Pride & Prejudice: Forte sings the gay battles

13 Jun 2023 - photos suppled by Vince Ciarlo

"We do a version of 'Over the Rainbow' which is based on Eva Cassidy’s performance, which was just her and a guitar," says Charles McFarland of Forte's upcoming production Pride & Prejudice. "Ed has arranged it so that the various sections of the choir—basses first, then baritones and tenors—take the melody lines, and the rest create a kind of ‘strumming’ accompaniment. Completely different from the familiar with Judy Garland! And we wrap up with an African American spiritual, 'The Battle of Jericho,' which has the chorus split into two and sing in a battle between us, until we join together for the final shout, “and the walls come a-tumblin’ down."  We just performed it as part of our set at Unison, the national LGBTQ+ choral festival in Halifax over the May long weekend, and the audience went nuts at the massive energy of it. There's also sexy with 'Steam Heat,' with a group of dancers in towels—and nothing else—doing Bob Fosse-style moves."

McFarland says that "Pride & Prejudice is a bit of a riff on the idea that the Jane Austen novel could be read out at a Drag Story Hour. In the first half of the show, we tell the stories of Stonewall and the birth of the Pride movement—with a rediscovered original Pride anthem from 1971, "Stonewall Nation"—and also the AIDS crisis, particularly here in Toronto, with the birth of the community’s responses in establishing such hospice venues as Casey House and getting international attention and acceptance—think, Princess Diana—after so many years of the gay community being ostracized, and the epidemic being ignored. In the second, we bring the “prejudices” up to date. I’d say the big battles now are the laws, bigotry and restrictions targeted towards our trans and non-binary community, such as the denial of gender-affirming medical care, denying trans kids’ freedom to choose in sports teams and even bathrooms—it’s as though, with marriage equality being so overwhelmingly accepted, the haters had to find a new, vulnerable, and defenseless community to attack. So we all need to come together to battle that."
 
Politics and entertainment is a Forte trademark.  "Forte has always tried to blend celebration in music with a serious look at some of the issues our LGBTQ+ communities have faced and continue to face," says McFarland. "So, with all the protesting going on around Drag Story Hours, our artistic director, Edward Connell, had a brainwave about drag queens reading Pride and Prejudice to kids in that format. In fact, at the top of the show, one of our three drag queens reads out the famous first line of that novel, only to have the other two shut her down and suggest instead of a “dusty old classic,” we tell our audience our personal stories of pride and prejudice. And so that’s what we do, with the Forte men coming on to tell the story in song. It’s a dialogue-song-dialogue-song format."

McFarland joined Forte in October of 2021, "Just as we were coming out of the pandemic and in-person rehearsals—in masks, everybody distanced—started up again, There was another shut-down in early 2022, and then we came back together in March last year to prepare for our 25th anniversary greatest hits concert in May. I was one of the new members - half the choir at that point! – who were learning all these complex pieces for the first time. We rehearse every Monday night for two and a half hours, and as we get close to a concert things really ramp up. Over the past month we’ve added Saturday morning rehearsals, scripting and staging rehearsals, choreographing dancers for our 'Steam Heat' number commemorating the 1981 Toronto bathhouse raids, and getting the technical elements of the show prepped. So I’ve been doing three or four sessions per week lately, plus some script work in-between, plus leading the marketing team."
 
All the hard work is paying off with pride/Pride. "Madeline Davis’s 'Stonewall Nation' felt initially like an artifact and very much of its period of the birth of Pride as we know it in the early 1970s," says McFarland. "Now, with Ed’s arrangement and a lot of rehearsal, it comes across as loud and fierce and powerful: 'We’re gonna sing our songs, sing ‘em loud, Gonna live our lives out and proud, The Stonewall Nation is gonna be free.' Every time we get close to concert time, this is my third, there’s a moment in final rehearsals when we really 'hear' just how amazing the sound is. That happened yesterday morning. At yesterday’s rehearsal, we put together our amazing tenor, Alain’s, solo with the choir singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” as our tribute to those who live and have lived with HIV/ AIDS. I don’t think there was a member of the chorus who wasn’t either in tears or very close. There are a couple of those numbers in the show – especially because the Drag Story Hour intro scenes are all about the struggles we’ve faced, and then the songs turn those struggles into songs with messages of acceptance, welcome and love."