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Kamsack audience gives Dad’s Piano well-deserved standing ovation

By William Koreluik

            The standing ovation was never more heart-felt, or deserved than it was the end of Dad’s Piano at the Kamsack Playhouse on Saturday.

            A smart, well-written play by Dave Kelly, it needed someone with serious acting chops directed by someone with an understanding of the craft, and an excellent pianist.

Fortunately, the Kamsack Players drama club has all three in Adrian Hovrisko, Leanne Keys and Marilyn Marsh. They put their skills together to deliver a wonderful theatrical experience to which the audience responded with laughter and tears during the show and a sustained applause when it was over.

With it, the Kamsack audience was again reminded how fortunate it is that such a performance could only have shone in a venue that is as up to the acoustic challenge as is the Playhouse.

On stage alone except for the non-speaking pianist, Adrian Hovrisko has a role into which he can sink his teeth. That he did with a bravado performance as The Actor.

Because the play asks for one actor to play all 10 roles, without makeup or costume changes, and an accomplished pianist playing snippets of familiar classical pieces, everything rests on those two performers rising to the occasion.

The Kamsack audience has applauded Hovrisko in several of the Players’ productions, including the dramatic Tuesdays and Sundays, but in Dad’s Piano, he’s got a goldmine of a role for a capable actor.

On stage, Hovrisko has a compelling presence. It’s an intangible quality much like how the camera likes to look at the likes of Jennifer Lawrence and Montgomery Clift. You can’t help but watch him and listen to him and, in a good, well-staged piece like Dad’s Piano, be moved by him.

Accenting Hovrisko’s portrayals with beautifully-played classical music, Marilyn Marsh, out from under the focus of the Kamsack Community Choir for which she has been providing the accompaniment and much else, prompted at least one appreciative member of the audience to ask where she’s been hiding.

“Is she local?” the guy asked, intimating that maybe she had been imported from New York or Toronto especially for the play.

Probably few within reach are as schooled in the theatre arts as is Leanne Keys. She’s acted, most recently with the Kamsack Players, stunning the audience as the articulate professor slowly dying of cancer in Wit.

And no one who has seen Unnecessary Farce, which was staged as a Players’ dinner theatre production a few years ago, will ever forget her comical turn as the pregnant police officer. Her hilarious tumble off the bed, while she was visibly pregnant, produced the play’s biggest laugh, and a hundred gasps.

Keys has directed several plays and she has taken workshops offered by Theatre Saskatchewan. She’s now with the Yorkton Paper Bag Players, but said that since first discovering the script for Dad’s Piano before having moved to Yorkton she had wanted to direct it, but only with Hovrisko in the role of The Actor.

With Jack Koreluik and the Players on board and in support, they dug in, in spite of often having to travel back and forth between Kamsack and Yorkton for rehearsal.

Kamsack will be represented at a high standardat Theatre Saskatchewan’s TheatreOne festival at the Artesian Theatre in Regina next week when the Players re-stageDad’s Piano in competition.

And we’re all looking forward to Scrooge Macbeth, a comedy with “singing” actors that the Players will be staging as a dinner theatre at the OCC Hall December 2 and 3.