West Coasters have a delicious opportunity to get some philanthropic noshing in this Saturday.
Ucluelet’s The Blue Room is hosting a pancake breakfast from 8-11 a.m. on June 3 to support the West Coast Glee program.
The program’s co-founder Courtney Johnson told the Westerly News that The Blue Room’s Janine Riley reached out to her with the idea to support the peninsula’s young local performers.
“She’s a wonderful person,” Johnson said of Riley adding that funds will go towards
costumes, sound equipment and supplies.
She added that the local support she receives fuels her passion for the program.
“It makes me feel like what I do matters. It’s a lot of work to put these shows on, to have a vision in your head and write a script, pick all the songs and the students and get the sets made and delivered and the sound equipment all together and get the costumes. It’s not just me in the classroom for two hours. It’s tons of work all week every week. Maintaining a relationship with these kids and being a mentor is wonderful work and it reinforces that what I do matters.”
Glee is getting set to put about 60 young performers on the Ucluelet Community Centre stage on June 9 and 10, illustrating the program’s significant growth since its launch in 2012 when Johnson and co-founder Sarah Hogan welcomed about 15 aspiring thespians.
“I thought it was amazing then and it was amazing then,” she said. “It’s becoming a huge program and I only want it to expand and if people are supportive of it that means they like it so good, that means I’ll keep going.”
She added that local kids deserve local support.
“You have these little community members that want to be a part of things too and they deserve our support. They need to see that their community cares about them and what they do,” she said. “You never know what kind of talent you have unless there’s somebody there to say, ‘Hey let’s sing a song, let’s dance, let’s do a scene from this play. What is it that you like to do?’ Not every kid surfs. Not every kid is into sports and all of those are wonderful things too, don’t get me wrong, but performing arts is just a different way to get children to learn the best possible parts of themselves.”
Johnson noted that Glee was shut down by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and suggested the absence of live performances left a big void in local hearts.
“To be perfectly honest, I feel like these little programs are the bread and butter of our community. When the pandemic happened a lot of things were cancelled and it was mostly everything in the arts,” she said. “You couldn’t go to a concert, you couldn’t go to a dance class, everything had to go online and we missed the intimacy of being able to see people perform, to see live music, to see live performances and it actually turned out that the arts were the thing that we couldn’t live without. It really had a drain on people, it took its toll.”
The program’s upcoming ‘The West Coast Chronicles of Narnia’ performances have been a long time coming as it was a script the students were working on when Glee was shut down by COVID-19 in 2020.
Johnson wrote the screenplay and explained it encapsulates the seven Chronicles of Narnia squished together with a time travel theme and the characters meeting themselves.
“Children’s stories are not always about how everything works out and they’re not necessarily always a pleasant story. There’s always an evil-something or a challenge…The kids who read these stories leave knowing that they have the skills to overcome obstacles,” she said.
“I wrote the story with that idea in mind. The Chronicles of Narnia are not necessarily all happy. There’s a lot of sadness and there’s a lot of loss. So to start before the pandemic and then have us be shut down and then have it survive and come through and that now it’s happening after the pandemic is really serendipitous and it’s very amazing to me.”
She added that the Glee program is “an absolute confidence builder” and that students who begin the program shying away from speaking roles or singing solos often find a passionate conviction and belief in their abilities.
“They come out of their shells and it’s not just in performing, it is in every aspect of their lives,” she said. “What you do when you are little sticks with you. I was a performer when I was a kid and I still remember going across the stage and playing on a grand piano when I was four years old. I remember how the keys felt, I remember how the stage felt and how dark it was in the audience and I was bit by that performing bug. It made me feel really good about me, that I was important, that there was something awesome about me. These kids deserve to feel all of that too and to take it with them in whatever it is that they do in their lives.”
She hopes to see full audiences on both June 9 and 10 and encourages everyone to experience the abundant local talent.
“They want to learn, they want to do well and they want to show you what they can do…You are going to see something that you’ve never seen before. It’s going to blow you away,” she said. “I truly believe it really is unique…When some of those kids get up there and they sing and dance, you’re going to be amazed at what you see because it’s not the norm. I make a point of being very unusual with everything that I do in the best possible way.”
Doors open at 6 and shows start at 6:30.
“If you want a good seat, you better be in line early,” Johnson said.
andrew.bailey@westerlynews.ca
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