ON STAGE
What: The (Post) Mistress
Where: belfry.bc.ca
When: May 11-16
Tickets: $25 from 250-385-6815 or tickets.belfry.bc.ca
Artists trudging forward in the Canadian arts community often lament their lack of downtime, and for good reason. Making a living as a creative type in this country is a full-time, all-encompassing endeavour.
Cut to 2021. During the pandemic, free time has been a constant, rather than a luxury, according to Cree/Métis singer, dancer, actor and musician Krystle Pederson.
“Usually artists get so busy that sometimes we don’t have time to do the things we want to work on,” Pederson, 38, said recently from her home in Saskatoon.
“I was super-appreciative last year to have some time to write music and focus on that and have a bit of a break. But by the end of the year, I was just dying to be in a show or some kind of rehearsal or something. It has been off and on. I’m really grateful for the time off, but I’m also really missing being in a rehearsal room and being with people and being with an audience.”
Pederson, who was a contestant on Canadian Idol in 2007, has returned to music in recent months, which she hopes will result in a forthcoming EP. She has performed some sporadic online concerts during the pandemic, but her first big production of late was a recording of The (Post) Mistress, a one-woman musical from award-winning Manitoba playwright Tomson Highway (The Rez Sisters) that opens virtually at The Belfry on Tuesday.
“It was very strange,” Pederson said of the production, which was filmed over two days at Winnipeg’s Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre in March. “You don’t get the reactions of the audience. There’s no laughter and there’s no applause. It was just very foreign. But still, trying to push through the performance was very exciting.”
The taping put Pederson back in touch with the work of Highway, a longtime collaborator. Pederson was cast in earlier productions of the musical, with Highway on piano, and starred in 2019’s Lynx Lamour Goes to Nashville, a Cree musical about a country-music hopeful that Highway created specifically for Pederson.
She stars in The (Post) Mistress as Marie-Louise Painchaud, a 1960s-era postmistress in the fictional Ontario town of Lovely on the rural outskirts of another fictional city, Complexity. It has a comedic side — Painchaud has something of a supernatural ability to read mail through sealed envelopes — but Pederson says the show is about love (platonic, and otherwise) more than anything else.
“It’s such a beautiful story about family and community, and how we connect to each other. I think that even though it’s digital, it’s still a great piece that we need to bring out to the world at this time.”
She served in the role in 2015 as the local understudy for star Patricia Cano during a Saskatoon run. Cano was a revelation during her time in The (Post) Mistress, and recorded the songs for the official soundtrack in 2014, which earned a Juno Award nomination for Aboriginal album of the year.
Pederson also drew raves for her hometown performances, but she feels more confident now, having had six years of additional experience.
“I find that I’m more comfortable now and have more room to kind of explore as an actor and have more fun,” she said.
The musical deals with a form of communication that some thought was not long for this world, but ironically, the postal service appears to be more relevant than ever. Mail traffic is at an all-time high, thanks to the pandemic-boosted popularity of online shopping through outlets like Amazon, and life in a small town, where viruses pose less of a threat, is more appealing than it was pre-pandemic, Pederson said.
“I remember having a pen pal and writing letters all the time when I was younger. Now, you can FaceTime. But there’s always that sense of community and building strengths with the people that you care about. We need to connect to our loved ones, especially during times like this.”
