Martin Julien on The Man That Got Away

14 Dec 2022 -Photos by Dylan Mitro  

"The play is based in my own personal history of growing up through the 1960s to 1980s in the loving and complicated family of my lesbian mother, my gay father, and me," says Martin Julien (Stopheart) of The Man That Got Away. "It is a multi-faceted play that celebrates and critiques underexamined notions of queer identity through a unique personal lens, from the days of pre-Stonewall repression to ‘Gay Liberation’ to the AIDS epidemic. I sense that much of the ramifications of this collective journey are in danger of being lost, or simplified, in politics, art, and memory." 

Julien refers to The Man That Got Away as a play, but it is billed and styled as a cabaret. "The cabaret form is both elastic and codified. It is a well-loved historical genre for both musical theatre performers and audiences – with deep roots in everything from Weimar Republic Germany to Manhattan supper clubs – yet can often be trivialized through sentiment and cliché. Personally, as a child, I was practically raised on the form. My gay father took me to countless one-person shows at Toronto’s O’Keefe Centre in the '60s and ‘70s: Liberace, Debbie Reynolds, Harry Belafonte, Peggy Lee, you name it. My director Peter Hinton-Davis [Bombay Black] and I want to both utilize and subvert the often confessional and nostalgic construction of the cabaret form to discover access to its deeper modalities and affects. It entails selecting showtunes, from the Judy Garland songbook for instance, and re-contextualizing them to explore their cultural and personal importance, their impact as entertainment, and the codes through which their appearance both reveals and hides potential meanings and identifications." 

Garland is undoubtedly the gold standard when it comes to cabaret, but there are also many songs and artists that are standards in the genre. "Growing up, I was immersed in the canon," says Julien. "My parents took me to see musicals, and soundtrack albums, including Sondheim, were forever on the turntable. Now, I teach musical theatre performance at Sheridan College, and the growing contemporary repertoire is introduced to me by my wonderfully gifted students. So, both familiarity and newness inform our artistic choices. Some of the Judy songs we perform in the play will be well-known to many, others will be newly discovered. This theme of appearance, disappearance, and reappearance – of form and meaning – is embedded in the work’s constructed dramaturgy. In the earliest play drafts, I was throwing in ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ in terms of potential showtunes from the 20th century. It was director Hinton-Davis who discovered the deep dramaturgical value of focusing on selective songs from Judy Garland’s career. Garland held great meaning in my parents’ lives, as they negotiated their gay and lesbian identities, and the discovery of the centrality of this repertoire was a vital link in creating this theatrical dramatization of my family life." 

The song "The Man That Got Away," is a torch song for the ages. "Oh, I get a little ‘torchy’ near the end of The Man That Got Away," says Julien. "The quality and usage of the titular metaphor is certainly a vital aspect to the play’s journey. Not only regarding the loss of my father Leo to AIDS in 1988, but to evocations of and provocations to my own identity as a queer man, though I’ve experienced a primarily heteronormative life. Creating this project as both writer and lead performer has provided me with both immense gifts and surprising challenges. Perhaps, this is what a pure cabaret form aspires to. As a veteran actor, I know that one can never really affirm the reality of anything a fictionalized character experiences, while also using technique and discovered emotion to give a performed appearance of that ‘truth.'. Here, the roles are entirely conflated, and memorizing and internalizing my own written dialogue for and as ‘myself’ is the biggest challenge I’ve ever faced. Strangely, perhaps, I sense very little vulnerability as ‘me,' sharing my secrets and vulnerabilities, in the show. Being raised by homosexual parents in the mid-20th century, our public family life was constituted almost entirely of secrets. And I’ve been happily and willfully exposing and destigmatizing those secrets my whole life." 

The cabaret stage is often a lonely place with the performer's emotions laid bare under a stark spotlight. Fortunately Julien will have company. "We have two wonderful performers in their twenties – Ben Page and Tat Austrie – rounding out our cast of three. Though our trio only sings together once, (in an unexpected and subversive way), the isolation of our roles and songs are woven together to create tension, release, and resonance." Julien then amends the cast list, referencing the video and projection work. "HAUI [Choir Boy, Mixed Up, C'est Moi, I Call Myself Princess, Bombay Black, The Wedding Singer) has done incredible work on this project that is intimately connected to the deep dramaturgy and aesthetic of the piece. HAUI uses image, word, placement, movement, repetition, augmented video, and integrated visual aesthetics to such a degree that the projections are practically a fourth character in the script." And of course the director. "As someone who's known me since we were in our late-teens, and who also knew my parents, Peter’s and my engagement with the play’s themes and resources created not only a play, but a changing and fluid relationship with each other. In a way, this is really what the play is about: time, memory, circumstance, relationships."

Even the venue is a nostalgic character. "I did my first show with Buddies in 1989 for the Rhubarb Festival, with Peter Hinton-Davis directing. My father took me to shows, when I was a young teenager, at the Alexander Street theatre when it was helmed by the ground-breaking Toronto Workshop Players. This is a show about a unique queer family in time and space," so it makes sense to be in a determinedly queer venue. "I hope that the audience will laugh, cry, and think," says Julien. "In real time, in a space, together. A simple and recognizable hope. I yearn that audiences will identify and recognize their own stories and families in the work, and reach out to their own memory and the potential it has to expand into compassion and reckoning."