Larry Lewis Turns Words and Music into Gold: The Play

"For people to be interested in the issues, you have to give them good art."
- Larry Lewis, playwright of/musician in Gold: The Play

Whether it's writing music for a Shakespearean play or creating a theatrical work about a long-lost Toronto waterway, Larry Lewis reaches a wide audience with his clever use of words and music, and his comic sense of the absurd.

This is a multi-faceted artist who went from studying classical guitar with the famed Alexandre Lagoya in Paris to touring puppet shows in the United States to performing on the stages of international festivals in the U.S., Canada and France.

Originally from Boston, Lewis was hired right after his music studies in France to work with puppeteer/director Ralph Lee in New York. After one season, he founded his own company, The Crankee Consort, putting his musical knowledge to good use in a fanciful travelling puppet show for young audiences, Stringing You Along or The History of the Classical Guitar.

Lewis has made Toronto his home since the 1980s. It was here that he dove into playwriting, creating and composing music for and directing and performing some of the Crankee Consort's six shows. His wife, Jane Low-Beer, a visual artist in her own right, designed the sets, costumes and puppets. The Consort toured extensively in Canada and the northeastern United States for 10 years, and appeared at The Toronto Guitar Festival and the Puppeteers of America Festival at the National Museum in Ottawa.

In recent years, the Crankee Consort has focused on adult productions. In three years, Lewis wrote as many plays - Very Short Stories, Wolkenstein - The Performance and the Dora Award nominee Irrevella.

In the late 1990's, Lewis began what has become a fruitful collaboration with David Anderson and Clay and Paper Theatre, penning three plays - The Resurrection of Fornax (1997), The Ballad of Garrison Creek (1998) and Gold: The Play (2001-02).

Lewis has found common ground between his work with puppet theatre and the outdoor productions he has created with Clay and Paper Theatre.

"The theatrical language in both cases is highly stylized," he observes. "Our language operates on a similar principle to drama in 18th century opera - actors perform a series of gestures that tell the audience how they are feeling."

In recent years, Lewis has also created both script and music for HipHopera, a hip-hop opera with a multi-racial cast, based on The Threepenny Opera, and wrote the play and played the overture for A Place, a performance piece for the Quebec company Merlin's Son. A Place toured several Canadian fringe festivals in the summer of 2000 and was pegged as a "must see" at the St. John's Fringe in Newfoundland.

Lewis has also composed and directed music for other productions, including Theatre Columbus' The Twelfth Night, a Dora nominee, and Cascade Theatre's Something From Nothing, which won a Dora.

Larry Lewis' theatrical work has been greatly influenced by two titans of the 1970s New York theatre scene - Peter Schumann, director of the famed Bread and Puppet Theatre, and renowned stage director Robert Wilson. While the two are distinctively different in style, both of these artists conceive of theatre in visual terms.

"When I am trying to communicate an emotion or idea, I try to put the actor/s in a situation where the visuals are as important to the process as the attitude of the performer."

Lewis also finds inspiration in the cinema of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. "In American cinema, directors such as Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder and Frank Capra used light comedy as a vehicle for personal and political commentary. I identify with that comic tradition."

Musically, Lewis finds himself most drawn to composers connected to a folk tradition. "I'm particularly fond of Stravinsky and Bartok, both of whom synthesized modern techniques with folk traditions." Modern jazz and, more recently, Latin music are also passions. Lewis played guitar with the modern jazz group Delawareness at a number of jazz festivals and in concert series. He currently leads an eclectic ensemble, The Patio Rats, which performs regularly in and around Toronto.