It’s been somewhat of a dream of Heather Gordon Murphy to do this for some time now.
After her sister wrote a successful show back in 1998 called Tyee Town, performed by the Shoreline Musical Society, Gordon Murphy had wanted to revisit the idea of making a theatre performance out of various historical figures and events throughout Campbell River’s history to share with the public.
“Since my sister did that show, it’s something that I’ve always wanted to do – to take it and re-jig it into something we could present at Spirit Square as just a nice little show for people who remember some of this stuff that happened and the people involved and maybe for some people who maybe didn’t know these pieces of our history,” Gordon Murphy says.
Last year they presented “bits of it” at their Summer Theatre in the Square event, with the hopes that she would get the go ahead – possibly thanks to a grant due to it being Canada’s 150th birthday this year – to do a full-on production of the piece this year.
That grant came through, and here she is, performing the piece for four shows, two Fridays in a row at Spirit Square.
The show is made up of a series of vignettes highlighting places, people and events from Campbell River’s history, interspersed with songs written especially for the show.
“You’ve got everything from the Spit Camp with the Painters and the Petersons, Captain Vancouver and some of his people who some of the things are named after around here – that’s a fun little vignette. We’ve got one that’s set at a logging camp, there’s one that’s set at the Beehive Café, we’ve got one that’s set at the Willow’s Hotel, one is a surveyor and a trader talking about Strathcona Park. It’s going to be super fun, and I think it will really resonate with people.”
One of the coolest aspects of the show, she says, is the fact that it’s not a bunch of scenes that are completely fabricated for entertainment. A lot of research has gone in to make the show as historically accurate as it can be.
“All the stories actually happened. It’s all been archivally researched, just re-written a little bit.”
There is also a sprinkling of contemporary written word pieces submitted by the public interspersed between those historic scenes.
“I’ve asked people to give me two or three sentences about why you came and why you stayed,” Gordon Murphy says. “And they’ve been coming in from people who have been here forever and people who just got here, and they’ll be read out – anonymously – between the vignettes by the actors. I’ve got a whole bunch of them, so I’m hoping that between the four shows – although it will be the same show, all these little readings will be different. We have so many people moving here, and everyone of them has a story to tell, and they’re phenomenal.”
Performances run at 3 and 7 p.m. today (Aug. 11) and next Friday (Aug. 18) and are absolutely free.