Kraanerg, performed by the National Ballet of Canada to ear-splitting music by Greek composer Iannis Xanekis, proved a challenge to the opening-night audience. Photo © Anthony Crickmay.Courtesy of the National Ballet of Canada.
Pierre Trudeau loved ballet and went backstage with Madeleine Gobeil after the controversial Kraanerg to congratulate the performers. Dance star, later NAC board member, Veronica Tennant is on the extreme right. Photo © Ottawa Citizen/UPI. Reprinted by permission.
In designing the program for the two-week opening performances, David Haber had two key goals: to intrigue the audience by its diversity and to let the Arts Centre show itself off. Subsequent ballet performances included the sure crowd-pleaser Swan Lake and a sumptuous performance of Romeo and Juliet. On one of these evenings, a technical failure in the opera hall’s grand new machinery took top honours. After a mistouch of a button, the orchestra suddenly rose up out of the pit in mid-performance and travelled on past stage level to tower over both the performers and the audience. Franca, dancing the role of Lady Capulet in the ballroom scene of Romeo and Juliet, rushed to the wings and stopped the performance. As things settled and the platform descended again, a witty violinist tied his handkerchief to his bow and waved goodbye to the audience while the musicians sank back out of sight.
The rest of the programming unfolded relatively without hitch and mostly to critical praise. The Montreal and Toronto Symphony orchestras performed, and the Vancouver Playhouse brought a production of a new Canadian play, George Ryga’s Ecstasy of Rita Joe, which portrayed the lostness of a First Nations girl in modern urban Canadian society. The production drew excited interest on Parliament Hill, where a Commons Committee on Indian Affairs was studying this very issue.
George Ryga’s play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, about a benighted young First Nations girl, was also featured in the opening week. Then Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development Jean Chrétien and his wife, Aline, attended and met actor Chief Dan George at a post-play reception. Photo © John Evans.
Le Théâtre du Nouveau Monde opened the Theatre with an outrageous and witty musical adaptation of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata written by Michel Tremblay and directed by the sensational young Québécois director André Brassard. The Studio, the experimental three-hundred-seat space designed to function like a television studio, scheduled Jack Winter’s Party Day, a three-dimensional work that had the audience sitting on all sides. Commissioned by the Arts Centre, the play revolved around the Nazi Party and the Nuremburg rallies. Even before opening night, this theme had elicited worried complaints from the German ambassador in Ottawa and the city’s chief rabbi. Winter’s message, a strong warning against government sponsorship of the arts, was received through gritted teeth by the first-night audiences and, after its NAC run, the play disappeared virtually without trace. Its inclusion in the opening festival signalled, however, that the new Arts Centre would be brave and audacious in what it presented.
Not everything on offer during these first two weeks was “high-brow.” One of the NAC’s basic tenets was to offer variety—and that would include a vast range of popular entertainers booked by the Arts Centre or by private impresarios who would rent the halls. Singers Gordon Lightfoot and Monique Leyrac were among the “popular” artists who played to sold-out audiences.
Despite the appearance of leading Quebec artists, Radio Canada was reluctant, given the nationalist sentiments stirring in Quebec, to report on these events in Ottawa. Finally, top CBC brass intervened and ordered at least some cursory coverage. CBC English television, in contrast, pulled out all the stops to cover the opening celebrations, with Bruno Gerussi on hand to host the proceedings. In the midst of a live broadcast on the first night, Gerussi chivvied Southam about his resplendent formal attire of white tie and medals. The good-humoured Southam gave back as good as he got. He was “on duty” this particular evening, he explained, so had to appear “in uniform,” but when he later attended the Arts Centre for pleasure, he assured the interviewer that he would dress more like the tieless, wide-lapelled, bell-bottom-clad broadcaster himself, even asking the hapless Gerussi for the name of his tailor.4
The avant-garde Studio theatre set up for performances of Jack Winter’s play Party Day, which attacked the government’s role in the arts.Photo © Studio Graetz.
Gerussi summed up the evening’s events as “a mix of Carnaby Street and old school tie. Miniskirts and full-length minks … ruffled shirts and … the faint smell of moth-balls”— in short, the Canadian scene on the eve of the 1970s. This mix of tradition with openness to the modern was at the core of Southam’s approach, and it would be central to much of the programming at the NAC during his tenure. Combining the two would be his challenge in the years ahead as he moved to establish the National Arts Centre on the Canadian arts scene. The opening festival was meant to demonstrate that the best and most challenging national and international work would be presented at the NAC.
Actor Bruno Gerussi hosted a live CBC Television broadcast of the opening. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was interviewed. Photo © John Evans.
The media response to the opening exceeded the organizers’ wildest dreams. The press was filled with rave reviews for the building, the performances, and the very idea of a multi-performing arts centre of international standard on the banks of the Rideau Canal. Mr. Pearson’s hopes seemed fulfilled; all eyes were focused on the capital. The international wire services AP and UPI, The Times of London, the New Yorker magazine, and the New York Times all covered the event, thanks to the prodigious efforts of Mary Jolliffe.
Amid the excitement of the opening events and the praise from the critics, a major crisis was brewing—the budget. Accustomed to the free-flowing expense accounts at Expo and the buzz needed to attract the hard-boiled international media, Jolliffe had realized soon after her arrival at the Arts Centre that there was insufficient money for the job she had to do. She told Southam right from the start that they needed at least $600,000 to promote the opening festival, but little more than half this amount had been approved for the entire first year’s publicity budget. With only eight months before the opening when she arrived in Ottawa, she knew they had to “go like hell” and, while Southam worked on the financial side to try to increase the funding, she began to spend money as she saw fit. She found Southam an easy and amenable boss. When she brought him a draft of the first brochure, he inquired, laconically, “Am I supposed to approve this?” 5 He was never arbitrary in his decisions, she found, but usually deferred to the expertise of “the professionals”—Beaudet, Haber, Corder, and, indeed, herself. She thought Southam “a classy gent,” equal to the leading arts czars of the era, men such as the Met’s Sir Rudolf Bing and England’s Tyrone Guthrie.
By May, before the Arts Centre even opened, not only had Jolliffe blown through most of the first-year PR budget but there were looming budgetary problems in other departments as well. Southam warned the Board of Trustees that there would likely be over-expenditures in some areas, including operations, and even in catering, where a row with the newly contracted concessionaire was spelling financial trouble. The problems were