I hope everyone had a chance to see Christmas With Scrooge at Fulford Hall this past week, and if you didn’t there might still be tickets at Salt Spring Books for the last show tonight (Dec. 20).
Christmas With Scrooge is a beloved Salt Spring cultural institution and I got to see it again last Thursday night. I love the mix of things that stay the same and the new additions as the musical evolves. Sue Newman — daughter of Ray and Virginia Newman, who birthed the musical play 52 years ago — and the show’s director and producer, still opens the post-prologue action as the elegant dancing Christmas Fairy whose wand turns on the Christmas tree star’s light. The most recent Scrooge (Patrick Cassidy) and Cratchit (Kevin Wilkie) are perennially delightful, yet fresh faces are always in the mix of a Scrooge show.
I thought this year’s cluster of Cratchit children and Spotty Dogs were remarkable, and the show featured exceptionally strong singing from the cast. I was especially moved by the rendition of Not So Long Ago in the scene where Belle Merriweather (Amber Tuttle) sets loose her once betrothed young Scrooge (Liam Hackett) due to his toxic obsession with gaining wealth.
I wasn’t sold on the move to Fulford Hall when the show first went there in 2019. It seemed harder to follow the action and to hear some people when they weren’t facing our way. Some of the traditional theatre “magic” was gone with less sophisticated lighting and being able to take in the whole scene at a distance on the ArtSpring stage.
But this year I didn’t seem to miss a word and, in addition to being impressed by the lovingly appointed Fulford Hall for the occasion, I appreciated several aspects of the in-the-round format. Those included seeing audience members across from me smiling, laughing and singing; being able to admire the stunning costumes up close; sensing everything that goes into the movement of actors, dancers and singers because you can almost reach out and touch them.
An unexpected effect of the format was feeling discomfort at the depictions of poverty. When the desperation of the beggars, pickpockets, drunks and other poor people are right in your face, it definitely has more impact.
That feeling was rekindled the next day after I had a conversation with a long-time islander whose freely divulged opinions I always enjoy hearing. She shared her concerns about Ganges and said people who were down on their luck and crazy, basically, should find another community to hang out where there were more services for them. She speculated that islanders’ generosity was encouraging more of the same high-need people to come here. She wondered if our food security programs were not reaching the longer-term families and seniors who “really” needed them because more demanding newcomer street people were being served first. Valid concerns and questions, no doubt.
I know some people have had unsettling experiences in Ganges and/or Centennial Park in recent years, but our village centre is no different than any other community of our size. I’m not sure why we expect to be spared the unpleasant outcomes of our country’s failure to maintain adequate housing stock for people of all income levels in the past 20 years and to provide enough access to mental health services. We know that insecure housing and mental health problems are inextricably linked.
Some illuminating facts about public housing funding were shared by the Capital Regional District (CRD) senior manager of regional housing Don Elliott in a presentation at the Nov. 23 Local Community Commission meeting. From 1983 to 1986, the Capital Region Housing Corporation created an average of 115 units of affordable housing per year with financial help from provincial and federal governments. As that funding steadily declined and then dried up, so did public housing creation in the CRD. Except for one project the CRD funded on its own, and one anomaly, zero units were created for 15 years — from 2003 to 2018 — representing the philosophy of private-enterprise-all-the-way governments.
“That’s the problem that we are now facing,” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to solve, is all of that lack of investment from senior levels of government.”
Elliott said the CRD’s housing corporation has returned to the 1980s level of housing creation thanks to investments made in recent years, while noting the financial challenges to maintain that level or, ideally, exceed it are significant. Public acceptance of property tax increases — or a switch in priorities — to help fund housing projects is needed.
A number of individuals and organizations are obviously trying hard to create housing on Salt Spring. Similarly, the Ambassador Program, the Mental Wellness Initiative and Mental Health First Aid courses, and our current crop of socially aware RCMP officers, have had some success while working to minimize issues in Ganges.
I don’t want to downplay people’s reasons to feel fearful or uncomfortable in our public spaces. We would all rather walk around Ganges seeing only securely housed, unstressed and happy folks, right? But that’s not the reality here or almost anywhere these days.
But back to Christmas With Scrooge. I found the preface of the program interesting as it reminded us of the continuing validity of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol story: “We have endeavoured in this Ghostly little Play to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put our Audience out of Humour with Them-selves, with Each Other, with the season or with Us. May it Haunt Your Home pleasantly, and no one wish to forget its message.”
With that the Newman family is perhaps suggesting that we need to be “haunted” and even made to feel uncomfortable by witnessing poverty up close, whether depicted by actors in Fulford Hall or real people in Ganges.