Okotoks will get a rare chance to see one of Canada’s top playwrights and composers perform his own materials with the help of a Calgary singer and actress.
Onalea Gilbertson and composer David Rhymer will perform Only Love Knows Love at the Rotary Performing Arts Centre on Jan. 14. The show features the pair performing songs from the extensive list of plays written by Rhymer.
“The audience can expect a cabaret-type evening, where we will be discussing each of the shows, in an entertaining way, where each of the songs come from and performing them,” said Gilbertson.
It will be an intimate concert with Gilbertson’s impassioned performance accompanied by Rhymer on piano.
They will set up each song to let the audience know which play the song is from and what it is about.
Rhymer is an award winning composer known for unconventional musicals that include An Eye for an Eye, the story of a fundamentalist preacher, Weibo Ludwig, and his one-man war with Alberta’s oil and gas industry; Dream Machine, his impressionist take on the Beat Generation and Ilsa Queen of the Nazi Love Camp.
Gilbertson is a singer, actor and writer who was a seven-year member of Calgary’s One Yellow Rabbit theatre company. She is back from an off-Broadway performance in New York City of her one-woman play, Blanche, received positive reviews.
Only Love Knows Love begins with a selection from Rhymer’s pop-opera, Matahari, Tigress at the City Gates.
Of course, they will give the songs a theatrical flair and Gilbertson will take on the characters in each of the songs.
“If I’m doing my job right you should be hearing the different women who are singing the individual songs,” she said.
Gilbertson said it was an incredible opportunity to be able to mine Rhymer’s immense talent and record of composing in Canada for 30 years.
“He’s just an incredible Canadian treasure, and I’ve been working with him for at least 12 years on various different shows,” she said.
The show came about early last year when she and Rhymer were working together in Toronto over two weeks and they went through his entire catalogue of songs and found 25 they wanted to perform.
“The experiment was to see if they would stand alone sort of in a salon, cabaret type setting, rather than the shows they were in,” she said.
Gilbertson said the songs stand up well on their own, outside of the play they were first written for.
“He has so many pieces that are just so incredible and are like a full and complete story already within the song,” she said.
They have performed the show a few times now to small audiences in Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver and in Wells, B.C. The Okotoks show will be a warm-up of sorts for One Yellow Rabbit’s High Performance Rodeo on Jan. 18 in Calgary.
