"No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted." A special THANK YOU to all our volunteers over the years!

Feminine Force Works Off Stage for Rainbow

July 5, 1958 – Winnipeg Free Press Archives

VOLUNTEERS will be serving hot coffee to Rainbow Stage patrons and here Mrs. S. J. McKay gets some practice.  She fills the cups of actors and production crew members taking a coffee break from rehearsals.  Left to right are: Miss Frances Williams, Don McGregor, Miss May Ostapowich and Georges La Flache.

Behind every worthwhile endeavour it is quite usual to find a group of hard-working women.

The Winnipeg Summer Theatre association which starts its season at Rainbow Stage Monday is no exception.  Behind the scenes many Winnipeg women are donating their time and talents to the dozens of jobs necessary to ensure the success of any theatrical production.

MRS. RALPH G. YOUNG creates a papier mache
dog for a dance sequence in The King and I.
The dance depicts the Siamese version
 of Uncle Tom's Cabin.  A sculptress, Mrs. Young
 is working on the masks in her home on Somerset Avenue.

Sewing for the costume department is one of the really big projects the volunteers have tackled and the women are putting in many hours at sewing machines in the Strathcona Curling Club rehearsal headquarters for the Rainbow Stage shows.

Large papier mache masts for the Siamese dance in The King and I are being created by Mrs. Ralph G. Young, Mrs. Harold Stubbs and Mrs. John Holmes.

Rainbow Stage patrons like their cup of coffee at intermission time so the women sell hot coffee on the pergolas on either side of the theatre and the profits are turned into the association.

Square dancers who use Rainbow Stage for their dances sell programs and usher in the customers.

There are many other jobs handled by the women’s house committee and other volunteers – the ticket blitz, which is most important, hunting properties or even driving the costume department supervisor around the city as he gathers together  his materials.

It all goes to make a good show.

THE SUMMER THEATRE Association needs women who are handy with needle and thread.  There are many costumes to be sewn.  Here, three volunteers lend a helping hand.  Left to right they are: Miss Anne Stevenson, Miss Lorine Hodgson, chairman of the women's house committee and Mrs. Douglas McKay, founder of the women's committee. 

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It’s Skill Behind The Scenes That Keeps The Play Rolling

A Story Of The Rainbow Stage

By Jerry Walmsley – Winnipeg Free Press Archives

July 12, 1958

From an old wedding gown and a red sash Bernard Polly styles
a costume for Ziegfeld Follies queen Mary Wallis

“The play’s the thing” said Will Shakespeare.

Ah, but there is more to it that just that, Mr. Shakespeare and we need go no further that the Strathcona Curling Club to prove our point.

There, amidst cardboard cartons, yellowed bridal gowns, greasepaint and musty frocks and suits, the Winnipeg Summer Theatre association is creating the fantasy to weave around the plays.

And key man in that purposeful disorder is Bernard Polly, a lean, spectacled fellow with a divine faculty for creating something out of nothing.  He is the costume designer and co-ordinator for the Rainbow Stage productions.

With a $600 budget to work with, Mr. Polly right now is designing and making 225 costumes for one show – Hells-a-Poppin.

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WHERE DID he begin?

Well, in the first place Mr. Polly was a dress designer in a fashionable Los Angeles shop for two years.  He came back to Canada because he “likes working with Canadians.”

Styling 1880 hats and feathers and not are designer
Bernard Polly, his assistant Rocky Grant (right)
and an unidentified helper.

Until recently he was a commercial artist in Winnipeg but he had a real soft spot for costume designing.

Finally, the firm he was working for decided that he couldn’t devote full time to costume designing and it too, so they suggested that he might give the Summer Theatre all of his time.

Because Summer Theatre in Winnipeg had a financial setback and is struggling, Mr. Polly is strapped to an almost impossible budget.  So his first call was to the Junior League Thrift Shop, which was closing for the summer months.  He cleaned them out of bridal and evening gowns, tuxedos, and tails and dress shirts.

Next stop – the Harlassah Bargain Centre.  Then the Goodwill Industries where one purchase alone included 65 evening gowns.

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MATERIAL from three gowns provides the designer with the basis for one costume.  Add to this – lace, sequins, net beads and maybe feathers and you have a Polly original.


There are 40 hooped crinolines with full bouffant skirts with three rows of six inch net stitched around the 30 feet of hem in each skirt Mr. Polly has been poking through the lanes of Winnipeg, stripping scrap steel off wooden packing cases with which to make his hoops.

For four weeks now they have been sewing down at the curling rink but Mr. Polly still needs women who would happily donate some sewing time.

One scene in which the cast does the song With a Little Bit Of Luck, requires 12 pearly hats and a pearly suit.  Close to 20 pounds of white buttons are being used for this.

Another is an extravagant sequence which might be termed the Polly Follies but actually is referred to as the Ziegfeld number, which according to Mr. Polly stars 10 of Winnipeg’s most beautiful and curvaceous women.

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Nadine Kelly demonstrates eye makeup for
Judyan Gustafson and Carole Cohen.
The model is Lane Carswell a Ziegfeld
girl in Hells-a-Poppin.

UNDERNEATH the big beautiful hats and the silk foppers are the faces of the singers and dancers and a versatile school feather with a Schilizy hairdo is responsible for them.

“Anybody here seen Kelly?” is a common cry backstage in any of Winnipeg’s theatres.  The girl who answers to the call is Nadine Kelly, supervisor of make-up for the Summer Theatre.  Kelly has done makeup for so many theatrical endeavors in Winnipeg that it would take a column to list them all.

But as every actor in Winnipeg knows, Kelly is much more than a makeup artist.  Kelly has worked in every phase of the theatre.  She’s been an actress, singer, stagehand, prompter, wardrobe mistress and a shoulder to cry on.

“I’ve been a baby sitter too, for adults, children, dogs and other animals,” she says.

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WHEN SOMEBODY presses the panic button it’s invariably level-headed Kelly who untangles the mess and puts things right.

In the Rainbow Stage production of Annie Get Your Gun a worried dancer came off stage screaming K-E-L-L-Y. Calmly, Kelly surveyed the situation.  The dancer’s tight fitting cowboy pants had split down the back.  In minutes he had to be back on Stage.  Kelly put the young man over her knee and quickly stitched up his trousers.

Whenever a director is casting around for a bit character player he often puts the finger on Kelly.  In I Remember Mama last season, Kelly with bucket and mop in hand, ambled on stage as a weary, old scrub-woman in a hospital.

Last winter with Death of a Salesman was staged in the city, a cast member who was ill did not show up one night.  Kelly was busy making up the cast when the director told her she’d be going on as the secretary.  She did – for two nights.

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KELLY IS TRAINING the Summer Theatre actors to do their own make up as much as possible because she knows if they go elsewhere to act they will be expected to do their own faces.  She is also training some assistants to help her out through the three shows.

Hells-a-Poppin in WInnipeg - the next Rainbow Stage
production - features Grant Cowan, Daphne Karol
and Murray Senens.

Makeup for The Kind and I, with its Siamese setting is the biggest task Kelly has to tackle this summer.

“Eyes are an actor’s greatest asset” says Kelly, who likes to pay special attention to eye makeup.

She says people should remember that if they sit in the first few rows of a theatre, actors may look overly made up, even to the point of being grotesque.  This exaggeration is necessary so that the people in the rest of the theatre can see the actors facial expressions.

Rainbow Stage presenets a difficulty that is not encountered in an indoor theatre – having to makeup for daylight and artifical light both.  But Kelly is equal to that problem too.

Kelly probably knows more faces than anyone else in Winnipeg.  They pass her on the street and say hello, and although she can’t always pin a name on the face she knows at one time or another she made it up.

And when you are out at Rainbow Stage taking in Brigadoon, Hells-a-Poppin or The King and I one of those faces will likely belong to some panic stricken actor backstage, roaring through the wings screaming “K-E-L-L-Y.” 

John Hirsch pulled out all the stops for the 1957 Rainbow Stage production of Chu Chin Chow.

Chu-Chin-Chow Starts Monday

Khuzayma (Douglas McIntosh) a member of Abu Hassan’s band of robbers threatens the life of Kasim Baba (Ted Korol) a wealthy merchant, in a scene from Chu-Chin-Chow, musical extravaganza which opens Monday at Rainbow Stage.  Mr. Korol, as well as acting in the show, has designed the sets for it.  John Hirsch is director, Nenad Lhotka is choreographer and Eric Wild is music director.  The production will run all this week and Monday and Tuesday of next week.

Here There and Hollywood

With Frank Morriss

If I can take the word of John Hirsch, and I’d very much like to, we’re going to have animals, acrobats, jugglers, snake charmers, fireworks, fountains and the Indian rope trick on the Rainbow stage in Kildonan park this summer.

John even promises to auction off some women, which seems very shocking until you realize the show he is talking about is the venerable Chu Chin Chow which will bring the Rainbow stage to a finale blaze of glory for the summer.

John is back in Winnipeg after a winter and spring of drama study in London, and he has been engaged to do three musical shows for the Rainbow stage.  They are Can Can, Do You Remember? and the aforementioned Chu Chin Chow.  Now I had some misgivings about Chu Chin Chow because it was popular during World War I but I suspect has aged.  The good old tunes like Any Time’s Kissing Time.  The Cobbler’s Song, etc, have survived but what about the book and lyrics?

It was then that John mentioned his startling innovations, although the auctioning off of the women is actually in the show.  I remember being taken, as a very little boy, to see it at the Walker (now Odeon) theatre and hearing the gasps of the audience when the ladies walked onto the draughty Walker stage, protected only by a gauze curtain.

Note to Mr. Hirsch, James Duncan and the rest of the Rainbow stage people:  It can be very chilly on an evening in Kildonan Park.

Enough of frivolity however.  The facts of the Hirsch case since he left Winnipeg some time in January are these:

He has been studying at the Central School of Drama, whose principal is Gwyneth Thurburn, coach for Sir Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave and other eminent actors.  John’s teacher was Oliver Reynolds, who taught with Michael Saint Denis.  The school, incidentally, is solely for professionals, not beginners.

He also worked at the Unity theatre in St. Pancras and has a 19^th century farce which he is reading at the moment and might do for them next season.  The Unity theatre premiered Jean Paul Sartre’s Nekrasov, which will be staged at the Edinburgh festival this summer.

John was closely in touch with John Allen, Andre van Gyseghem and other theatre people.

At the moment, he says, the theatre is undergoing a tremendous change in Britain.

The first factor in this is the emergence of Arthur Miller, such directors as Elia Kazan and the realistic school of the Actor’s theatre.

Secondly the emergence of such a British playwright as John Osborne is giving the people a lift.  John feels that Fry, Elliott and some of the other writers aren’t influential any more.  Osborne, however, is giving the people something to hang on to.

One of his plays, Look Back in Anger, was about a working man whose education brought him out of his class and made him unhappy.  Another Osborne play, which will have Sir Laurence Olivier at the helm, deals with music hall people and their frustrations.

Thirdly, the visit of Berthold Berliner Ensemble from Germany has proved tremendously dynamic.

John also has admiration for Terrence Rattingar’s virtuoso writing in such a play as Separate Tables.

When John stopped briefly in New York he saw Paddy McIntyre, who is working to establish himself there.  Lawrence Gradus, another former member of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet is with City Centre Ballet.  John hears that Georges Balanchine is doing two of Ruthanna Boris’ works… Cakewalk, and an untitled one.

In London he saw Evelyne Anderson in the musical , Free As Air, says she was wonderful.  Evelyne is understudying the leading lady and did the role for a week in Bristol to great acclaim.

Peter Perebinczuk, who acted a great deal in Winnipeg is now Peter James and has appeared in A View from the Bridge.  He is now with the Sir Laurence Olivier production of Titus Andronious which will tour Europe.

Bernard Behrens, another ex-Winnipegger, is with the Old Vic and will be touring the Near East with the company.

It’s nice to have John Hirsch back, if only for the summer.

Chu Chin Chow Wows Crowd

By C.G. Dafoe

Free Press Staff Writer

A bomb exploded at Kildonan park Tuesday night and sent vivid color flashing about Rainbow stage.  The bomb was called Chu Chin Chow and the near-capacity audience roared its approval when the fireworks ended.

Last spring when the summer theatre announced that Chu Chin Chow would be one of the productions this season, many patrons groaned.

“That old thing,” they said. 

“Who wants to see a show written in 1914?”

Now, however, “that old thing” has turned out to be a the best thing the summer theatre has done in its two years of operation.

Director John Hirsch and his crew of assistants have given us a show that has almost everything; color, wild and tame animals, talking birds, jugglers, a gala parade, and other numerous surprises.

LASCIVIOUS SLAVES

As usual, the dancers are the most skillful performers on Rainbow stage.  The finale of Act 2 features the ballet music from Borodin’s Prince Igor and some of the best dancers in Canada swirl about the stage to the wild Tartar music.  The female members of the company make some of the most lascivious slave girls ever put up for sale.  It was a wonder there were no bids from the audience. (only in 1957, how times have changed)

Director Hirsch has chosen his cast well.  All the major characters were more than able to handle the tasks assigned to them.

The team of Roy Firth and Wendy Hicks in particular, stood out.  Mr. Firth combined a mellow and pleasing singing voice and a flare for outrageous comedy to give the outstanding performance of the evening as Ali Baba.

Miss Hicks as Ali’s lover has a way of smiling that makes every man in the audience think she is smiling at him.  Delightful.

MAKE-UP EXCELLENT

As the robber chief, Leo Brodeur is a villain to the core.  His make-up is excellent and he shifts character nicely when he changes his disguise.

Harry J. Enns and Nora MacLean make a charming pair of lovers when they are in a crowd.  Alone on stage however, they tend to become wooden.  The director may be to blame here.  Give Hirsch 50 people rushing about the stage and he is as happy as a lark.  Give him two and he panics.

Merle Pelcher gives a good account of herself as the willy Zahrat Al-Kulub although her voice tends to be shrill now and then.

As the aged cobbler, Geoffrey Davies gives some of the best singing in the show.  The famous Cobbler’s song comes his way and he makes the most of it.

SIGHT TO BEHOLD

Ted Korol as the wicked merchant Kasim Baba is a green beard and a pair of gracefully moving hands.  He is always at his best when he lets his hands speak for him and they are often far more eloquent than the tongue could ever be.

Murray Senens as the slave dealer is an Egyptian temple painting come to life and Colin Walley sings splendidly and moves with a regal dignity as the steward of Kasim Baba.

Ramona Mcbean is the ultimate in shrews as Ali Baba’s wife Mahbubah.

There is seldom a dull moment in this giant of a show.  Hirsch moves his cast on and off stage like a ring-master with a well trained equestrian act.  The costumes are a sight to behold.

Anybody who stays home to watch television this week is crazy.