GOOD TIMBER: Songs and Stories of the Western Logger

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Saturday, July 31st, 2010
8:00 PM to 9:30 PM

The Other Guys Theatre Company, with the Royal BC Museum, presents an original musical theatre multi-media production featuring the songs and stories of the western logger.

Good Timber sold out its run in Victoria last summer and is presently touring Washington State and Vancouver Island. The show returns to Victoria in August and runs Mondays through Saturdays at the Royal BC Museum from August 8 to 27.

Good Timber: Songs and Stories of the Western Logger celebrates the golden age of logging in British Columbia -- and the legendary Bulls of the woods, hookers, hi-riggers, fallers, whistle punks, and locie engineers from the time when loggers climbed trees.

The Other Guys Theatre Company’s artistic director, Ross Desprez, was inspired by a dog-eared copy of Rhymes of the Western Logger, a compilation of logging camp poetry by Robert E. Swanson. If you’d stumbled into a skid road smoke shop or camp commissary during the 1940s or ‘50s you would have seen well-thumbed copies of Swanson’s chapbooks sticking up among the Reader’s Digests. Swanson achieved legendary status among the BC coast loggers, doing for them what Robert Service did for the gold miners of the Klondike. Poems like The Cat Skinner’s Prayer, The Death of Rough House Pete, and BC Hiball lament the hazards of the bush.

Desprez and creative partner Tobin Stokes have gathered a stellar cast for this entertaining romp through the past. Set against a multi-media backdrop of rarely-seen images from the BC Archives, John Gogo, Mark Hellman, Kelt and Colleen Eccleston, Sarah Donald and Desprez act, sing, and play everything from guitar and fiddle to axe and handsaw. Desprez, Stokes and the ensemble have written original music that ranges from Celtic and country to folk and blues, to accompany the loggers’ poetry.

Good Timber: Songs and Stories of the Western Logger is directed by Ross Desprez with music direction by Tobin Stokes. The production features the multi-media set design of John Carswell and Peter Pokorny. Lighting design is by Keith Houghton with costumes by Erin Macklem. Karley Wolfert is the Stage Manager.

Good Timber is presented in partnership with the Royal British Columbia Museum and BC Archives. .