At 61 years old, Keith Alessi had done well for himself.
The Detroit-born trained accountant had moved up the corporate world, running companies in the United States and Canada, and had even retired once before, in 2000. A coal company brought him back to work, in Edmonton, but in 2016, he resigned for good, and looked forward to all the time he’d have to learn to play at least one of the dozens of banjos he’d collected over the years.
Two weeks later, he was diagnosed with stage three esophageal cancer and given a year to live.
“It was, of course, a shock,” he says. “I’d never been seriously sick a whole day in my life.”
Alessi moved to Virginia, so his wife could be with family as she cared for him. There, he joined a circle of musicians, which brought “emotional and physical healing. And as time passes, people are saying, ‘Keith, you need to tell your story.’ Where am I going to tell the story? Well, anybody can enter a Fringe Festival, right? You just put your name in a hat.”
In 2018, Alessi put his name in the Toronto fringe hat, which had “1,100 acts vying for 110 positions — and we were the first name out,” he says. Weeks later, the show got picked from the Edmonton and Vancouver fringe festival hats, too. “So then it’s like, whoa — we need to write a show!”
Alessi had met then-Edmonton-based playwright Erika Conway while working in town, so “I called her up and said, ‘What do I do?'”
“The first thing I said is that he needed to get the story out — just write it all down,” Conways says. “And I’m a creative, so when you hear write this story down, usually it takes months, like you’re trudging through water. But [Alessi] called me three days later and was like, ‘I’m done! Now what?'”
The pair looked through the story to “unravel the important parts” and make it theatrical, “which is different than what [Alessi] wrote because his background is business, so the story was very linear — like, this happened, then this happened, then this happened. But we got into the nitty gritty of why it happened. What made you think that way, and what were the feelings behind that? And Keith has just been so vulnerable in a way that makes this show beautifully authentic and connect with audiences.”
Audiences connected early, back when Alessi — who had never performed in any capacity — admits the show was still in its rough stages.
“After the very first show, people came out of their seats with their own stories about their cancer journeys. So we found that we collected a following. This show was supposed to be a one and done. But we’re about to do our 400th performance of this thing. And we’ve seen 30-40,000 people over this five year period. It’s a show about the healing power of the arts, the healing power of music, and it engages audiences of all ages everywhere we’ve gone.”
The show — a one-man telling of Alessi’s journey interspersed with banjo songs (“I’m an intermediate player now,” Alessi understates) — has gone around the world, including multiple sold-out runs at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and off-broadway in New York. But the show doesn’t just entertain and uplift — it also plays a role in saving people’s lives.
“Since day one, we’ve contributed 100 per cent of our box office to cancer, music and theatre charities around the world,” Alessi says. “And the reason we’re coming back to Edmonton is we’re going to raise our one millionth dollar for charity on this month, and we thought that we wanted to do that in Edmonton versus some other place. At the end of every show, I do a count for how long it’s been since my surgery, and on opening night of this run, it will be nine years to the day.”
Alessi and Conway say one of the messages of the show is that “it shouldn’t take a cancer diagnosis to get you to pursue things that you really want to do,” whether that’s art, music, or however people want to enrich their lives. Because, Alessi says, “When you’re dealt a bad hand, your options are to just give up or to do something about it. It’s not like I’m a hero — these were just my options, and giving up didn’t seem like a good one. But there are times where you have just the most incredible survivor guilt, when you see kids with cancer that you know aren’t going to make it. I’m not going to go super spiritual here, but I’d like to think that there’s a reason why I’m doing this. I just turned 70. A lot of guys my age are just kicking back and playing golf, but I’m out here sharing this with people, and having them share their stories with me.”
Share in the joy and help raise the millionth dollar for charity, February 19 to 23 at Workshop West’s Playwrights’ Theatre.
