(North Renfrew Times, 2005 April 13)
Deep River Players have a hit!
On April 2 I attended the production of the "West Wylie Story," put on
by the Deep River Players.
It was a musical about "love and fission in the Ottawa Valley."
The musical story-line itself was really quite simple - two people of
different backgrounds meet, conflict and passion arises, and they all have a
good time, like "West Side Story."
And much of the music came from "West Side Story" as well as other
popular musicals.
But what made the presentation so wonderful were the following:
- It was in fact based, although loosely in some areas, on actual
occurrences.
- It gave the background of the development of fission in the area, and
referred to such things as "X" for Uranium, "polymer" for heavy water, etc,
and introduced strange physicists and politicians to a rural Ottawa Valley
area, and focused on the development of ZEEP - Canada's first nuclear
facility.
- The words were clever, and both historical as well as up-to-date, with
references to CD Howe (CD Who in the musical) and his "famous" kick-off to
nuclear development in Canada ("Okay, let's go!"), and to things like
difficulties in getting ZEEP to actually go, compared with problems on
Maple.
- The cast was great, the singing and dancing were both vigorous and
inspired. The music was well balanced (but my seat was on the other side of
the auditorium from the band).
- Not coming from the area, I only recognized a very few in the cast,
but one of them was outstanding - dancing and singing like a young actor was
our own Jeremy Whitlock, as Sir John Cockcrow (Cockcroft).
I had tears running down my cheeks from the humour and nostalgia of the
presentation.
It was really great, and greatly appreciated by everyone who attended.
Thank you, Deep River Players.
RL Bob Hemmings
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