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5 OPEN AT LAST

On the glamorous but rain-lashed evening of June 2, 1969, when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and the other splendidly attired guests arrived for the first performance in the National Arts Centre, they were treated to a new work commissioned by the National Ballet of Canada. Conscious of the honour accorded the company, artistic director Celia Franca had gone to great lengths to ensure a memorable evening. With the bilingual, bicultural nature of the Arts Centre in mind, she had called on her “favourite choreographer in the world,” the Englishman Anthony Tudor, to contrive a ballet based on a story by Voltaire. After months of tinkering, Tudor had informed Franca that he was uninspired and could not produce the work. With only a few months left before the opening, she had turned urgently to another friend in the dance world, the French choreographer Roland Petit. As Franca remembered, she felt out of ideas at this point, so she gave Petit a free hand to pick the work, the music, and the designer for this commission.¹

Newly minted Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his companion, Madeleine Gobeil, already appointed to the new NAC board, made a stunning and much-talked-about couple at the NAC’s opening night, June 2, 1969.Photo © Ottawa Citizen/UPI.Reprinted by permission.

The result was Kraanerg, an avant-garde ballet with discordant electronic-sounding orchestral music by Greek composer Iannis Xenakis. The kinetic set was designed by the Hungarian-born, French-based “wizard of op-art,” Victor Vasarely. The dancers, clad in stark white leotards cinched tightly at the waist with wide belts, had struggled hard to learn the steps. No clear discernable melody marked the score, and American conductor Lukas Foss resorted to a metronome and stop-watch to keep the beat. The dancers intensely counted their way through the movements with the aid of their French-speaking ballet master, who stood in the wings calling out the beats: “une, deux, trois.” Ballerina Veronica Tennant recalled the experience as “out of the space age, like being in Star Trek.”² Still, the elastic geometric manoeuvres would be hailed by the critics, including the demanding dance critic Clive Barnes of the New York Times.

Barnes had been lured to the first night audience by Mary Jolliffe’s energetic international promotion of the new centre as well as the prospect of a new ballet. He later reviewed the evening as “the same sort of disaster as the first night of Swan Lake, shocking on first viewing but with music and dance that will endure.”³ As the two-week opening festival continued, Franca later recalled she could pinpoint the moment when at least thirty to forty patrons would rise in the middle of Xenakis’s discordant music and leave the hall. But on this opening night, the audience politely sat it out. Whatever the aesthetic demands, “real culture” had arrived in Ottawa. This work went on to sporadic performances in the regular season of the National Ballet and became part of its repertoire. It would later be used by the Arts Centre as an example of one of the ways it should “assist the Canada Council in the development of the performing arts in Canada”—an essential part of its new mandate.

Kraanerg, performed by the National Ballet of Canada to ear-splitting music by Greek composer Iannis Xanekis, proved a challenge to the opening-night audience. Photo © Anthony Crickmay.Courtesy of the National Ballet of Canada.

Pierre Trudeau loved ballet and went backstage with Madeleine Gobeil after the controversial Kraanerg to congratulate the performers. Dance star, later NAC board member, Veronica Tennant is on the extreme right. Photo © Ottawa Citizen/UPI. Reprinted by permission.

In designing the program for the two-week opening performances, David Haber had two key goals: to intrigue the audience by its diversity and to let the Arts Centre show itself off. Subsequent ballet performances included the sure crowd-pleaser Swan Lake and a sumptuous performance of Romeo and Juliet. On one of these evenings, a technical failure in the opera hall’s grand new machinery took top honours. After a mistouch of a button, the orchestra suddenly rose up out of the pit in mid-performance and travelled on past stage level to tower over both the performers and the audience. Franca, dancing the role of Lady Capulet in the ballroom scene of Romeo and Juliet, rushed to the wings and stopped the performance. As things settled and the platform descended again, a witty violinist tied his handkerchief to his bow and waved goodbye to the audience while the musicians sank back out of sight.

The rest of the programming unfolded relatively without hitch and mostly to critical praise. The Montreal and Toronto Symphony orchestras performed, and the Vancouver Playhouse brought a production of a new Canadian play, George Ryga’s Ecstasy of Rita Joe, which portrayed the lostness of a First Nations girl in modern urban Canadian society. The production drew excited interest on Parliament Hill, where a Commons Committee on Indian Affairs was studying this very issue.

George Ryga’s play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, about a benighted young First Nations girl, was also featured in the opening week. Then Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development Jean Chrétien and his wife, Aline, attended and met actor Chief Dan George at a post-play reception. Photo © John Evans.

Le Théâtre du Nouveau Monde opened the Theatre with an outrageous and witty musical adaptation of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata written by Michel Tremblay and directed by the sensational young Québécois director André Brassard. The Studio, the experimental three-hundred-seat space designed to function like a television studio, scheduled Jack Winter’s Party Day, a three-dimensional work that had the audience sitting on all sides. Commissioned by the Arts Centre, the play revolved around the Nazi Party and the Nuremburg rallies. Even before opening night, this theme had elicited worried complaints from the German ambassador in Ottawa and the city’s chief rabbi. Winter’s message, a strong warning against government sponsorship of the arts, was received through gritted teeth by the first-night audiences and, after its NAC run, the play disappeared virtually without trace. Its inclusion in the opening festival signalled, however, that the new Arts Centre would be brave and audacious in what it presented.

Not everything on offer during these first two weeks was “high-brow.” One of the NAC’s basic tenets was to offer variety—and that would include a vast range of popular entertainers booked by the Arts Centre or by private impresarios who would rent the halls. Singers Gordon Lightfoot and Monique Leyrac were among the “popular” artists who played to sold-out audiences.

Despite the appearance of leading Quebec artists, Radio Canada was reluctant, given the nationalist sentiments stirring in Quebec, to report on these events in Ottawa. Finally, top CBC brass intervened and ordered at least some cursory coverage. CBC English television, in contrast, pulled out all the stops to cover the opening celebrations, with Bruno Gerussi on hand to host the proceedings. In the midst of a live broadcast on the first night, Gerussi chivvied Southam about his resplendent formal attire of white tie and medals. The good-humoured Southam gave back as good as he got. He was “on duty” this particular evening, he explained, so had to appear “in uniform,” but when he later attended the Arts Centre for pleasure, he assured the interviewer that he would dress more like the tieless, wide-lapelled, bell-bottom-clad broadcaster himself, even asking the hapless Gerussi for the name of his tailor.⁴

The avant-garde Studio theatre set up for performances of Jack Winter’s play Party Day, which attacked the government’s role in the arts.Photo © Studio Graetz.

Gerussi summed up the evening’s events as “a mix of Carnaby Street and old school tie. Miniskirts and full-length minks … ruffled shirts and … the faint smell of moth-balls”— in short, the Canadian scene on the eve of the 1970s. This mix of tradition with openness to the modern was at the core of Southam’s approach, and it would be central to much of the programming at the NAC during his tenure. Combining the two would be his challenge in the years ahead as he moved to establish the National Arts Centre on the Canadian arts scene. The opening festival was meant to demonstrate that the best and most challenging national and international work would be presented at the NAC.

Actor Bruno Gerussi hosted a live CBC Television broadcast of the opening. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was interviewed. Photo © John Evans.

The media response to the opening exceeded the organizers’ wildest dreams. The press was filled with rave reviews for the building, the performances, and the very idea of a multi-performing arts centre of international standard on the banks of the Rideau Canal. Mr. Pearson’s hopes seemed fulfilled; all eyes were focused on the capital. The international wire services AP and UPI, The Times of London, the New Yorker magazine, and the New York Times all covered the event, thanks to the prodigious efforts of Mary Jolliffe.

Amid the excitement of the opening events and the praise from the critics, a major crisis was brewing—the budget. Accustomed to the free-flowing expense accounts at Expo and the buzz needed to attract the hard-boiled international media, Jolliffe had realized soon after her arrival at the Arts Centre that there was insufficient money for the job she had to do. She told Southam right from the start that they needed at least $600,000 to promote the opening festival, but little more than half this amount had been approved for the entire first year’s publicity budget. With only eight months before the opening when she arrived in Ottawa, she knew they had to “go like hell” and, while Southam worked on the financial side to try to increase the funding, she began to spend money as she saw fit. She found Southam an easy and amenable boss. When she brought him a draft of the first brochure, he inquired, laconically, “Am I supposed to approve this?” ⁵ He was never arbitrary in his decisions, she found, but usually deferred to the expertise of “the professionals”—Beaudet, Haber, Corder, and, indeed, herself. She thought Southam “a classy gent,” equal to the leading arts czars of the era, men such as the Met’s Sir Rudolf Bing and England’s Tyrone Guthrie.

By May, before the Arts Centre even opened, not only had Jolliffe blown through most of the first-year PR budget but there were looming budgetary problems in other departments as well. Southam warned the Board of Trustees that there would likely be over-expenditures in some areas, including operations, and even in catering, where a row with the newly contracted concessionaire was spelling financial trouble. The problems were serious, the costs were already running $250,000 over budget for the year, and Southam appeared before a parliamentary committee to say that the new National Arts Centre really needed a budget of $3 million a year. He would later comment ruefully that his pitch “had not been a strong enough smoke signal.”⁶

The board chairman, Lawrence Freiman, was deeply upset. He had promised Judy LaMarsh that the centre would live within the original $2.5 million budget, whereas Southam had blithely been pushing ahead. In several heated arguments with Freiman, he rationalized that public interest was much stronger than expected and, moreover, the basic costs had gone up. While the trustees urged senior staff to exercise better financial management, Southam argued in a memorandum to the May board meetings that they were dealing with artistic and theatrical temperaments—which functioned differently from those engaged in other activities. Freiman struggled hard to put better financial controls in place, even as he pushed to get the revenue-producing small shops along Elgin Street opened and the other commercial concessions paying some rent. The board floated yet another idea for fundraising in support of the NAC—a national lottery—but lotteries were still illegal in Canada and considered by many to be immoral. The plan was quickly rejected by the secretary of state’s officials and then by the deputy minister of the Treasury Board as “an ineffective way to raise money over an extended period.”⁷ The dispute over money between Southam and Freiman continued through many meetings, with Freiman so distressed at one point that he left the proceedings and turned them over to his deputy, Claude Robillard. The effort would affect Robillard’s already failing health, and, in October, he was forced to retire altogether from the board.

Jolliffe had worked hard to entice the Canadian and the international press to take an interest, and she introduced many of the leading journalists to Southam. He in turn beguiled them with lunches at the Rideau Club featuring the best food and wines, polished off with brandy and one of his Monte Cristo cigars. Whatever it took, the plan worked. Leading critics turned up to review the opening performances: Nathan Cohen, Canada’s outstanding theatre writer; Clive Barnes of the New York Times; Courtney Towers from Time magazine; and Hilary Brigstocke, Ottawa correspondent for the London Times, all gave them extensive coverage. Many of the more thoughtful articles looked well beyond the gilded two weeks of the opening festival to ponder what this new arts emporium would mean to the Canadian public.

While Jolliffe had pulled off an international public-relations coup and the name of the National Arts Centre had appeared around the world in the quality press, she now had little left in the kitty to promote the first regular seasons of orchestra, theatre, and other performances that would soon be starting on the NAC stages. Southam had not discouraged her efforts for the opening, and she had achieved what he wanted. But now the bills were coming due, and that spelt trouble.

The first public signs of the problem came in an article by John Drewery, the national CBC political correspondent. On June 13, as the thrill of the opening peaked, Drewery reported that the brand-new arts palace was already running out of money. What was worse, the source of the story turned out to be the sometimes-bibulous Mary Jolliffe herself. Jolliffe developed close relations with her press clients and had let her hair down with Drewery, giving him a glimpse of what was going on behind the scenes. Alarm bells rang furiously on Parliament Hill, and Southam raced to assist the deputy minister, Jules Léger, to fashion a statement for the new Secretary of State Gérard Pelletier to deliver in the House of Commons. Peppered by the Opposition, Pelletier spoke in the Commons on June 18, insisting that the real story was the “NAC’s immediate success from coast to coast and the aura it gave off of being a permanent Expo.” Léger kept the minister on message with a follow-up statement, that 65 percent attendance had been expected for the opening festival, but the event had gone way beyond that with an overall audience of 86.6 percent. This huge increase in unexpected visitors, the minister declared, had cost money.

Despite these public declarations intended to draw off the attackers, the board was facing a major crisis. The press leak had left the politically appointed trustees extremely nervous. At the July meetings, in the face of their chagrin, a sheepish Hamilton Southam delicately and dexterously brought about the disengagement of Mary Jolliffe. After the triumphant opening she had helped so much to engineer, she left with much praise and three months’ salary. Southam met personally with Pelletier, apologizing for the fuss and assuring him that the Arts Centre would henceforth respect its budgets.

The financial crisis that had been allowed briefly to surface was real. An extended struggle had been under way between Treasury Board officials and the NAC management throughout the opening celebrations. Southam had written earlier to ask LaMarsh to provide supplementary funds before her departure as the minister responsible. He had requested an additional $300,000 to $500,000 beyond the base $2.5 million budget that had been approved, but the Treasury Board was stubbornly holding the line. Southam argued tenaciously that a performing arts centre could not be treated like other government departments—that performance bookings often had to occur years in advance and that budgeting had to allow for this fact. It was a problem that would rage over the Arts Centre’s budget and dog its planning down through the years.

The trustees grappled with the problem and discussed how they should keep the government abreast of the gravity of the situation. Southam crafted yet another detailed memorandum for the minister to take to Cabinet, setting out reasons for the overruns that blamed everything from higher electricity costs than those projected by the Department of Public Works two years before to the expense of servicing the huge and unexpected increase in visitors. He also dropped a first hint that revenues for the proposed resident companies in the upcoming season might also be less than expected. The question of an audience for the real work to come had yet to be fully addressed.

As public tempests swirled around the fallout from the grand opening, inside the Arts Centre, intense efforts were under way for its real artistic beginnings. David Haber had carefully booked in a light season of summer fare for the tourists who poured through Ottawa in July and August. It included the Charlottetown Festival musicals Anne of Green Gables and Johnny Belinda as well as the Quebec folkloric dance troupe Les Feux Follets. One of the outstanding successes was a small in-house production, Love and Maple Syrup, an amusing cabaret show presented in the Studio which was so successful that it had an extended run on into September. A witty and ironic look at Canadian foibles, written by Louis Negin, it played on a few bilingual themes, including a spoof on a Quebecer ordering “un hamburger” with “tous les works” over the telephone. One of its stars was Jean Gascon’s brother, Gabriel Gascon, who had taken classical French theatre studies in Paris and then moved to London, where he trained and worked in English theatre with the famed director Michel St. Denis. The show proved so popular that it would come back again the following year.

While this first summer season kept the Arts Centre functioning as it prepared for the future, the trustees recognized that they had not yet devised a winning formula for the Summer Festival. It had been Part Two of the original approval for the NAC and was expected to attract and accommodate hundreds of thousands of tourists, both Canadian and American, to the capital each summer. By the end of the first year of operations, the tour guides had logged more than 117,000 visits to the Arts Centre. These encouraging numbers did not necessarily translate into audience members, but they did show a tremendous interest in the new facility.

The coming regular seasons in music and theatre were beginning to shape up. After lengthy negotiations, a final deal, although imperfect from the NAC’s point of view, had been struck with Stratford. The company would become a year-round operation, with a “substantial portion” of the six months away from its summer festival home spent in Ottawa. The company would also tour extensively around Canada and into the United States, but not under the NAC banner. Despite the newly acquired “National” in its name, Stratford would not become the English-language resident theatre company at the Arts Centre. Instead, it was contracted to present a limited number of plays there, and company members would do school programs and tours in the National Capital Region. The balance of the full theatre season would be filled out with other companies from across Canada booked into the centre by Haber. This was a bitter blow, especially to Lawrence Freiman, who had believed so strongly in his close ties with Stratford. The intense behind-the-scene power struggles, which included intervention by the Canada Council and the Secretary 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.