It’s been a long time since I encountered what I think of as “Christmas card” cold, the kind of cold where you take a deep breath and it feels like your lungs freeze just a little bit. The way I imagine that it would feel like if you could walk into the pages of a holiday poem.
The weather in Saguenay was like that. KitKat and I ventured out on the gangway wrapped in hats, scarves and faux-fur collared coats and we were still shivering by the time we reached the warmth of the small terminal to wait for our crew tour. When it’s that cold out, even the warmth of a tiny terminal-side market is welcome.
As for the tour itself…or rather, as for the show we went to.
Well, we were left unsure whether or not we’d all seen a show, or if we’d all just experienced some very very strange shared dream.
This was truly the most bizarre spectacle I’ve ever seen put on stage. That’s not to say it was bad at all, just…utterly bizarre. If you were to take a relatively high end community theatre production (and nearly the entire town takes part in this presentation), and somehow give it a massive effects budget, as in the level of budget you would give to a small professional touring broadway show; you might have something like this. That’s really the only way I can describe it.
Nominally, it was a theatrical production telling the story of the history of the area in about an hour and a half. There was a show back home that played for years every summer in the harbor that did a similar thing (though they were considered a professional production and their show was only 45 minutes long), so at first I somewhat thought that this would be like Spirit of a Nation only longer…
Er…not exactly.
Taking away from the fact that the story jumped around so much none of us were ever quite sure what was happening, this…really the only word I can think of is spectacle had – within the space of an hour (in no particular order) – 6 live horses on stage, 5 geese, a pig (which really did not want to be on stage!), a cow, I’m pretty sure there might have been a chicken in there somewhere, people rappelling from the ceiling, a tank (I’m pretty certain it wasn’t a real tank, but honestly for a moment there none of us were certain), a random appearance by Elvis (because Elvis is so Canadian….?), balloons falling from the ceiling, a water show, fireworks, fire eating, full inferno flame effects, real axes being used to chop wood on stage, cannon fire, two different cars driven on and off stage at not-very-slow-speeds, a lazer light show, a couple of ballerinas dressed as Pocahontas, and a flood…
All surround a production that was, at its heart, no more than a highly enthusiastic community theatre show. House in a huge stadium theatre with a stage that had clearly been specially constructed to hold all of the above.
As I said…utterly bizarre.
And I would have loved to see their back stage!
Glad you’ve been to Saguenay! Further up river is Lac St-Jean Where my father was from. you’ve touched a part of my familial roots.