Charlie Rhindress with Anne Murray and a new book he compiled and edited called Thank You Anne! which is exclusive to the Anne Murray Centre
The iconic music of Anne Murray and Rita MacNeil is coming to Ship’s Company Theatre for their A Weekend of Nova Scotia Songstresses event hosted by Charlie Rhindress. Now and Forever is a musical tribute to Anne Murray with shows on August 29th and August 30th created by Rhindress and it features stories from Murray’s life and performances of twenty of her greatest hits performed by Jennie Del Motte, Mirren Lithwick, Heather MacIntyre, and Carley Varner-Joudrey. I Am Not What I Seem is on August 30th and August 31st and features stories and songs from the life of Rita MacNeil, featuring a four piece all female group of singers led by New Brunswick’s “Queen of the Blues” Theresa Malenfant.
I sat down with Charlie Rhindress and Heather MacIntyre at the Glitter Bean Cafe in Halifax to chat about the evolution of these two exciting and captivating shows.
In July of 2000 Charlie Rhindress’ play Flying On Her Own premiered at Live Bait Theatre in Sackville, New Brunswick. This play tells the story of Rita MacNeil’s life from childhood, with her songs woven throughout the narrative and sung by an actor who remains separate from the action of the story, as a harbinger of things to come, or even a kind of Greek chorus that comments on the action from MacNeil’s inner world. After MacNeil tragically passed away in 2013 Formac Publishing Company in Halifax approached Rhindress asking if he would expand on his play and write a biography of MacNeil. This book, I’m Not What I Seem: The Many Stories of Rita MacNeil’s Life was published in October of 2016. Once the book was released Rhindress was asked to do a number of readings, but considering that music was such an integral part of MacNeil’s life and her story, he enlisted the help of his partner, Heather MacIntyre, who sings and is a musician, and he asked if she would accompany him to these readings and bring her ukulele. “When we did these readings, that went over really well,” Rhindress says, “and I started thinking we could probably do a whole tribute show based around this [idea].”
The genre of Rita MacNeil’s music is difficult to pin down, and I feel like because she was from rural Cape Breton people often assume that her music is of folk or even Celtic flavour, which often isn’t the case at all. Rhindress points out that a lot of the songs she sings, actually, are more from the blues and gospel tradition, and he says that when he would hear these songs he’d think, “I’d love to hear somebody like Theresa Malenfant [sing] these songs.” So, when he was thinking of putting together this tribute show he asked if she would like to be part of it. “At first she thought I was crazy,” he says, but once she too discovered more of MacNeil’s music, the more she felt like it might be a good fit for her after all.
Along with the music and reading excerpts from the book Rhindress is also able to tell some personal stories from his time working with MacNeil as he was developing his play. Now he has a new book, also from Formac Publishing, Nova Scotia’s Stars of Song, in which he writes about the lives and the music of six women “who shaped Nova Scotia’s music landscape:” Portia White, Anne Murray, Carroll Baker, Holly Cole, Sarah MacLachlan, and, once again, Rita MacNeil. Rhindress is also the Outreach Coordinator at the Anne Murray Centre, so with his connection to Murray and deep love of her music he thought they could put a similar tribute show together to complement the new book as well. MacIntyre says that she and three other female musicians in the show play a wide array of instruments and trade off playing them like you might see at a dinner theatre show.
Rhindress’ love of MacNeil and Murray’s music goes back a long way. In the summer of 1987 he was working at the Amherst Stadium, which was a summer job he had just after he’d finished university. At this point Rhindress had only heard MacNeil’s first hit song “Flying On Your Own,” but one of his coworkers was a fan, and knew MacNeil was coming to do a concert at the Stadium. His coworker said to him, “If we stay late after work we can just sneak into the concert.” And that’s what they did. He called his girlfriend, Karen Valanne (with whom he would go on to work at Live Bait), and invited her to join them. “She came and met me and we just hung out in the office, and then we snuck down to the concert,” he said. The song from that set that stood out to him the most was called “Grandmother.” “Karen started crying because it touched her so much, and I was like ‘oh, I have to find that song.’ Of course in 1987 you couldn’t just go on the Internet to find the music you were looking for. Rhindress had to be a sleuth. He and Valanne moved to Toronto together that fall, and while he was there he went to every record store looking for “Grandmother.” Along the way he found MacNeil’s first three albums. “I bought all of them going, ‘I’m going to find that song-’ and it wasn’t there,” he says, “but I discovered all these protest songs, and I didn’t know that [Rita had] been part of the women’s movement, and so I was shocked to find these protest songs, and songs where she was critical of Cape Breton, because as she discovered the feminist movement and went home [from Toronto] to Cape Breton, they weren’t embracing her ideas [there]…. I was shocked to find these songs [where] she’s sarcastic and kind of funny, and fighting for women’s rights.” He realized that there was a lot more to Rita MacNeil than he’d first thought.
The following year Rhindress founded the aforementioned Live Bait Theatre with Randy White, and Ann Rowley, where he started writing his own plays, and from what he was learning about MacNeil through her music he immediately saw the potential for this story to be told onstage. He started to collect as much of her music and interviews as he could, and in 1991 he wrote to her management asking if he could adapt her story into a play. He says that he highlighted the similarities between himself and MacNeil, citing that he was from Amherst, that he also left and went to Toronto to pursue his career in the arts, and that his birth mother had been on welfare, so he understood the realities of the financial hardship that MacNeil encountered early in her days as a parent. “They said no,” Rhindress says, “so, that was in ’91. I kept at it thinking, ‘someday I’ll do this.’”
After MacNeil published her own autobiography On a Personal Note (1998) Rhindress reached out to MacNeil’s son Wade Langham, who was also her manager, and Rhindress met with Langham first and he was open to the idea of the play, and then Rhindress met with MacNeil here in Halifax at what was then the Holiday Inn (and is now the Atlantica). “We met over tea for about an hour and at the end of it she said I could do [the play]. I was shocked. I remember driving home to Amherst and thinking ‘I’m flying on MY own’ (he laughs), because I was so excited. The drive felt like it took five minutes… Years later I remember she was interviewed… and somebody [asked] ‘So, why did you let these people tell your story?’ I was not an established playwright. Live Bait Theatre was a tiny little company; she could have had Neptune or the Mirvishes… somebody bigger could have done it. She’d done [Rita and Friends] by then, so was already a national treasure. She said, “their heart was in the right place.’ I think that says a lot about Rita that that’s what she cared about, that somebody whose heart was in the right place was going to tell her story.”
Having grown up in Amherst, which is just fifteen minutes from Springhill, Rhindress’ memories of Anne Murray go back even further to when he was four years old in 1970 watching TV with his grandparents, and the adults around him were pointing out that she was from Springhill. Rhindress cites seeing her perform on television with Glen Campbell as proof for four year old Charlie that someone from his home region with big dreams could achieve superstardom. This buoyed Rhindress up as a teenager with dreams of becoming an actor. “If you’re from Amherst and you tell people ‘I want to be in the movies’ they think you’re crazy,” but he thought of Murray’s trajectory and believed he could achieve that level of success too. In 1984 he went to Halifax to be in a Pizza Delight commercial and had his entire career mapped out from Pizza Delight to an Oscar acceptance speech. “Turns out I couldn’t [reach those heights as an actor],” he laughs, “but she was my inspiration, and I also just loved her music.” The first album he ever bought was Murray’s Christmas Wishes in 1981 when he was working at his first job at Maher Shoes. He got to know Murray a little bit through his work with the Anne Murray Centre, where he started as a Board Member, and he also emcees their annual VIP Meet and Greet Luncheon, where fans come to Springhill from literally around the world to have lunch with Anne Murray.
Rhindress says that it feels like the perfect time to be bringing these two shows to Ship’s Company Theatre because it feels as though Canadians are really embracing Canada and our own stories in light of the constant threats being lobbed at us from the United States. “Most of what I’ve done [in my career] has been telling Atlantic Canadian stories, and I started Esther Fest in Amherst (based on the story of Esther Cox- heralded as “Canada’s Greatest Ghost Story”), and the Sackville Arts Wall, I love telling stories of Atlantic Canadians and I feel really lucky that I get to be onstage telling the stories of these amazing Canadian women.”
The summer before he saw Rita MacNeil at the Amherst Stadium Rhindress was involved in his first production at Ship’s Company Theatre: the 1986 production of The Mystery of the Mary Celeste, written by Michael Fuller and directed by Mary Vingoe. He was hired as a production assistant where he did everything from cleaning the toilets and dressing rooms to chipping rust off the bottom of the literal ship. “Then Marsha Coffey, who I still feel I owe a great debt of gratitude to.. she was the sound designer and [she asked if I could do the sound for the show]… and I got to do sound every night for this play Mary directed, and Robbie O’Neill was in it, and [Nicola] Lipman, and all these legends of Canadian Theatre, and I got to be there hanging out with them… I was twenty years old and that was how I got to spend my first summer working in professional theatre.”
Rhindress notes the proximity between Amherst and Parrsboro as well, saying that before Ship’s Company Theatre was founded by Mary Vingoe and Michael Fuller in 1984 there were no professional theatre companies anywhere near his hometown. He got his start onstage at school, in Grade Six, playing the teacher in a school play, and he says, “I loved the attention. It was a comedy and everybody laughed and paid attention to me and I went, ‘I want to do this for the rest of my life.’” He did theatre all through school after that, but he didn’t have the opportunity to see much of it given how far away he lived from all the professional theatres in the province. At that time Mount Allison University didn’t have a drama program either, so he went to university and majored in English. He became a playwright sort of by accident when he read the story of The Great Amherst Mystery at Live Bait, “it was written by Walter Hubbell,” he says, “who was an actor and very theatrical, and I was like, ‘this would make a great play,’” and so he adapted it.
MacIntyre mentions that the through line of what Rhindress calls an “unfocused” career is that it’s all storytelling. She also says that because Rhindress is such a fan of MacNeil and of Murray he becomes a sort of surrogate for the audience, that when he is telling stories about his own interactions with these icons he is just like one of us experiencing all the excitement and awe that comes with being a fan.
One of the most surreal projects that Rhindress has been working on lately is Anne Murray’s new album Here You Are, featuring eleven newly found songs, which will be out on all music platforms on September 5th. He tells me that back in 2019 Lynn Holt, one of Murray’s super fans, had gone through Murray’s personal archives, which had been donated to the University of Toronto, and he found rough recordings of a number of songs that had never been released. “She’d record fourteen or fifteen songs for an album, use twelve of them, and others would just go into the archives,” Rhindress explains. So, in 2019 Holt wrote to the Anne Murray Centre pitching a listening party there, and that idea didn’t come to fruition, but then last year Rhindress asked Murray about those songs Holt had found, and at the same time EMI Universal donated all their archives to the University of Calgary. Rhindress was able to find the masters from there, and he would send an MP3 of each track to Murray, who would give her feedback about the song or tell him some of her memories from recording it. “At the end we had eleven songs, and she wrote to me one day and said her manager and the record label wanted to turn it into an album. So seventeen years after she retired, she has a new album [coming out]… it’s been amazing…and really exciting for me. It’s totally a fluke that I got to work on this [project] with her.”
His favourite song from all the newly discovered tracks is called “Rest Easy (In My Love).” He says, “It’s on my phone and I was going through cancer treatments and I listened to it every single day… sometimes more than once a day.” MacIntyre concurs saying, “I know all the words.” “I told Anne, I said, ‘it’s become an inspirational song for me as I go through all of this.’ And then one day we were talking and she said, ‘send them [producer Bob Rock and her manager] that song you like.’” Rhindress said he was floored. “Rest Easy (In My Love)” is the first single from the album and you can stream it or buy it wherever you listen to your music.
Now And Forever: An Anne Murray Tribute plays on August 29 (Sold Out) and August 30th at 2:00pm at Ship’s Company Theatre (18 Lower Main Street, Parrsboro, Nova Scotia). Tickets range in price from $16.02 to $42.72 and are available here or by calling 1-800-565-SHOW (7469). I’m Not What I Seem: A Rita MacNeil Tribute plays on August 30th (Sold Out) and August 31st at 2:00pm. Tickets range in price from $16.02 to $42.72 and are available here or by calling the phone number above. Charlie Rhindress’ books are available wherever you buy your books; if you’re in Halifax I recommend Bookmark or you can buy directly from Formac. Visit Rita MacNeil’s website where you can find an array of her music and other merchandise and visit the Anne Murray Centre’s website to shop everything Anne Murray. Pre-Order or Pre-Save Here You Are wherever you get your music today.
Accessibility at Ship’s Company Theatre: There are 6 Wheelchair seats available. Assisted-listening devices are available upon request at the Box Office.
