For the second year in a row the Winding Rivers Arts and Performance Society is staging a pantomime.
Written by former Ashcroft RCMP officer Const. Richard Wright, Beauty and the Beast: A Pantomime opened last weekend and will be showing again the weekend of Nov. 29 to Dec. 1.
Director Mavourneen Varcoe-Ryan of Spences Bridge said Wright wrote and directed last year's pantomime and had planned to direct Beauty and the Beast but then was transferred out of the community.
"Sadly, he was no longer involved so they asked me if I would be interested in directing and I said, 'sure, it should be fun,' and it has been," Varcoe-Ryan said the morning of opening night.
Pantomimes are from a tradition going back to the 17th century, she explained.
"It has a lot of slapstick comedy and a rougher type of humour. It's always based on a fairy tale and always the lead character is a female, played by a man, like in drag. It is silly and a lot of local jokes are brought in."
The audience is spoken to directly all the time.
They are asked to boo for the villains and cheer for the heroes.
Last year the pantomime was based on Sleeping Beauty and Aurora, but included characters such as James Bond and some villains for what Varcoe-Ryan described was "quite a wild ride."
Similarly, while the baseline for Beauty and the Beast: A Pantomime is a fairy tale, the play includes characters such as evil witches and good witches.
"To make it even funnier, I hope, we set it in the 60s so our music is mostly old familiar tunes from the 60s," Varcoe-Ryan said.
When asked for one of the tunes patrons can expect to hear, she replied she'd had He's So Fine in her head all morning.
"Gaston is being very vain and all the girls are singing He's so Fine because they would like him to marry them," she explained.
There are 21 people in the cast, ranging from six to 75-years-old and several of the cast members are playing multiple roles.
"We have people being trees and then being cutlery in the castle, alive and dancing. Children are playing roles such as Chip, the tea cup."
Many pantos (her shortened version of the word pantomimes) have a horse, and the horse in this production is being played by a child as well.
The show has a musical director - Theresa Takacs - and Varcoe-Ryan said music in the show has been beautifully arranged with harmonies and choral work.
"The music is nothing to do with me," she insisted.
Varcoe-Ryan has been involved with Winding Rivers Arts and Performance Society (WRAPS) directing plays for many years. "I think the whole thing started when I was a trustee on the board of education and there were a few of us that were interested in the arts," she recalled.
Government cuts were being made to education and art programs were being cut in the schools.
"A few of us said, 'let's try to start a society that promotes music and theatre for kids. That started it. I think it was around 2002, 2003."
That society eventually became WRAPS and more adults became involved, making it very multi-generational.
Ashcroft Mayor Barbara Roden plays Cogsworth in the play and said Varcoe-Ryan is a super lady.
"She’s been involved with every WRAPS production I’ve done since 2012, which is 13, as either director or actor, and she drives in from Spences Bridge, which is about an hour round trip," Roden said.
In 2016, to thank Varcoe-Ryan, WRAPS members asked if there was a play on her bucket list she had always wanted to do, and she said she’d always wanted to play Shirley Valentine.
"So WRAPS did it and she starred and was wonderful in a very gruelling one-woman show. That’s why I got into directing: she couldn’t direct it herself, so I volunteered to learn the ropes," Roden said.
We caught up with the author, Cst. Richard Wright, now teaching at the Applied Police Sciences at the RCMP Academy in Regina, Sask., who explained the he is a classically trained actor.
"I trained at LAMDA and Mountview Academy of Performing Arts, both in London, before moving across the pond and switching careers, joining the RCMP."
Wright was posted to Ashcroft for three years and left in August 2024.
"I truly loved the community and its enjoyment of live theatre, which was only just restarting after a Covid-19 hiatus."
He said he thinks during his first week in Ashcroft in 2021, he made a point of introducing himself to Jessica Clement, the producer of Beauty and the Beast, and talked about their mutual love of all things theatre.
"The first show after the hiatus was The Games Afoot and I was lucky enough to play Sherlock Holmes, a British detective (a real stretch considering that I’m British and a police officer!)."
After that, he said, Jessica and he talked about some pantomime scripts he had written and that had been produced previously in North Vancouver, while he was working in the Lower Mainland area. It was decided that Winding Rivers (WRAPS) would produce the spy-based pantomime he had written, Shaken Not Stirred, in 2023.
"Shaken, not Stirred was a high point in my experience treading the boards as I also directed and acted in it, adding a wholly new improvised pre-show that interacted with the audience as they found their seats. I really wanted to do this as, in my experience, non-British audiences don’t know exactly what to expect when they go to see a pantomime (there are a lot of audience participation moments), whereas a UK audience would know what to do and be engaged from the first moment – it is a traditional festive entertainment for families in the UK, so most children grow up watching pantomimes. I felt that the pre-show would help engage the audience and get them ‘warmed-up’ for the main show… and, boy, did it work well."
The other panto he had written was a re-telling of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, which is the show being staged in Ashcroft until the end of this week.
"Sadly, I haven’t been able to be involved as much, but I had the pleasure of working with the vast majority of the cast as they are returning, having had such a blast staging last year's production. One cast member from last year and a fantastic actress, Mavourneen Varcoe-Ryan, has taken on directorial duties for Beauty and the Beast and is doing the new ‘panto tradition’ in Ashcroft proud."
Wright said as a police officer, he has always found that engaging in activities which you enjoy to be an amazing way to not only share that enjoyment with the community you serve, but also as a way to show police as community members, neighbours or friends.
"Some of my colleagues coach sports, but my passion is theatre, so I share in it."
"We turn the gym into a theatre and really, once you are in there sitting down and the lights are on the stage you forget that you are in a gym," Varcoe-Ryan said. "We have sound panels hanging on the walls that help with the acoustics so it's all black and the audience is tiered up on platforms to look down on the stage."
Beauty and the Beast: A Pantomime continues at the Ashcroft Hub Friday, Nov. 29 and Saturday, Nov. 30, at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m.
