“This is the third shrunken head I’ve had,” Margaret Whisselle remarked, “but I think that Mongo here is a keeper. Actually, he goes really well with my boar’s tooth.”
It’s just not something you hear everyday in Iroquois United Church.
However, if you take into account that South Dundas native Margaret Whisselle is an operatically trained singer/actor, who is taking on the role of Bloody Mary in the upcoming Brockville Arts Centre production of the musical, South Pacific, it does become a lot clearer.
South Pacific, directed by Michael Trussell, with musical direction by Christopher Coyea, will play at the Brockville Arts Centre June 17-19, 2016.
A graduate of Riverside Heights Public School, and Seaway District High School, with a bachelor of music, honours, from Queen’s University, Margaret Whisselle is a teacher of both vocal music and piano.
Margaret is also the accompanist with the Seaway Valley Singers, directed by Robert Jones, and organist for both Iroquois United Church and Lakeshore Drive United Church.
But the role of Bloody Mary is going to be a new experience for her.
“I’ve performed in pit bands and I’ve worked as a production voice coach,” Whisselle explained. “I have also served as rehearsal pianist for other shows. But this is my first time actually going on stage myself in an acting and singing role.
It is challenging, playing Bloody Mary, but this is a sweet challenge, one that makes me happy,” she said.
When the chance to audition for the Trussell/Coyea production came up in January, she decided to take a chance.
She won the role and has been in rehearsals since March.
Bloody Mary is definitely a challenge for the singer.
Mary is a tough black-marketeer, trying to scratch out a living peddling shrunken heads, hookahs and grass skirts to the US sailors stationed on a tropical Pacific naval base in the last year of World War II.
“Mary’s had a hard life,” Whisselle explains, talking about her unusual character.
“She is alone on this island base. Her family is far away on a different island, Bali Hai.
Mary is also desperately trying to marry her beautiful and innocent young daughter, Liatt, off to an American officer, in the hope that Liatt will then have a better life than she has had.”
As Whisselle put it, laughing, Mary is often very funny, but she can be a bit sleazy at times.
“She wants a ‘hot lieutenant, a rich man, a white man’ for her daughter. But this is largely so that Liatt will escape the racism, and the back-breaking work on plantations that Mary’s faced all her life.
This is a good show, a wonderful show,” Margaret said. “Audiences will be carried away by the story and the music.”
South Pacific actually has some unusual qualities for a production written in the 1950s.
While it is filled with some of the most beautiful music Rogers and Hammerstein ever wrote, including Some Enchanted Evening and Bali Hai and comic songs like There’s Nothin’ Like A Dame and I’m In Love With A Wonderful Guy, it also dared to tackle issues of racism.
One song, You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught, sung by young Lt. Cable, confronts the nature of bigotry head on.
The two love affairs at the heart of the musical, one between American nurse Nellie and Emile, a French planter, the other between Lt. Cable and Tonkinese Liatt, will prove difficult, and, in one case, tragic.
“Emile is being sung by my Opera and Vocal Coach, Alex Fleuriau Chateau,” Margaret explained.
Chateau has also been responsible for preparing Margaret for the next great challenge of her musical career.
In the spring of 2017, in the North American showcase of a production scored for singers and a brass band, the South Dundas artist will make her operatic debut in Mozart’s well loved opera, The Magic Flute.
With David Druce conducting, Margaret Whisselle will appear as First Lady of the Queen of the Night when this production is staged in Brockville and later in Ottawa.
First, however, is Whisselle’s debut as the determined Bloody Mary.
It is a performance the artist is looking forward to.
To her, singing, dancing and acting will always be “a passion.”
Margaret Whisselle (and ‘Mongo’) will be on stage at the Brockville Arts Centre, in the beautiful production of Rogers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific June 17- 19.
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