If music is the food of love, as Shakespeare said, then the characters of All Shook Up — the new Theatre Cambrian musical — are lining up for a lavish buffet.
Those who think the new musical — directed by Mark Mannisto, choreographed by Angel Mannisto and vocal directed by K.C. Rautiainen and Scott Infanti — is only about songs made popular by Elvis Presley, will be surprised to learn that Shakespearean comedies also inspired the show’s plot. It’s an original tale packed with romantic yearnings, mismatched partners, deception and disguise.
Although All Shook Up is set in Eisenhower’s middle-America in 1955 — the period when Elvis emerged — the musical’s characters and plot twists conjure the sparring lovers and surprise couplings of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
“In the author’s script was the idea of Shakespeare together with Elvis, which is the first thing that was really interesting to me,” Mark Mannisto, Theatre Cambrian executive director, said. “In it is the idea that if the girl can’t get the guy she wants, maybe she should dress like a guy to be his buddy and see what happens.”
What sparks it all, is the music one associates with the late Presley. “Music works like the love blossoms in Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Mannisto said. “It can unlock something, it can a make an entire town come to life. A show gives a director an immense amount of permission and latitude to invent.”
Mind you, there is not an Elvis character in the play — unless you count the motorcycle-riding, leather-jacketed, swivel-hipped Jeff Burton, who plays a newcomer-to-town named Chad, who shakes up a small town.
At a tech week rehearsal, the musical’s Act One finale, “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” sung by the entire cast “as a thrilling anthem rather than a doleful ballad, seems to suggest All Shook Up is about how human attraction is somehow inexorable, and never easily explained,” Mannisto said.
...All Shook Up is about how human attraction is somehow inexorable, and never easily explained.
Mark Mannisto,
executive director, Theatre Cambrian
“The show’s completely about love and how you can’t control it. And this music unleashes something that’s delightful, exciting, passionate, unexpected, often painful and completely out of everyone’s control.”
Things get “all shook up” in a very square town in a very square state when Chad shows up and romances chilly Miss Sandra (played by Rachelle St-Denis) via the go-between “Ed,” who is really Natalie (played by Kelsie Carroll) in disguise. Tomboyish Natalie likes newcomer Chad, and Miss Sandra falls for “Ed.” Meanwhile, Dennis (played by Kalvin Blanchard) is smitten with Natalie.
By the end of Act One, do we know who is going to end up with who?
“You don’t,” Mannisto said. “In fact, at the end of the show, there’s a sequence where the tectonic plates all re-shift and you go, ‘Oh, that person ends up with that person? I can’t believe it!’ It ends up feeling sort of inevitable, if unexpected.”
Another couple in the plot, Dean and Lorraine (played by real life love interests, Orville Andrews and Kelsie Carroll), challenge the expectation of class separation when they fall in love. The conformity-minded 1950s — represented by the right-wing mayoress, played by Sue Gates — was the setting of the show from the first draft.
When it came to selecting the show’s score from the treasure chest of songs Elvis sang (all by a variety of composers and lyricists), the creative team was in heaven, according to the director.
“It’s a huge, amazing library of music,” Mannisto said. “The Elvis estate has been really amazing about allowing the playwrights access to pretty much anything he sang. They were denied nothing. It’s about trying to find the balance between how much of the really, really famous music should be used — ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love,’ ‘Hound Dog,’ ‘Burning Love,’ ‘Jailhouse Rock,’ ‘All Shook Up’ — and going to the (Elvis) movies and finding unexpected songs, that happen to hit the plot exactly right.
“It’s all about, hopefully, staging a show that feels like those songs were written for this show.”
All Shook Up runs June 11-26 at Theatre Cambrian, 40 Eyre St. The production is sponsored by Vale and Northern Life. Tickets are $26.50 for adults, $21.50 for students and seniors and $16.50 for children 13 and under. Tickets are available by phone at 524-7317, at Records on Wheels downtown, Jett Landry Music in New Sudbury, Vrab’s Your Independent Grocer in the South End or the Azilda Rexall.
For more information, visit www.theatrecambrian.ca
