[REVIEW] Anne of Green Gables: The Musical
Click to viewThanks to my sister, I was able to get tickets to see Anne of Green Gables: The Musical last Tuesday. This showing will have been the fourth time I've seen the act that has been headlining the
Charlottetown Festival for the past 51 years, at least--I may have forgotten earlier performances.
What was my experience of this, possibly one of the preeminent cultural forms of my native province? Positive, if complicated.
One thing highlighted in the local media about this year's performance is the novelty of having the two lead characters being played by Island-born actors, Jessica Gallant as Anne Shirley and Aaron Hastelow as her sometime-rival and sometime-friend Gilbert Blythe. These, and their colleagues, did their jobs well, singing and dancing and acting their way through the roles that I know off by heart, to the music that I even now can find myself humming along to.
Another thing highlighted in the local media about this year's performance is a limited modernization of the script. Out of a desire to keep Anne of Green Gables more relevant as a remembered past, the sort we might have absorbed from the time of our grandparents and great-grandparents, the era of the play has been advanced somewhat, from Victorian to Edward times. When the people of Avonlea gossip about the injuries Anne inflicted on Gilbert with her slate in the classroom, they do over the telephone. Later, Diana Barry sings rhapsodies about the miracle of the electric lights of Charlottetown's Queen Street, lights which never burn down. On a separate note, Josie Pye, Anne's rival for Gilbert's attentions, is rather nastier than I remember from previous performances. The underlying story remains the same, with the songs and dialogue I remember from other iterations still intact: Anne surprises the Cuthberts and Avonlea, eventually makes her new family and community fall in love with her, and finds her place.
When I watched the musical, I was struck by darker elements of the plot. I don't think I quite noticed the desperation of Anne's early life, the young orphan suffering two failed foster families before being sent to the orphanage, long before she was sent to the Island with the Cuthberts. Her desperation to find a home bit much more with me now than before. At the same time, the desperation of the Cuthberts also came through to me: They arranged to take in an orphan not because they wanted to create a family, but because they needed a boy to do physical labour around their farm, the labour that Matthew could not perform after his heart attack but that needed to be done to keep the farm viable, even--as a last resort--saleable.
The relationship between Anne and Gilbert also made me think. Theirs is a complicated relationship, Gilbert's attraction to Anne inexplicably leading him to tease her hair colour, which leads her to reject him, until she decides she is interested in him, by which time he has resolved to spend time with someone like Josie who appreciates him, and so on and so forth. There's no question of any coercion, at either end, and I did not think Gilbert was behaving like a so-called "Nice Guy."
I was also left wondering, of all people, about Matthew Cuthbert. We learn, in the musical and in the books, all about his sister Marilla, how her life was defined by her rejection of John Blythe when the two were younger. We the audience see Matthew Cuthbert as a kind man and a good man, the first kindred spirit that Anne met in Avonlea. He is the person whose counsel to Marilla that they might be good for Anne convinces her to let the young Nova Scotian orphan stay. We learn nothing about Matthew's past. Why did he stay single and unmarried, living with his sister in the family homestead? Did he have no great lost loves, no terrible disappointments? I'm more than a bit tempted to speculate about the possibility of a queer Matthew.
I have to see Anne of Green Gables: The Musical first and foremost as a rite of community. It is a thoroughly professional and enjoyable theatrical show, two and a half hours long including an intermission, but it's more than that. I found myself thinking of previous iterations of the musical that I had seen, of other versions I had read or watched (Megan Follows and her television movie came to mind). I found it functioning for me, someone who read all the Anne novels and most of the other in-universe stories and is familiar with the proliferating Anne mediasphere beyond books, as a sort of aide-memoire, functions as an aide-memoire for the fandom. Here is the character, here is her community, and here is what they do together for everyone to see.
It works superbly, and likely will continue to work superbly. It could not have lasted 51 years at the Charlottetown Festival if it did not. If you're at all curious about Anne Shirley and her mythology, or about the ways Prince Edward Island is represented in popular culture, or indeed about the lived experience of Prince Edward Islanders (how many of us have not seen this musical?), Anne of Green Gables: The Musical is the show for you.