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Mike Ross underwent a “baptism by fire” this summer. “Pardon the pun,” he grimaces. The first professional experience in musical theatre for this experienced singer, songwriter, and musician, was playing the leading role of Cale Blackwell in the Charlottetown Festival production of Fire. The baptism was quite a shock for someone whose only previous acting experience was with the Feast Dinner Theatre.
While this is his first year with the Charlottetown Festival, the venue he has been playing, the MacKenzie Theatre, is well-known to him, since in another incarnation, Mike sang as the lead singer of the Jive Kings, the East Coast Music Award-winning swing band that four years ago started swinging crowds at the theatre every Saturday night. During that time, Mike even wrote a song for the Kings, called “At the Mack.” The affectionate label “The Mack” hadn't been coined before. “I should be getting royalties,” Mike jokes.
Royalties notwithstanding, “The Mack” has been magic for Mike. He loves the intimacy of the space — “whether I'm performing with the Jive Kings or a stage show or singing my own songs,” he says. “It has a feeling like a big living room, but it's also an equipped theatre, with lighting and a raised stage.” Playing at the Mack and playing with the Jive Kings “really worked my performing ability under any venue — always adapting to a new crowd. I really honed my skills as a front man.”
The Jive Kings played for audiences of all ages, including doing “sixty-plus school shows”. “The great thing about the Jive Kings was that that we were not dumbing anything down to anyone. Even with kids, we were not cutting their food for them. The music was the same. We sold it, and they got it. They listened.”
Since graduating from UPEI with a degree in music, Mike has already had some amazing opportunities come his way. He credits an openness “to anything.” “My approach has always been to put one foot in front of the other, and to see what doors open.” He calls his success “happenstance-meets-preparation.”
He'll be looking for happenstance to open doors for him in Toronto after this summer. “Now that I've been part of the Festival, I'd like to continue acting—but I'm also going to continue being a musician and a songwriter,” Mike says.
His most exciting project will put to use the performing and songwriting chops he developed with the Jive Kings — and his knowledge of how to capture audiences old and young. Mike has recorded a full-length album, called The Dennis Lee Project, made up of original songs written to poems from the collection Bubblegum Delicious by Dennis Lee, Toronto's poet laureate and much-loved author of “Alligator Pie.” Mike describes the music he has created as “adult music for children and children's music for adults.” The project has Lee's full support.
“I have no recollection of listening to or singing children's music. I have no memory of singing ‘The Muffin Man,' no memory of elementary music class. My earliest memory of music was my mom getting Billy Joel's An Innocent Man.” Later influences have been Tom Waits and Randy Newman—songwriters who use “imagery—that makes you tell yourself a story. They give you the tools to make a story for yourself. How it unfolds is how you imagine it.” The music makes imagery, too: “The first chord—whether it's major or minor—tells a story in itself.” Lee's poems, are “so vivid”—“one read, and you've got an idea.”
Mike loves using Lee's words as a base for his composing. “Ideally, I'd love to get into an Elton John/Bernie Taupin situation—where the words are done for me.” In that scenario, “You can't change [a line], so you have to do something with it.” It forces you to be creative. Mike also says, “Simplicity is the key in songwriting, and it's hard to be simple when you're doing it all. We have a tendency to complicate things.”
His acting experience this past summer has been another opportunity to “make art out of someone else's words.” “In music you arrange a song; in acting you arrange a character—based on what you've been given.” What Mike wants to do, in whatever he does, is to “give [audiences] the liberty to tell themselves the story,” whether he interacts with those audiences from the stage of the Mack or elsewhere, as a singer, musician, songwriter, or actor.