Eugene Clark and Marlane O’Brien Marlane O’Brien steals the show, many people have said. The focus may be on the guys in The Full Monty, but it’s the character of Jeanette, the gritty, chain smoking, tough love piano player, who is getting a lot of the laughs. While O’Brien pushes aside the praise, she readily admits she loves the role.

“She’s quite a gift of a character. When you’re given such an outrageous character to begin with, as long as you keep the core of reality so that everything you do has truth as a base, you really can take her as far as you want. And I do!” she says.

She also admits that she has never seen the musical elsewhere. “I’m coming at her totally fresh. This is more fun because it’s my creation. Annie Allan the director said go for it, so I did.”

O’Brien understands why audiences are responding so well to not only her character but the whole show. The honesty of the relationship between Jeanette and the guys in the show resonates with people. “The guys are great. Off stage and on, they’re my boys. That’s why I like this play. You can have a place deep down where they’re real people. Jeanette has her places where she brings the truth home. It’s a really great combination of heart and cheek, literally and figuratively!”

One of her friends saw The Full Monty and did not even recognize her, and she says all the ‘gals’ in her community have been to it and loved it.

Nora McLellan

in Anne of Green Gables

Tess Benger and Nora McLellan Listening to Nora McLellan talk is like running through a who’s who of Canadian musical theatre. She rattles off the names of many of the famous players who have been involved in The Charlottetown Festival over the years, but the irony is, this is McLellan’s debut on the Island. She plays Marilla Cuthbert in Anne of Green Gables—The Musical™ in the Homburg Theatre.

McLellan first met and worked with Norman and Elaine Campbell, two of the creators of Anne, when she was in her early twenties. “Norman and Elaine tried to get me to The Charlottetown Festival for years, whether for Anne or Emily or something else. I was always of the mind I would wait until I was the right age for the role I was right for,” she says.

With a career that includes many television specials and galas, several years at the Stratford Festival, and 22 seasons with the Shaw Festival, McLellan says this year, with the reimaging of Anne, “Marilla was the right part at the right time.”

“A lot of times I go into these iconic shows without seeing the original or the movie version,” she says. “For me it’s completely new. I asked the director, Marcia Kash, if this would give me the opportunity to come at it in a completely new way. That was the excitement for me. I have to thank Anne Allan for the bold idea of a new Anne. ”

Gordon Gammie

in Separate Beds

Catherine O’Brien and Gordon Gammie Gordon Gammie wants to talk about couples working things out. It’s not clear at first if he’s referring to his dual roles in Separate Beds, now playing at The Charlottetown Festival, or his co-star Catherine O’Brien or their director Wade Lynch. Lynch directs Gammie and O’Brien as not one but two different couples in the comedy play. The three of them have had to sort out a lot of movements, costume changes, props and set changes.

The two act play features two couples on a Caribbean cruise sorting out the truth of their long marriages over the course of a few days. Gammie and O’Brien play one couple in the first act, Ernie and Twink, and another in the second, Blake and Beth. Part of the challenge is playing one couple off the other one act after the other.

“It is playing out like rough seas. There are highs and lows. There are some comedic highs and then some dark lows. It does feel like an emotional cruise. We’re having fun doing it,” he says.

Gammie played at The Charlottetown Festival with Lynch in Shear Madness in 2006 and 2007. Then Lynch directed him in The Ballad of Stompin’ Tom in 2008.

Loving Buddy ←		Meet Marcia Kash →

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