For 20 years, beloved author, humourist and CBC broadcaster Stuart McLean spent the Christmas season touring Vinyl Cafe, a live performance of his iconic CBC radio show, to theatres across the country. In his warm, steady voice, McLean would read a selection of his short stories about a fictional Canadian family: Dave, Morley and their children, Sam and Stephanie.
Those performances offered listeners a reliable escape. McLean wrote slapstick humour at an expert level, crafting earnest, funny tales in which the stakes are low (a destroyed turkey, mixed-up punch bowls at a party, trouble at an automatic carwash), but the emotional resonance is high.
When McLean died in 2017, fans felt a noticeable absence in their seasonal traditions – and that’s where Vinyl Cafe: The Musical will pick up.
Debuting at The Citadel on Nov. 8 and running until Dec. 7, the play weaves together two of McLean’s best-loved holiday stories, “Dave Cooks the Turkey” and “Rashida, Amir and the Great Gift-Giving,” bringing the characters to life for the first time.
“There is a nostalgic, sort of warm, community feeling about his stories that we found tone wise,” says director Daryl Cloran. “We want to make these characters true to people’s experience with them as they heard the stories from Stuart.”
Cloran first approached Jess Milton, producer of Vinyl Cafe (which aired on CBC radio weekly for 22 years) and McLean’s long-time collaborator, about creating a musical nearly five years ago only to discover that she and McLean had already discussed the concept prior to his death.
“Jess really kept what Stuart would’ve thought of the show in mind throughout the process,” he says. “I think he’d be thrilled because we’re treating the stories and the characters with so much love and respect and joy,” Cloran says. While songs were never integrated into McLean’s stories, his shows were inherently musical, thanks to the up-and-coming Canadian acts he regularly recruited to tour with him.
For The Citadel’s production, songwriting team Colleen Dauncey and Akiva Romer-Segal crafted “catchy and bright earworms” that are integrated into the story. In one scene, Morley is lamenting that her life is like a train, dragging kids from place to place all year, managing the household and barrelling towards the last stop of Christmas dinner – only to find the train back at the first stop when the year turns over again. The pair translated the sentiment into the song “I Am a Train.”
“That was a moment where we knew that they were exactly the right fit to write the music for the show because it’s a beautiful song,” Cloran says. “It encompasses Stuart’s story and Morley’s sentiment in a musical way. You want songs to lift the story and lift the characters. They’ve done such a beautiful job of that.”
With a built-in fanbase, tickets for the initial shows sold quickly, prompting the theatre to add an extra week. While nothing is confirmed yet, theatres across the country have also been inquiring about touring the musical.
“The ticket sales have not only been great, but also we’ve had so many people buying tickets from outside of Alberta,” Cloran says. “There are definitely Stuart McLean fans flying in from other parts of Canada to see this.”
Vinyl Cafe: The Musical runs from Nov. 8 to Dec. 7 at The Citadel.
