Story based on a real British actor and singer who swapped fame for a farmer’s life in Canada.
By Gillian Brunette
Those who have seen one of Stina Nyquist’s many plays about pioneer life in Muskoka will be thrilled to know she has a new story to tell.
The Huntsville playwright has sharpened her quill as it were and penned The Lost Chord, which the North Muskoka Players will stage at the Algonquin Theatre on July 26-28 at 8 p.m.
Based on historical fact, the play is a fictional drama of the human dilemma and a family’s struggle to survive in Muskoka at the turn of the 20th century.
FIELD OF DREAMS: In rehearsal for Stina Nyquist’s latest play The Lost Chord are, from left, Gregg Evans (Joseph Tapley), Sherisse Stevens (Elizabeth Tapley) and Richard Wattling (Al, a farmhand). The Huntsville Festival of the Arts drama plays at the Algonquin Theatre July 26 to 28.British actor and singer Joseph Tapley was well known in England during the height of the Gilbert and Sullivan era. He was a student of the illustrious Sir Arthur Sullivan and mixed with the social and cultural elite. He sang for royalty, including Queen Victoria, and also performed in Australia, where he met and married a young, beautiful actress who sadly died in childbirth.
Tapley remarried a charwoman well below his class and fathered two sons. When illness struck and his doctor advised him to give up his career and become a gentleman farmer, Tapley instead took his family across the Atlantic and bought a rocky, run-down farm in Lake of Bays, then a Muskoka wilderness.
The year was 1905.
His talent was definitely not in agriculture and Tapley yearned for England and the theatre, imagining a theatrical spectacle on the shores of Lake of Bays and dreaming that his sons would one day inherit his musical mantel.
Meanwhile, his down-to-earth wife was left to become the proud tiller of the soil.
While sharing their love for their children and treating each other with respect and loyalty, the couple is separated by class, by Tapley’s all-consuming passion for his art, his long absences from home and by the shadow of his first wife. Elizabeth Tapley finds support in an earthy and attractive farmhand named Al. He is a complete contrast to the sophisticated actor and becomes Elizabeth’s jack-of-all-trades and her friend. . . perhaps even a little more.
Nyquist has chosen her cast well from a plethora of great Muskoka actors. Gregg Evans is Joseph Tapley and Sherisse Stevens (who is also the play’s musical director) is his wife Elizabeth. Richard Wattling is Al, while Austin Simonett and Billy Wray play the two Tapley sons Percy and Douglas.
Tayler Calleja and Kristin Dalziel play the Tapleys’ daughter Violet as a young girl and a young woman respectively.
The remaining cast members are Kenneth Donald, Troy Palmer, Gary Fisher, Meg Giller and Maureen Van Lare.
The play is both serious drama and comedy, part truth, part fiction, said the show’s producer Pam Smyth.
“Although the play is based on real people in a real time period it is, at heart, a story of human dilemma, conflict and resolution, which is of course from the imagination of the playwright.
“As in any good theatre we as an audience want to be able to get into the hearts and minds of the characters and share their challenges.”
Much of the background material for the play comes from Tapley’s grandchild Nancy, who with her brother Brian, is the owner and manager of the original Tapley farm, now called Bondi Village Lodge and Cottages.
The actual silk suit costume worn by Tapley when he appeared on stage before Queen Victoria in Australia around 1890 is currently on display in the performing arts section of the Muskoka Creative exhibit at Muskoka Heritage Place.
Tickets for The Lost Chord are $22 for adults and $12 for youth under 18 and are available from the festival website, www.huntsvillefestival.on.ca, at the Algonquin Theatre box office on Main Street, or by calling 705-789-4975.
