For 65 years, the stories of New Westminster have been told here. Not just on the expansive stage with the sweeping red curtains, but in the hallways and the rehearsal rooms and the lobby and the broad centre aisle.
Art has happened here. Art and music and dance and politics and education and community and family. Life has happened here.
This is the Massey Theatre – and it’s celebrating its 65th birthday in style with Homecoming: These Glorious Years, a gala event on Sunday, June 14.
The event includes an evening packed full of performers who have graced the stage throughout the years – headlined by such well-known names as Charlotte Diamond and Jeff Hyslop. They’ll perform alongside a host of Royal City Musical Theatre performers, with revivals of some favourite big production numbers from past musicals, along with Royal City Youth Ballet, Goh Ballet and renowned Indian classical performers Cassius Khan and Amika Kushwaha.
TheRecord talked to a few of the evening’s performers about what the Massey Theatre has meant to them.
CHARLOTTE DIAMOND
Diamond – who’s now, of course, known everywhere as a popular children’s entertainer with 13 recordings and a string of awards to her credit – is thrilled to be returning for the occasion.
Her association with the theatre goes back to 1969, when she first started as a French teacher at New Westminster Secondary School. At the time, she’d bring her guitar into the classroom and incorporate music into French classes. Then she got involved with the choral program and, soon, with the school’s major musicals.
Diamond recalls she pregnant with her first son when she helped stage Oliver, playing Mrs. Sowerberry and serving as vocal director, and she later worked on Showboat.She also kept up her work with the school’s choral program. To this day, she’s still in touch with members of her last choir, the New Westminstrels.
It seems that Diamond’s children were fated to be involved with the Massey, if only tangentially: it was while she was conducting her last concert for the school in 1978 that she went into labour with her younger son.
“It was terrifying and exhilarating at the same time,” Diamond says, laughing that she’s pretty sure the tempos were a little faster than usual during that particular choral performance.
That was the evening of Dec. 14; her son was safely born the morning of the 15th.
Pregnancy and labour stories aside, Diamond has nothing but good memories of the Massey Theatre.
“It was just such a treat to be the choir teacher across the hall from the Massey,” she said, recalling the number of times she led her choir across the hall to the stage to perform in the impressive 1,200-seat venue.
“It was just, to me, exhilarating to be on that stage,” she says. “That association with such a beautiful big theatre, it made all of us involved with it grow by leaps and bounds.”
The performing and production skills she picked up in those days serve her well to this day, she notes – as she and her Hug Bug Band tour the continent, she’ll always be carrying on the legacy that began in New Westminster.
She’s excited to be coming back to the stage, where she’s expecting to find many of her former students among the parents – and, yes, grandparents – in the audience, strolling down memory lane with her and singing along to Four Hugs a Dayand I Am a Pizza.
“Whenever I return to New Westminster, it feels like coming home.”
CASSIUS KHAN
“Home” is a word that keeps coming up when you talk about the Massey Theatre, it seems.
Cassius Khan is a relative newcomer to the venue – his association with the theatre dates back to 2008, when he first moved to New Westminster and he was invited to take part in a performance celebrating the city’s 150th anniversary.
Khan is a renowned Indian classical musician, a tabla player who possesses the unique skill of being able to play the traditional drums and sing at the same time.
The Queensborough resident and his wife, Amika Kushwaha – herself an acclaimed kathak dancer – were immediately embraced by the Massey Theatre staff.
“The people are fantastic,” Khan says. “(Executive director) Jessica Schneider is an awesome human being.”
Khan says their relationship with the Massey staff has quickly become a family bond.
“It feels like you’re in your own home when you perform in their theatre,” he says. “It’s just such a warm place.”
Khan and Kushwaha have brought their international festival of classical Indian and dance, the Mushtari Begum Festival, to the stage at the Massey three years running; this fall, the fourth edition will take to the stage again on Sept. 26.
Khan is thrilled to have the chance to bring their music to the stage for the Homecoming gala. The husband-and-wife duo will be joined by sitar player Sharanjeet Singh Mand for the occasion, offering up what Khan describes as a “blistering” composition that expresses the rain in dance and song.
Many in the audience may not be familiar with classical Indian music, and Khan is looking forward to demonstrating just how much energy and passion it offers.
“It gives them an awareness, and hopefully an audience for our festival,” he says, adding he’s looking forward to the night of performances.
“We were so happy we could be a part of it,” he said. “We’re very thankful that they thought of us for such a prestigious event.”
COLLEEN WINTON
The Massey Theatre is equally home to another familiar local face – Colleen Winton.
“I’m excited to see the show myself,” says an enthusiastic Winton, the veteran musical theatre performer who was most recently seen on the Massey stage starring in Hello Dolly!She’ll reprise her star turn in a revival of Before the Parade Passes By, complete with costumes and chorus and a surprise twist (her lips are sealed).
Winton’s association with the Massey goes decades back, to her days as a student at NWSS, when her primary focus was band. In the years since, she served on the theatre’s board for some 18 years and has performed there many a time.
Asked about a favourite Massey memory, Winton smiles and recounts when she starred in RCMT’s South Pacific. At the time, her youngest son was six months old. She has vivid memories of the chorus of burly men strutting their stuff in There Is Nothing Like A Dame– then “cooing and gooing” at the baby.
That baby, incidentally, is the now-21-year-old Gower Roberts, who happens to be on the technical staff at Massey. His 25-year-old brother Sayer is now a professional musical theatre performer and has also graced the stage several times, including starring in RCMT’s Oklahoma!in 2013, and has also worked off and on as an usher at the theatre.
Both boys grew up as Massey kids, with heavy involvement in the NWSS music program. Add in dad Russell Roberts, another veteran actor, and you have a family that just can’t escape its ties to the Massey.
But for Winton, the Massey is about far more than just the performances.
It’s about events like all-candidates’ meetings, or a nurses’ rally for Royal Columbian Hospital, or high school graduations. And there was another of Winton’s favourites – the time the theatre offered a big-screen viewing of the 2010 Olympics opening ceremonies.
Those kind of events, she says, have made the Massey special.
“It is truly cultural, in terms of both arts and the political life of the city,” Winton says. “This sort of event where the community rallies together – you need a big space. … Over the years the Massey has attempted to serve the community in every way.”
And there’s the very act of coming together as an audience. Whatever the occasion, Winton says, just wandering down the centre aisle of the theatre towards your seat is a chance to catch up with neighbours and friends and past contacts from all parts of life.
“I love the big centre aisle at the Massey,” she says.
“If you’re attending a community event, you see everybody,” she says – citing a recent West Coast Tap Dance Collective evening where she ran into one of her son’s former tap teachers and another former schoolteacher whose daughter was onstage. “New Westminster is such a community, you see your friends and neighbours. … You just don’t find that other places.”
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Homecoming: These Glorious Years is onstage Sunday, June 14 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $15 regular, $12 for students and seniors, $5 for children 12 and under. Buy at www.ticketsnw.ca or call 604-521-5050.
