'The Kingsbridge Chronicles' concludes 'Kingsbridge: The Musical' series
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
For its sixth and final chapter, The Kingsbridge Chronicles has fittingly decided to close the ring with Where Do We Go From Here? - which tells the tale of the Kingsbridge Centre itself, and how it came to be. It’s a great story, well worth immortalizing on the stage. From the moment that St. Joseph Church was ordered to close in 2012, the people of Kingsbridge have been working together to preserve the place at the heart of their hamlet by transforming it into a public space that can be used for everything from concerts to classes for children and adults. It took a concerted community effort to bring the Kingsbridge Centre from idea to reality. People donated their money, time and talent to the project. Funds were raised, grant applications were written, renovations were undertaken and the once-shuttered church was reopened as an accessible centre that hoped to act both as a meeting place and an incubator for rural creativity.
It wasn’t long before Goderich-based playwright Warren Robinson and his musically-minded partner Eleanor were commissioned to pen an opus or two about the history of the hamlet of Kingsbridge and the people who have lived there over the years. The shows, from the cast to the crew, were to be put on entirely by local volunteers. The first chapter of the Chronicles was Kingsbridge! The Musical. It hit the stage of the Kingsbridge Centre in 2017, much to the delight of audiences that relished the rare chance to see their friends and families on stage, telling their own stories.
There have been five more installments in the Kingsbridge musical series since then, each one relating a fictionalized selection of locally-sourced stories from different time periods. It’s become clear that the semi-regular stagings of these self-reflexive musicals have done so much more than simply telling stories - they’ve changed the way this robust rural community sees itself.
The dedication and passion that has gone into each Kingsbridge play is obvious, and St. Joseph is the sort of inspiring performance space that’s destined to set off the spark of creative ambition. The Kingsbridge Chronicles reframes minutiae as momentous - it lifts up the times in life that are frequently dismissed as banal, and transforms the lives of friends, family and neighbours into characters - into parts worth playing. One of the best songs in the whole show is exclusively about making pies. In classic Kingsbridge style, there are three fresh pies on stage for each performance of the pie-making song, made by one of the community’s best bakers. After each show, the pies are consumed by the cast and crew.
Over 50 years ago, Toronto-based Theatre Passe Muraille came to Huron County to gather stories directly from farmers to form the basis of The Farm Show. It was a seminal work in the evolution of Canadian theatre, and directly inspired the founding of the Blyth Festival.
Seeing stories of rural life on stage tends to inspire others to see their stories as worth telling. So it is with The Kingsbridge Chronicles - there must be more than a few farmers who occasionally catch themselves humming bars from “Life of a Farmer” or one of the other many great Kingsbridge songs, when they’re out working the fields.
Where Do We Go From Here? opens with an apparition. Specifically, the ghost of recurring Kingsbridge character Bernadine, whose real life counterpoint had passed away before the events in the play. The ghost of Bernadine has found that she can’t shuffle off this mortal coil for fear that there will be nobody to safeguard the future of Kingsbridge.
Meanwhile in the show, a group of Kingsbridge volunteers (portrayed by a group of Kingsbridge volunteers) is selecting its best songs from past performances in order to impress a group of visitors who run a free travel magazine that covers all of southwestern Ontario. The songs, which range from stately anthems like “O Kingsbridge” to silly ditties about the benefits of having cats over husbands, are all accompanied by a live band. The Kingsbridge characters are proud of all the work they’ve put in to make their community centre great, and they’re hoping to use the magazine to spread the word to the rest of Ontario.
Where Do We Go From Here? also delves into the delicate balance that the Kingsbridge Centre had to strike as it transitioned from being the holy heart of a strong religious community to a public, mixed-use space. The show’s running conundrum - how to adjust the centre’s lighting for performances without covering up the church’s stained glass windows - works as a metaphor for this struggle. The stained glass is a critical part of the church’s identity - covering them up just for a matinee is a non-starter for the pious preservationists in the town, while the young technical crew tries to find a practical workaround. An innovative compromise must be reached. Songs, laughter and teamwork ensue.
This may have been the final installment of The Kingsbridge Chronicles, but it’s not the end of new, local theatrical productions in Kingsbridge. The stage, as it were, is set for the next member of this creative community to bring a whole new story into the spotlight. Where will Kingsbridge go from here? Anywhere it wishes.