Art and Politics. Sarah Jennings
of State’s office, had eventually aided Stratford’s desire to operate independently of the Arts Centre, and even Southam felt let down by Stratford’s management. Still, the company would provide a core to English theatre for the first season.
The approach to French theatre was entirely different. Jean-Guy Sabourin had established the philosophy, structure, and repertoire for his company along with its name, Théâtre Capricorne (summer solstice), and the board had approved his plans. They called for a resident French company at the Arts Centre with at least six actors contracted on a twelve-month basis. This troupe would also visit schools and tour shows in the National Capital Region and neighbouring communities. However, Sabourin’s proposal to mix amateur players, mostly from Université d’Ottawa, with his professional troupe was firmly rejected by the board, which instituted a “professionals only” policy for performers at the centre. Sabourin accepted the decision, but not before defending his ideas by reading long excerpts from French director Jean Vilar of France’s Théâtre National Populaire into the minutes.
As for the orchestra, the final auditions were complete and, by the end of July, the last players had been selected and contracted. Years later the orchestra’s union representative would marvel that the contract was no more than a short letter signed individually with each player, although a strong collective agreement would eventually emerge.8 For Maestro Bernardi, his initial terms of engagement left him with a thirty-day dismissal clause if things did not work out. Although he found this clause unsettling, he signed the offer anyway because his wife “had purchased a lovely new house in Ottawa which carried a large mortgage.”9 In mid-August the musicians’ names were announced. Claiming “no compromise over quality,” fully three-quarters of the players finally selected were Canadian, and many of the others were already resident in Canada.10 For budgetary reasons, the musicians were not put on the payroll until the end of August. They would have barely a month to get to know each other, and just two weeks to rehearse and learn to play together in time for the opening concert on October 7, 1969.
Finding the audiences that would attend all these new performances was one of the biggest challenges over the summer. When Mary Jolliffe had arrived on the scene months before, she had strenuously advocated “good subscriptions as the backbone of support.”11 This credo was already being drummed into Canadian arts companies by American box-office genius Danny Newman, who had been brought to Canada at the expense of the Canada Council to preach this gospel. His techniques would work wonders for orchestra and theatre subscriptions all over the country, but the National Arts Centre Orchestra, which would go from zero to 90 percent subscriptions in less than three years, was to become his star pupil. Ken Murphy, the orchestra’s new manager, was well aware that finding an “instant audience” for the untried and unknown ensemble in the first season was its biggest problem. He turned for help to a young local music-lover who had lived all her life in Ottawa, Evelyn Greenberg—an avid musician with a warm and positive personality.
Like Bernardi, Greenberg played both piano and harpsichord and, although an amateur, she had appeared with the CBC studio orchestra in Ottawa from time to time. She had met the NAC audition team of Beaudet, Bernardi, and Murphy when she was recruited to play for the musicians who travelled to Ottawa for their auditions. These sessions had been held in a run-down movie house in Hull, the Montcalm Theatre, because no other space was available. Greenberg admired how quickly Bernardi was able to select the candidates who could be of value to his new orchestra. In early August, at one of the popular outdoor evening concerts run by the CBC at Camp Fortune in Ottawa’s beautiful Gatineau Hills, an agitated Jean-Marie Beaudet had seized her by the arm and declared, “You’re the one!”12 He explained that Ken Murphy and he were very worried about creating an audience for the new orchestra and asked if she would take on the task of rallying the locals. Greenberg accepted with alacrity and was soon on the telephone to Southam, asking if he would attend a meeting of a new booster club she was devising. The Arts Centre’s management understood from the outset the value of good volunteers, and Southam readily complied.
Using a model that today’s pyramid marketers would envy, Greenberg invited five friends to bring ten others to the first gathering and, before long, this network had mushroomed into small parlour meetings all over the city. Greenberg remembers it was the early days of Chargex credit cards, and she urged her friends: “Ladies, now take out your credit cards and buy your subscriptions!”13 It worked. Before long, the opening concert was sold out, and sales for the rest of the season rapidly picked up. Before long, these volunteers evolved into the National Arts Centre Orchestra Association, with Greenberg as its first president. This group would be responsible over the years not only for selling tickets but for setting up scholarships, looking after visiting artists, supporting orchestral tours, and providing other invaluable services in support of music at the NAC.
While the music association concentrated on the orchestra, another group of volunteers was created to look after the overall interests of the Arts Centre and promote it throughout the community. These Friends of the NAC named themselves Nine Plus— after all the lively arts—and drummed up attention with a whole range of social engagements, including the first of many grand balls that would be held in the NAC’s honour.
Efforts to plump up attendance for the first performances were greatly assisted by management’s decision at the outset to keep ticket prices low. This policy was most effective when the NAC was paying visiting companies all-inclusive fees, but more difficult to control when they received just a share of box-office revenues. It meant that audiences could see a Stratford play for $4.50, two dollars less than the cost for the same performance at the Shakespeare Festival’s summer home in southern Ontario. Similar discounts and other enticements were used to attract audiences to the French theatre; group discounts were introduced and low-priced “stand-by” tickets provided to attract seniors and students to attend. The organizers were racing against time, but the results were good. When the doors opened to the first season, a respectable number of audience members were in the seats. For the orchestra, 60 percent of the seats were pre-sold by subscription for Series A, while Series B had reached 40 percent by the opening performance. By the end of the first year, the paid attendance at both main music series would reach 80 percent and 61 percent, respectively, a phenomenal start for a brand new orchestra. The National Arts Centre Orchestra Association, created to stimulate community support, was gratefully acknowledged for its share in this success in the first annual report.
The magnitude of the operations getting under way cannot be overstated. The resourceful Haber had to balance, on a year-round basis, the programs prepared in-house with visiting companies both Canadian and foreign. Although proposed performances by then-controversial shows such as Hair, with its on-stage nudity, were nervously debated at the board level, Haber, with only one assistant to help him, became the single impresario who booked in nearly all the artists for the Arts Centre’s several halls. He quickly established a policy of “big name artists” which would bring entertainers as diverse as Marlene Dietrich, Ravi Shankar, Harry Belafonte, and Duke Ellington to the NAC in the coming years. The walls of his small office were soon covered with massive charts and schedules, and Southam developed the habit of dropping by from time to time to find out just what was going to appear.
On the programming and public approval fronts, the National Arts Centre was off to a very good start.
Soon after the elegant opening at the National Arts Centre, novelist Mordecai Richler quipped in Time magazine, “We now have our own Yankee Stadium but no Babe Ruth!” The reviewers thought otherwise, however, and, as the new season of performances unfolded, they were generally well received. All considered, Time concluded, there was no doubt that “the new showcase … has immeasurably improved the choices of entertainment for Ottawa residents.”1 Fastest off the mark and most enthusiastically received was the NAC’s orchestra.
The first notes to float out across the floodlights to the audience were a drum-roll played by the twenty-three-year-old tympanist, Ian Bernard. He had come almost directly from his final exam at Quebec’s Conservatoire de Musique into the new orchestra. At the very first concert,