Krystle Dos Santos and Steve Charles are both gifted performers. (Photo by Emily Cooper)
Representation matters. Viola Desmond’s legacy matters. And I’m a white guy who doesn’t think that this telling of Desmond’s story works very well — which is my way of acknowledging that perspective also matters. Please take it into account.
Desmond’s is the Black woman on the Canadian ten-dollar bill. In 1946, 9 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on an Alabama bus, Desmond refused to leave the whites-only main floor of the Roseland Theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. She was dragged out of the cinema, thrown into the street, and criminally charged.
Rather than admitting to racial discrimination — there were no Jim Crow laws in Canada — the theatre manager and police accused Desmond of defrauding the provincial government of one penny’s worth of amusement tax. (Seats in the balcony were cheaper.) The crown won.
Desmond contested her conviction but, because of a procedural mistake by her lawyer, she was not successful. After a series of legal defeats, Desmond gave up her thriving beauty-parlour and beauty-products businesses, her marriage fell apart, and she moved to New York City, where she died at the age of 50 in 1965. But her struggle left its mark on the Canadian civil rights movement.
Unfortunately, Krystle Dos Santos and Tracey Power struggle as they try to bring Desmond’s story to the stage.
In Hey Viola!, they make Desmond a singer who’s performing in a Harlem nightclub called Small’s Paradise. Desmond was not a singer in real life, although she did work at Small’s as a server; in the script, her step into the spotlight is part of the delirium that precedes her death. She recounts memories, then sings songs that are related to the moods of those stories.
But the device is disjointed: why make a non-singer a singer in the story of her life? And the relationship between the songs and events is often too loose to advance the slim plot. When her business ventures are going well, for instance, Desmond sings “On the Sunny Side of the Street” — unnecessarily. We already know she’s happy and the lyrics don’t speak to her specific situation.
Sometimes, when the songs are more directly tied to the tale, they’re moving. I’m thinking of “A Change Gonna Come” for instance, which Dos Santos, who’s playing Desmond, sings as her character rises back up after her legal knockdown. Steve Charles leads a skilled trio of musicians. And Dos Santos is a relaxed and humbly charming performer. Her voice is velvety in its lower register and she accesses real depth of feeling in the later going. Nonetheless, the songs are narrative pauses that defeat momentum.
As writers, Dos Santos and Power also fail to contextualize the climactic event at the Roseland. In the script, Desmond says that she has no idea where her refusal to move to the balcony came from. This may well have been her conscious experience, but that kind of courage doesn’t come from nowhere. As I have known it in myself and seen it in others, it’s often an eruption of suppressed rage that’s been provoked by a relentless stream of everyday insults. Dos Santos and Powers’s script nods in the direction of those injustices, but only generically. Desmond tells us that she couldn’t attend teachers’ college as a Black person, for instance, and that Black women couldn’t be nurses. That kind of discrimination is soul destroying, but the script presents it as general historical information, without enough detail and personal resonance to allow its impact to to really strike and accumulate.
But, as I said off the top, that’s my perspective as a white guy. Black folks and others might experience Hey Viola! very differently.
HEY VIOLA! Created by Krystle Dos Santos and Tracey Power. Directed by Tracey Power. Produced by Musical TheatreWorks in association with Western Canada Theatre. Presented by the Anvil Centre. At the Anvil Centre on Saturday, October 17. Runs until October 25. Tickets.
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