ON STAGE
What: A Wonderheads Christmas Carol
Where: McPherson Playhouse, 3 Centennial Square
When: Tuesday, Dec. 17 (7:30 p.m.) and Wednesday, Dec. 18 (7:30 p.m.)
Tickets: $34.75 ($26.75) from the Royal McPherson box office, by phone at 250-386-6121, or rmts.bc.ca
Note: A Wonderheads Christmas Carol will also be performed Dec. 12 at the Tidemark Theatre in Campbell River, Dec. 14 at the Cowichan Performing Arts Centre in Duncan and Dec. 15 at the Port Theatre in Nanaimo.
When Andrew Phoenix and Kate Braidwood, co-creators of Victoria’s Wonderheads Theatre, are asked to explain the inspiration behind the company’s signature full-face masks, both laugh. It’s a question they’ve had a hard time answering many times before.
Wonderheads Theatre calls to mind the physical theatre of clowns and mimes, along with Victorian-era melodrama and Italian commedia dell’arte. The range of influences grows with each production — Braidwood and Phoenix are now incorporating puppets of their own creation into their dialogue-free performances.
“We latched on to the idea of mixing a couple of different mask styles together to make this cartoonish thing,” Phoenix says.
“It was a mash-up of larval masks, which are very large and bulbous, with more character full-face masks. I’ve always been interested in silent film and short cartoons that are based on the visual aspect, not words.”
Braidwood says it’s tricky to sum up in one sentence what inspired the masks. “It does have European roots, but there are also elements of Kabuki [a traditional form of Japanese theatre] in there as well.”
The papier-mâché masks created by Braidwood take cues from clay sculpture, along with the larval masks pioneered by French theatre icon Jacques Lecoq, who took his inspiration from carnival masks made popular decades earlier in Switzerland.
Phoenix and Braidwood cite a range of reference points, from the Pixar film Up and Jim Henson’s Muppets to Japanese animation auteur Hayao Miyazaki.
Performances by Wonderheads Theatre, including A Wonderheads Christmas Carol, which had its world première Dec. 3 in Courtenay, have drawn raves since the couple founded the company 10 years ago. They have been refining their approach in the years since, to the point where the performance and production quality is through the roof.
The husband-and-wife team of Phoenix (who plays Bob Cratchit and Mr. Fezziwig in their retelling of the Charles Dickens classic) and Braidwood (as Ebenezer Scrooge) tries to ensure the production appeals to theatregoers of all ages and faculties.
Not surprisingly, it’s their biggest production to date, both in terms of the size of the travelling caravan and number of performances.
They have already performed in Courtenay and Salt Spring Island, and are set to begin another series of dates on Vancouver Island today at the Tidemark Theatre in Campbell River (the Island trek concludes next week with performances Tuesday and Wednesday at the McPherson Playhouse).
The amount of gear needed to stage A Wonderheads Christmas Carol — which also includes puppets up to 12 feet in height — requires the couple to tow a U-Haul trailer behind their SUV, followed by another vehicle carrying stage manager Carolyn Moon and additional performer Jessica Hickman.
It’s a relatively skeleton crew for such a big performance, Phoenix says. “The choreography and orchestration backstage is a whole other element the audience doesn’t get to see. There’s 20 characters, including 14 masks and six puppets. It’s the most full show we’ve ever done. This feels like a cast of 20. When we put the mask on our face, that’s only one element. The physicality for Kate as Scrooge, who is hunched over all the time, it takes a toll on your body.”
The couple’s brand of theatre unique has roots in Northern California’s Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre, where they met. They were based in Portland, Oregon, until three years ago, when they made the move to Victoria.
They were familiar with the city before the move, having earned several awards at the Victoria Fringe Festival for their previous productions, The Wilds, Grim and Fischer, LOON and The Middle of Everywhere.
Relocating to Vancouver Island has been a boon for their creativity — Braidwood credits the Greater Victoria theatre community with inspiring A Wonderheads Christmas Carol and The Wilds, both of which were created in Victoria.
“I went to the University of Victoria and the city has always felt like a home for me,” says Braidwood, who was born in Vancouver.
“It was a natural fit for us. It has felt like home really quickly.”
Phoenix, who went to school in Texas, and Braidwood will tour several productions next year — Grim and Fischer in Atlantic Canada and The Wilds in the Okanagan-Kootenay area. Extensive touring in Canada is planned for 2020, which could be the company’s biggest year to date in terms of exposure, according to Phoenix.
“We’ve always spent a lot of our time in the Pacific Northwest and in Western Canada. We’ve never reached out much further than that, so we’re the opposite of most companies and artists who branch out as far as they can go. We’ve realigned our thoughts to become a Canadian company, so that we can reach as much of the country as possible. That was a purposeful thing on our part, rather than to continue trying to do the cross-border thing.”
