No Change in The Weather – A Newfoundland Musical

Jesus, Mary and Joseph R. Smallwood, No Change in the Weather – A Newfoundland Musical, is some shockin’ good!

Now how can you make a musical about the financial hardships of Newfoundland and Labrador with an impossible debt load, outmigration of over 3,000 people a year, 15 percent unemployment and the Muskrat Falls fiasco?

Well first you take a producer who is a visionary like Walter Schroeder, and an award winning and well-respected director like Ruth Lawrence, then let the incredibly funny Bernardine Stapleton write the script and an innovative movement coach like Lynn Panting choregraph it all. Then to top it off, you get the legendary Bob Hallett from Great Big Sea and the remarkably talented Paul Kinsman to arrange and direct the music!

They are a theatrical dream team.

The story centers around the death of an elderly mother and her two sons. One son who stayed and fished and one who left to join the political cabinet of Premier Joseph R. Smallwood.

The son who stayed, his daughter and friends steal the mother’s body and bring her back to God’s Back Pocket, the resettled island where she came from. Once there, the long-lost son shows up. The two brothers battle it out over whether Premier Smallwood signing the Churchill Fall’s deal was a good thing or not for Newfoundland and Labrador and what it cost each one of them.

Hilarity follows when the RCMP show up to take the body back, but the dead mother decides she is not finished with her two sons yet, as the ‘the night is full of ghosts.’

The show is full of Newfoundland and Labrador folk music that is used to tell the story. Some are well known, and some will soon be well known, but all of them will stay with you. Especially when Kelly Ann Evans sings the unofficial Ode to Newfoundland, Sonny’s Dream by Ron Hynes. There won’t be a dry eye in the house.

The cast is a who’s who of the music, acting and theatrical scene and includes multi-talented artists: Kelly Ann Evans, Mark Whalen, Paul Rowe, Marquita Walsh, Calvin Powell, Brooke Adams, Keelan Purchase, Vicki Harnett, and Olivia Heaney.

No Change in The Weather will make you feel good about your own Newfoundland roots. You’ll leave still tapping your toe to brilliant musical score and laughing at this incredible cast.