for me, spoken for me, done all the kind and good things in life. And I’m deeply grateful for everything that’s come my way. I have led largely, I know darkness, I know it, but I have had what might be described as a charmed life.
And there it is.
[Phil Rickaby]
Just as we start to reach the end of our conversation, we should talk about, you mentioned the memoir a couple of times, The Road to Bard, A Legacy of Shakespeare on Canada’s West Coast. You mentioned Douglas Campbell had wanted to write his memoir. It’s a big deal to sit down and write your life.
Forgetting for a second of all of the memory work and trying to remember the important things in your life and the things that happened, how did the memoir just logistically come about for you?
[Christopher Gaze]
Well, of course, it began in the, not the first year of the pandemic, because that was just a, maybe for all of us, certainly for me, was a dreadful shock, dreadful shock. So many people you’re going to employ and all the things that you did day in, day out, suddenly it didn’t happen. And it was just so wretchedly weird.
Anyway, the next year came around, 21, and I could see some time was opening up for me. And I had thought for years, who is going to archive this? Who’s going to tell the story of how all this began?
And I knew, I felt responsible. I thought it has to be you, Christopher, because if you leave it to somebody else, they’re not going to know how this, you tried to find it out from me earlier, how this all began, how did it begin? Well, I know, because there I was, it was this idea.
And so I thought, I have to write this book. So I’d been a president of the Vancouver club, which incidentally was kind of an unusual thing for an actor. They certainly, the Vancouver club had never had an artist, someone like me as president, and they’re always lawyers and doctors and all that sort of thing.
But here I was, and perhaps one of the most social men in the city, showing up just about everywhere for all sorts of special occasions. There I was president of the Vancouver club, and they didn’t have one event in the year I was president. Anyway, there was a chap called Roger Holden who was writing speeches for me that I would do on a video like we’re doing now.
And I would talk to the 2000 members of the Vancouver club. And I liked his speeches very much. And so when I started to, I talked to my friends, one or two who know writers who’ve made a profession that way.
How do you start these things? And anyway, I suddenly thought about, I thought about Roger, and I thought, well, I’ll ask him. And he said, well, I can help you.
And of course, I had to finance all this. And don’t think anyone who’s watching this, unless you’re Margaret Atwood or a person of national status, no one’s going to pay you to write a book anymore. You pay.
And so that’s what happens these days. So it’s an expensive proposition, but I believed in it. So I did it.
And Roger, I would go on a Zoom like this, and we’d talk to each other. And he would say, well, I’ve got to press record now. Tell me about this or that or the other.
And I’d chatter on like we’re chattering now. And then he would transpose that and send it back to me. And then I would fix it in my own voice, sort it.
I know how to write. So I made it my own voice. And that’s the best thing of this book.
I hope you find that having read the book and now talking to me, the book sounds like me. And I’m very pleased about that. But anyway, it took me five years from that spring of 21 to the spring or June of 26 to get it finished and get it done.
But I got a lot of important things done. I missed the MBE, by the way, and the Order of Canada a few weeks, but whatever, that’s fine.
[Phil Rickaby]
I mean, you couldn’t know those were coming. That’s fabulous. And I will say it does sound it does sound like you.
So good.
[Christopher Gaze]
Thank you. And it’s an archive of Canadian theatre of over well, 51 years since I got off that ship in Montreal.
[Phil Rickaby]
I think that that kind of thing is so important because as I think about, you know, as somebody who for the last 10 years, I’ve done nothing. I talk about theatre a lot with a lot of people. And I think about the history of theatre in this country.
It is very difficult to find those archival stories about how the theatre got started. You have to dig for them. So it’s good to have it directly from the source written down so that people now can look back and see how this important institution started.
It’s so important. So thank you for that.
[Christopher Gaze]
Well, thank you. That’s nice of you to say that. And if anyone is watching is interested, by the way, this is not a moneymaker, by the way.
And that’s not part of it. But if you’d like to buy it, of course, you can buy it off Amazon. It’s published by Harbour Publishing here in British Columbia.
And you can buy bookstores here in BC. But you can find it anywhere in the world, frankly. Yeah, it’s true.
[Phil Rickaby]
Well, Christopher, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. It’s been a joy talking to you.
[Christopher Gaze]
It’s been a great pleasure. Thank you so much for your interest and your contribution to the theatre in Canada, too.
[Phil Rickaby]
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of Stageworthy. Before I get into who the guest is next week, let me tell you about Patreon because I can’t do this show without the people who’ve chosen to back me on Patreon. It costs money to do a show like this.
It costs money to have a website, it costs money to host all the audio files so they can be distributed to all the podcast listening places. Editing software costs money, transcripts cost money, image creation software costs money. There’s money everywhere.
And the fact that there are people who have believed in this show enough to to back me on Patreon is so gratifying. It just tells me that I’m doing something right. I recently looked at the show number.
This is going to be episode 478. That means that my 500th episode is going to be coming up in the new year. And that’s kind of mind blowing to me.
But also, it’s something to be proud of. And also, I kind of want to set up Stageworthy for the future to make sure that I can keep doing this and to make that happen. I need more backers to help me make this show.
So if you were able to do that, if you would like to be able to do that, please go to patreon.com slash stageworthy and become a patron patrons get early access to episodes. We’ll have some conversations about things that are happening in the theatre world. And the more people who join the Patreon, the more I will be able to offer to my patrons.
And for those of you who don’t want to commit to an ongoing donation or can’t, there’s a new link in the show notes where you can find a way that you can leave me a one time donation. And so if you want to help me to make this show, you can either use Patreon or that other link. And I would be grateful for any support that you’re able to give.
All right, let’s talk about next week’s guest because next week’s guest is Sherry Flett. Sherry is a 34 year veteran at the Shaw Festival. And this year, she she’s playing rat in Wind of the Willows among other things.
But we really got into it on Wind of the Willows. It’s a wonderful conversation. I can’t wait for you to hear it next week on stageworthy.
