(photo credit: Nir Bareket)
Beyond Honey Boo-Boo
by Beat Rice
It’s not a new story but I always love to hear that a SummerWorks show has continued to have a life after the festival. Melody A. Johnson’s play Miss Caledonia was performed at the 2010 SummerWorks Theatre Festival and is being presented at the Tarragon Theatre in association with Lunkamud. Johnson’s play, where she is the sole actor accompanied by a fiddler, is based on the experiences and memories of her mother, Peggy Ann Douglas. Miss Caledonia is the portrait of a young girl in the 50s with big dreams of leaving farm chores in rural Ontario for stardom in Hollywood. To achieve her dream, Peggy sets her sights on winning as many pageants as possible, starting with the smaller ones and moving up along the way. Johnson plays many characters in Peggy’s life on a stage with nothing but a wood bench in the centre, all the while appropriately dressed in a plaid shirt and jeans.
