It is disturbing to have to look back so far to discover the culprits who set me on this bizarre life path. Like many of you, I’ve gotta blame my mom, first of all. Annie Fidler got me into the church junior choir in the late 1940’s, and then into the Strathroy United Church Sunday School concerts. She rehearsed me in long poems that she would then sign me up to perform. One of them, Casey at the Bat, I still have locked in my deteriorating memory, and can trot it out for performance at a second’s notice. (Any takers??) If I’ve still retained a restless inner energy, that’s mostly from mom. But my dad, big Art Fidler Sr., the baseball pitcher and nurseryman, is far from guiltless, and it is from him that I received the curse of my “Ham Bone” acting style. He had the funniest, most over-the-top Elvis Presley routine in history, and the nurses at the local nurse’s residence couldn’t wait for Dad to show up as a maniacal Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. He was a brilliant singer (“I’d walk a million miles for one of your smiles, My Mammy!”) and an hilarious jokester as an End-man in local minstrel shows (funny then, but seriously politically incorrect now).

Marguerite Johnston was the church choir director, and also taught music at Colbourne Street elementary school, and as my piano teacher, she took me pretty much by the throat one lesson, and forced me to abandon my monotone voice, and to practise the amazing gift of the matching of my human voice to notes on the piano. Who wudda thought! A whole new world discovered, thanks to little Marguerite! Then Strathroy District High School, and another new world! Gilbert and Sullivan! Another mentor too, although that word had not then been invented. Phil Sparling, the Latin and French teacher, a cool jazz musician in big bands in his spare time, spearheaded annual productions of these brilliant, charming, witty operettas. I was completely hooked from the moment we first sang “We sail the ocean blue, and our saucy ship’s a beauty.” G&S became totally my bag (that’s 60’s talk). Western U. had a Gilbert and Sullivan Society, and the huge theartrical thril for teenage Art was to go into the big city and see the shows they presented. They were my heroes, and the big reason I went to Western was to try to get into that group. And I did, by golly! Still one of the triumphs of my life! In the 1950’s, frosh had to take – and pass – a health course, and I skipped every lecture for rehearsals. (I passed anyway. With True and False questions on the exam like “For severe chest pain, heavy exercise is highly recommended. T or F?”, it was a bird!) In that group, I made my best friends, advanced from chorus to leads, then into producing. My first directing assignment was with the G&S Society: H.M.S. Pinafore, with the opening song beginning, “We sail the ocean blue, and our saucy ship’s a beauty…” (Mere coincidence… or secret powers at work??? Hmmmm…)  Meanwhile, I also got roles in weird and wonderrful plays and Broadway musicals at university. Then on to teaching and amateur theatre and youth theatre and the rest of my life!

My high school English teacher, Marion Cummer, gave us the chance to act out everything that we possibly could, Shakespeare, narrative poems, scenes from novel and short stories… such great stuff! So when I started to teach English, I did just what Mrs. Cummer had done, while trying to be pretty much the same teacher-guy as Phil  Sparling. They were my models. So drat you, Mom, Dad, Marguerite Johnston, Phil Sparling, Marion Cummer and the U.W.O. G&S Society!!! You all bent the twig, and now I’m the tree!

When the late 60’s transformed the world, along came Dramatic Arts! And there I was at exactly the right time! My buddy Mike Pooley and I got a chance to teach it. There was no training, no course of study, just an idea, an opening! We were free! I like to think that we were there before the training was in place, and that were inventing the training day after day. Remember, kids! Somebody has to be first. Yep! There are wonderful times before experts come along to pretend to own it all!

I’ll confess that somehow we stumbled on the right book at the right time, and it is still the best book ever to keep your head straight about teaching creative drama: Improvisation for the Theatre by Viola Spolin.

By now, the term “mentor” had finally been invented, and it was my turn to find out how to be one. The drama studio would be my place of business!

My favourite performance opportunity was in the Sam Shepard play, The Unseen Hand (why aren’t you guys doing his plays??). The universe is threatened and somehow a gang of old Western desperados, the Morphin Brothers, are summoned from eternity to fight the unknown forces of modern international deadness of spirit. We put it on in a warehouse and the set was the broken-down wreck of a Chevy convertible on the side of an inter-state highway. This was back in 1973, an era of wild experimentation, and this play was the most spectacular example of that I could have imagined. And two of the cast had just been my drama students, as actors in my high school drama classes and drama club. That was real theatre!

As a director, I’m most proud (but a very tough call!) of The Ragged Child, a musical written for the English Youth Music Theatre  that I discovered on a trip to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The significance of the production which I directed for Original Kids in Spring 1999, was not its level of artistic triumph, nor the significance of its themes, although, looking back, I’m happy about both of those. It was that we managed to get it on at all. We didn’t have a theatre, having left our home in Museum London, but not yet being able to move into our new home theatre which I had designed in the Covent Garden Market. We performed the epic play/musical in a warehouse in St. Thomas in an industrial mall, and the cast and crew went back and forth by school bus (which turned out to be a big part of the fun!). The cast of 45 had rehearsed winter weekends in an unheated elementary school gym. To keep some body warmth, all the actors had brought old blankets to wrap up in while on the sidelines, and I incorporated those old wraps, and the shivering characters underneath them, into the show. My lasting image is of those young actors, in the vicious heat and fierce humidity of a brutally hot show week in a windowless warehouse, pathetically huddled under woolen rags and shivering with the cold… believably. To me that is a lasting image of what actors (bless them!) can do, and of the gallantry that a good company can display.

“Is it a go?” he said.

“Nope. Not a chance.”

“Then do you want to go out and tell them?”

“Nope, I don’t. Sounds to me like a job for the principal.”

“Then what’s your job?

“I’ve got three jobs. Take Becky home. Buy a bottle of Scotch. Drink it.”

And that’s what I did.

And with those three jobs, I’m happy to tell you that I succeeded. Brilliantly.

(Yada… yada… yada… Finally the show must go on. And it did.)

Lately, I’ve been creating a theatre company. It is a fantasy theatre company, but it is a really good one. I know what it is called, I’ve got a clear definition of what it is, and what it does – a solid, credible identity, and a production style that emphasizes the material and actors over the tech stuff. Sort of the way grassroots theatre was before all the gimmickry took over. OK, I hear you: That was then, Art. Great challenges for local directors and performers, and a built-in audience demographic. I think… Best thing is that nobody has thought of this idea yet! Just me! I’ve got it on paper. I’ve got a partner.

To stay young in mind and imagination, and share that with others. To share richly in the lives of my 6 grandchildren.

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