Homo for the holidays
Richard Burnett
rburnett@hour.ca
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Audiences will ravage A Queer Carol's Niko with their eyes!
photo: Photo courtesy Harvest Festival
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I love a drama queen, especially a fabulous bitch like local playwright Davyn Ryall who, bless his heart, is still giving all he's got to make Montreal's struggling Harvest LGBT Theatre Festival the major success it so deserves to be.Ironically, it isn't straight folks who're the problem. It's gay audiences.
"I don't think the gay content is scaring away [straight] sponsors, it's just the lack of support from our own community," Davyn says. "They expect us to be established like Black & Blue and Divers/Cité from the get-go, but those festivals also started at the bottom. It's time we became part of everybody's calendar, though that's been difficult the last four years since our dates have moved around."
It didn't help that Image+Nation, Montreal's queer film fest, took over Harvest's November dates last year. I+N were able to muscle in because, Davyn says, "they're a bigger force."
But Harvest's new December dates (after a dismal September run last year) bode well. "This time of year lends itself very well to theatre."
This year's fourth annual Harvest will showcase three Canadian premieres, Almost Pretty by Kelli Dunham (NYC), and English and French versions of both A Queer Carol by Joe Godfrey (NYC) and Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. All productions will run at Fringe Fest head honcho Jeremy Hechtman's Mainline Theatre, which feels right considering Harvest's indie aesthetic and Ryall's years co-ordinating Fringe volunteers and running the Fringe box office.
Perhaps
the most anticipated production at Harvest this year is A Queer Carol, an über-gay adaptation of A Christmas Carol (Scrooge is a bitter old queen!). "It features three over-the-top production numbers with dancers and Marilyn Monroe popping out of a Christmas tree dress!"Harvest has a successful exchange program with NYC's Fresh Fruit theatre festival and Ryall hopes his festival's exchange success in NYC translates to Montreal. "Going to New York was a rare treat for our Montreal actors to perform off-Broadway, and we'll do it again," he says. "But first we need to pack the house during Harvest."
The Harvest LGBT Theatre Festival runs at the Mainline (3997 St-Laurent) from Dec. 6 to 16. Advance tickets available at www.cshow.ca or call 514-848-9696. Program info: www.villagescene.com.
oooLest we forget On the eve of World AIDS Day, the Mémoire vivante du Parc de l'Espoir committee - headed by Michael Hendricks and Roger LeClerc - will celebrate the life of the park's founder, the late Douglas Buckley-Couvrette, who died of AIDS on Nov. 22, 2002.
Hendricks (who won his legal fight for same-sex marriage in Canada), LeClerc (veteran AIDS and gay rights activist) and Claudine Metcalf (she ran the anti-gay-bashing support group Dire enfin la violence), along with Buckley-Couvrette, were Montreal's gay brain trust in the '90s. What gay-positive Montreal is today is directly attributable to them, Divers/Cité and Black & Blue.
"For me, World AIDS Day is the day I take stock," Michael told me this week. "Where are we at in the battle against HIV? For the last five years, since Douglas died, this has been a painful experience because I am obliged to think about what he would say. Douglas was an activist's activist, with a clear analytical mind and an incredible capacity to cut through the bullshit. Not having him here is lonely."
Michael continues, "Advances in treatment have transformed HIV into a chronic illness, not the death sentence that it was in 1994. But this wonderful news has had its own negative effect: the banalization of AIDS. The result has been a weakening of the prevention message and the continuation of the epidemic."
Where do we go from here?
"I have no idea," Michael says.
As for Parc de l'Espoir, Michael wryly notes, "For years it served as a memorial for those who died. But the population has forgotten why it's there, repressing the memory of what we lived through from about 1982 to 1996. That is what banalization of the epidemic has produced. So this year we founded La Mémoire vivante du Parc de l'Espoir to preserve the memory and the spirit - Douglas's fighting spirit - that created this special place."
The memorial will take place at 11 a.m. on Nov. 30 at Parc de l'Espoir (corner Panet and Ste-Catherine E. in the Village).
oooEssential buttplugs Don't miss the Boyz Nite Out Cabaret (featuring the drag king troupe King Size!), a benefit for OUT Productions' 10th anniversary, at 10 p.m. on Nov. 29, at Cabaret Mado (1115 Ste-Cat E.). On Nov. 30 at 9 p.m., do not miss Head & Hands' Red Light Party at the Main Hall's weekly "Faggity Ass Fridays" (5390 St-Laurent), complete with female burlesque dancers and twinkie male lap dancers! Whooeee!
Over at Sala Rossa (4848 St-Laurent) on Dec. 1 at 10 p.m., check out Meow Mix for bent girls and their buddies with emcee Alexis O'Hara.
Finally, on Dec. 2, do not miss the Cabaret Mado debut of fab Plateau drag queen Miss Gina the Dragpiper. See you there!
