Protest Song and Dance

Street scene during the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike. Courtesy Collections Canada.

Driving over Winnipeg’s Slaw Rebchuk bridge into the city’s rough but resilient working-class district, you see a rooftop sign that announces: “Welcome to the North End. People Before Profit.”

A few blocks away, at the 87-year-old Ukrainian Labour Temple, people are talking about shorter working days, safer working conditions and paid holidays. Well, singing about them, actually. Manitoba’s DIY musical impresario Danny Schur is hoping to reconcile profit and people with a project that is part commercial venture, part pure, crazy love.

The 38-year-old Schur brings Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney-style let’s-put-on-a-show enthusiasm to his current theatrical undertaking. He’s not running up bedspreads for curtains in the old barn, though; he’s staking over $300,000 of investment money on the three-week run of Strike!, an original musical based on the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike.

His models are Pierre Berton, the great populizer of Canadian history, and Cameron Mackintosh, the British marketing genius behind the modern mega-musical. Schur’s vision is ambitious, audience-friendly and, with its unsinkable optimism, quite irresistible.

He’s trying to build a viable musical franchise — a kind of Andrew Lloyd Webber hit machine — out of Winnipeg. For three years, he’s been writing, staging and, toughest of all, financing a full-scale singing-and-dancing production with over 70 cast members.

His muse is a Winnipeg event labour historians rave about: the general strike, in which almost 30,000 people walked away from their jobs, bringing the city’s infrastructure to a standstill. The strike pitted workers, mostly ethnic immigrants from the north end, against the WASP ascendancy of the city’s south end, culminating in Bloody Saturday, a protest in which one striker was killed and 30 wounded.

Schur is undaunted by the challenge of taking the conventions of musical theatre — more often used to express boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl frothiness — and applying them to weighty historical events.

“Oh, Slavic musical influences give you ‘serious,’” says Schur, a Ukrainian-Canadian who grew up on a farm near Ethelbert, Manitoba. In creative terms, Schur is spooning from a big bowl of borscht, combining the ancient modalities of Ukrainian church music (Schur is a former altar boy whose parish priest is currently saying prayers for Strike!’s success) with Soviet-style revolutionary marches and the mournful meanderings of klezmer.

“There’s also some pure musical-theatre pop there,” Schur adds. “Call it ‘Slavic contemporary.’”

And what about finding phrases that rhyme with “collective bargaining?” That hasn’t been a problem, at least with Schur’s character-driven treatment.

“My background is not at all of the left,” admits Schur, who has approached the strike not as a labour story, but as an immigrant saga. “My interest was the ethnic background. The people who did the grunt jobs... the people who were needed, but not wanted.”

Strike! tells a big story through four small people: a Ukrainian labourer (Best in Show’s Jay Brazeau), his godson (Canadian Idol finalist Marc Devigne), a Jewish suffragette (played by Catherine Wreford, a one-time Winnipegger now on Broadway) and her journalist brother (Israeli-born David Friedman).

The dramatic axis isn’t so much ethnics vs. Anglos or proles vs. capitalists, but the complexities and conflicts within the immigrant community.

“There was a lot of shame back then,” suggests Schur. “This was the era where you changed your name if it was at all ethnic — so you could get a job, so you wouldn’t be deported as an enemy alien.” This experience has left a lasting mark on the city. One of the reasons the 1919 strike has been overlooked, he believes, is the lingering idea that these stories aren’t important enough to tell. “I trace a good part of the Winnipeg insecurity complex to this period. We’ve got this chip on our shoulder that we’re not good enough.”

Fortunately, the flipside of this attitude is an abiding love for the underdog, a sentiment that Schur is counting on to sell tickets.

Producer/composer Danny Schur. Courtesy Danny Schur.

With an estimated budget of $600,000 — that’s still “relatively cheap” for a full-scale musical, Schur points out — he needs to fill a lot of seats to recoup the funds raised from investors and received through arts grants and sponsorships, as well as the money he and his wife, business consultant Juliane Schaible, are personally putting up.

Originally, Schur tried the more cautious and conventional route of pitching the musical to regional theatres. “Every artistic director I talked to said, ‘I support what you’re doing,’ and you know what that means,” Schur says ruefully. Evidently, it means they support you in theory but not in practice.

Winnipeg’s Rainbow Stage, which has been running summertime musicals for over 50 years, not only refused Strike! but tried to block Schur’s use of their Kildonan Park amphitheatre as a venue, even in the off-season. Eventually, the organization relented, under political pressure.

Schur moved to a more commercial proposition, one that seems to be a post-1919 model of ethnic, economic and class diversity. His 40 backers, most of whom staked between $5,000 and $10,000 each, range from labour people to hard-headed entrepreneurs like Phil Kives, the Winnipeg-based founder of the K-Tel empire. (When he’s not betting the farm on musicals, Schur helps produce the K-Tel Mini Pops series.)

Inspired by a 1995 casting coup at the Manitoba Theatre Centre, in which the most excellent Keanu Reeves came to town to play Hamlet, Schur cold-called celebrities such as song-and-dance-man Ewan McGregor and the up-for-anything Johnny Depp. It was all part of his unshakeable conviction that the Winnipeg General Strike has as much right to be on the international stage as the melodic barricade-manning in Les Miserables.

To ignite local interest, Schur staged a one-hour excerpt on May 15, 2004, to coincide with the 85th anniversary of the strike. Over 2,500 people crowded into Old Market Square for an open-air performance that featured a cast of almost one hundred and the Aida-like addition of four horses.

This was all part of a three-year collaborative process that included work-shopping with director Ann Hodges and consultations with local playwright Rick Chafe, who was originally called in for a polish but eventually did so much work that he now shares a writing credit. “There’s an old adage that musicals aren’t written, they’re re-written,” says Schur, who will probably be tinkering until curtain time.

There’s a certain irony in the fact that the man creating a musical about the union demand for a 48-hour workweek is currently putting in 20-hour days himself. He’s already thinking past opening night to future marketing, which he says will follow “the Nia Vardalos model”: take a Winnipeg story, make it universal and hope for the best.

Schur thinks Strike! could play as “exotic” in other countries. Failing that, it could play as familiar at the Citadel in Edmonton, a city with a big Ukrainian population. In the meantime, he’s hoping that some hummable tunes will help Winnipeggers take their history to heart.

Strike! runs in Winnipeg’s Theatre in the Park May 26 to June 14.

Alison Gillmor is a Winnipeg writer.