It's hard to imagine Col. John By singing and dancing Broadway-style show tunes, but a new musical play on the famed builder of the Rideau Canal is doing just that.
Bye Bye Bytown, a new work by Ottawa's Dancing on Water Theatre Company, is taking the stuffiness out of Ottawa's history and injecting it with humour, snappy songs and some dancing. The two-hour play brings to life the story of the early days of Canada's captial. It tells the story of Col. John By's monumental task of building the Rideau Canal, as seen through the eyes of five modern-day teenagers who are whisked back into history by the ghost of the colonel.
"It's not a dry show at all, this is Broadway-style," says Laura Ewing Piper, who wrote the script for the show, which she originally intended as an educational theatre piece for elementary school students.
"The whole point is to make the history exciting, to tell it in a way that people enjoy it and have them go away singing some of the songs."
The show debuts tonight at Centrepointe Theatre and runs until Sunday.
Her husband, Timothy Piper, wrote the music, 15 original songs in all, which are performed by the cast of 25 actors, including the nine musicians in the orchestra.
"Probably the biggest number in the show is The Streets of Bytown, in which Col. John By dances with the other main characters," says Timothy Piper. "There's even a tango number right near the end of the show. It's a musical so we can take some liberties."
To make the musical fresh and original, folk tunes as well as rock songs are incorporated into the show, he said. The musical styles switch from folk songs when the men in the play are digging a path for the canal, to modern-day songs when the teenagers are featured in the play.
Phil Holmes, who plays John By, said he was impressed by the courage of the character he is playing in the show.
"I learned so much about how passionate the man was and that he made so much out of nothing," said Holmes, a music student at the University of Ottawa. "He built this town pretty much and I never knew that he was completely unrecognized for it at the end. It must have been heart-breaking for him.
I'm in mostly every scene, kind of behind-the-scenes and running a lot of things because it is a ghost story."
Mari Lyn Kelly plays Mother McGuinty, who runs the local pub, and Matt Minter plays Col. By's best friend, John McTaggart.