Kate Newby gets back to roots in Blithe Spirit
The ability to memorize lines is like a muscle: if you don’t use it you lose it. So it’s no surprise that Kate Newby actor director and until earlier this year artistic director of the Calgary International Children’s Festival admits she’s “a little bit rusty” when it comes to the line-learning thing. After more than a three-year absence from the stage Newby is returning to “tread the boards” starring as Ruth Condomine in Vertigo Mystery Theatre’s current production Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit .
Not that she’s been absent from the theatre world. Far from it in fact. Last year for example she was nominated for a Betty Mitchell Award for her direction of Vertigo’s Twelve Angry Men and she just finished directing a highly successful production of Brad Fraser’s True Love Lies for Alberta Theatre Projects (ATP).
However the last time she took a turn on the stage was back in 2008 in a production of August An Afternoon in the Country for ATP’s playRites Festival. (Incidentally she also won a Betty for her role in that show.)
Newby says she largely stepped away from acting because of the heavy time commitment of being artistic director of the children’s festival a position she held for seven years before resigning this past summer.
“It was an enormous job. I was travelling a lot; there was a lot of administration. I could only do a couple of contract gigs a year and my desire and primary focus is on directing pieces” Newby says. After acting for some 20 years she sought a greater challenge and turned to directing earning her MFA in directing from the University of Calgary in 2006.
However when the opportunity to appear in Blithe Spirit arose the old acting bug bit. “I was excited to go back into acting. I hadn’t done it for awhile and I was excited to be working with all the artists” she says citing a cast list that will be familiar to most Calgary theatre-goers including a rare onstage appearance by Vertigo artistic director Mark Bellamy.
Newby’s role in Blithe Spirit is something of a déjà vu. She stars opposite Christopher Hunt just as she did back in 1998 for Theatre Calgary’s production of another Coward play Private Lives .
“Chris and I have a really good rapport and we riff off of one another really well. We understand the style of Coward the energy and the quips back and forth” Newby says.
In fact Blithe Spirit’s director Marianne Copithorne saw Private Lives and according to Newby it was one of the reasons she contacted the two leads asking them to appear together again in Vertigo’s production.
The plot of the production however is something totally different.
“A married couple has a séance for fun and out of that comes back the husband’s first wife who is dead. All of a sudden you’re in this bizarre polygamist situation. It’s almost like [the TV show] Sister Wives but one of them happens to be a ghost” she says.
Due to the first wife Elvira’s attempts to disrupt Charles’s current marriage Ruth ends up getting killed. She immediately returns as a ghost to exact revenge on Elvira creating quite the situation for Charles.
Newby says comedy is a somewhat rare pleasure for her in Calgary a city in which she has been cast primarily in serious dramatic roles.
“If there was a crazy psychopath they’d go ‘Oh call Kate’” she laughs.
Despite directing True Love Lies which wrapped in early October Newby says she didn’t have much trouble taking off her director cap and switching into acting mode.
“My focus is really on my character development my relationship with the other characters on the stage so I’ve got a lot on my plate” she says.
Turning from the edgy material of True Love Lies — a storyline that deals with a father’s gay ex-lover returning to stir the nuclear family pot — to Blithe Spirit’s tamer storyline wasn’t as much of a transition as one may think.
“Brad Fraser is actually pretty similar to Noel Coward in his rhythms and his one-liners and the quips people have back and forth” Newby says.
When speaking of linguistic rhythms Newby says Coward’s “whole structure and sense of dialogue is really complicated” and that she has to be “word perfect.”
“The way that he’s structured it is so rhythmic that if you say an “and” instead of a “but” it takes you on a different path and you get really messed up…. And yet it has to be really natural so there’s the challenge there” she says.
