My Story @ Tarragon

Charlie Northcote

Creeps by David Freeman was the first production staged at Tarragon Theatre in October 1971. Featured in photo: Frank Moore, Richard M. Davidson, Steve Whistance-Smith and Victor Sutton.

Forty Years On (by Alan Bennett) was playing at The Shaw Festival (which was comprised of just the Courthouse Theatre then) where I was an Apprentice Assistant Stage Manager. I was in university and had been severely bitten by the acting bug. I’d written to every theatre across Canada begging for a job of some kind. There were, if you can believe it, only about 10 theatres across the country at that point. Paxton Whitehead the Artistic Director of Shaw at the time called me in for an interview. He told me that they didn’t have acting apprenticeships but if I was in stage management, I’d be at all of the rehearsals and get to watch the actors at work. I jumped at the chance. When the season was drawing to a close and I was set to go back to university, one of the wardrobe mistresses, who knew I wanted to be an actor, pulled me aside and told me that a friend of hers was going to start up a theatre in Toronto and I should give him a call.

That friend was Bill Glassco and the theatre was Tarragon. I met with that wonderful, soft-spoken, gentle man and he cast me on the spot. I was going to be paid to do the thing I loved (I would have done it for nothing but I didn’t tell him that.) I went to rehearsal and met the rest of the cast including my soon-to-be best friend and cohort, John Candy. He and I were so excited; it was his first “professional acting job” too. The theatre was literally being built around us as we continued on back worked. We didn’t care. There was one small room behind the stage that was “dressing room” for the whole cast. There was no crossover and for our second entrance (I was on roller skates!!!), we had to go outside, down the block to where the box office was then and enter through the house, the floor of which was none too smooth for roller skates I can tell you. Creeps ran without an intermission and was about 90 minutes long. That left a lot of time afterwards to get to the Clinton House for drinks. Draft beer was five glasses for a buck and the $40 per week I was earning bought a lot of beer. Many years later sitting in his gated house in Mandeville Canyon in L.A., John and I reminisced and he was shocked to find out that I had made $5 more a week than he had!

John didn’t care (even though he turned it into a two-minute bit); even with all of his eventual success, he remembered the Creeps experience as one of the happiest times of his life. What I remember about the show is about the people. The laughter. The games we’d play in that tiny dressing room. The parties. Trying to get Frank Moore or Don Scardino (now one of the producer/directors of 30 Rock) to laugh while they were supposed to be in a “freeze”. Trying to stump Len Sedun with Broadway show tunes. Watching audience members jaws drop after the show when they saw that Victor and Bob and Steve weren’t really physically challenged at all.

I don’t think any of us thought that we were involved in making Canadian theatre history or that we’d still be around 40 years later. (Am I really that old?) We just loved the fact that we were working for such a wonderful man in a play that remains relevant today. And that’s what it’s always been about. The play. I am truly proud to have been a part of the launch of this theatre and, in my new role as literary agent, to continue to work with all of the subsequent “teams” at Tarragon who carry on Bill Glassco’s legacy. Forty years on…