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Culture Stage

The Picture Of Happiness

THE PICTURE OF HAPPINESS by Brad Hampton, accompanied by Patti Loach, directed by Rae Ellen Bodie (Hampton). At Gallery Fontana Swing, the Wrigley Lofts (245 Carlaw, suite 102B). Friday and Saturday (October 19 and 20), 8 pm. $35, seniors $30. fontanaswing@mac.com. See listing.


Actor Brad Hampton credits an old photograph with having a major effect on his life.

In his early 20s, Hampton found the picture, apparently unseen for decades, in his grandmother’s basement. Taken just before the start of the Second World War, it showed two smiling soldiers sitting on a picnic blanket, their arms around each other. They were, as the title of Hampton’s new show proclaims, the picture of happiness.

One was his grandfather.

“It was the start of my discovery of who my grandfather was,” remembers Hampton, who emceed The Spiegel Show at Harbourfront several summers ago and performed there in A Shameless Cabaret, a solo work in which he performed songs traditionally sung by women.

When he asked his mother about the other man, she responded coldly, “We don’t talk about it. We never talk about it.”

The openly gay Hampton did want to talk about it.

“But it took about 15 years for the conversations to happen time and distance change and heal a lot of things. The show draws verbatim on those later talks I had with my mother, in the process of which we came to know each other a lot better.

“I think she could only talk about it when we were in different cities and over the telephone. There was the safety of her being in her own home and not having me right in front of her, and she could also hang up if things got too uncomfortable.”

The material was so important to Hampton that he talked with pianist Patti Loach and director Rae Ellen Bodie, both friends, who helped him put together a show that’s part theatre and part cabaret.

“We’ve chosen songs by different composers – including Michel Legrand, Maury Yeston, Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini, and Alan and Marilyn Bergman – to highlight the story. One of the numbers is We Kiss In A Shadow, sung by secret lovers in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King And I. Another, Jason Robert Brown’s If I Told You Now, is about how the singer’s life would change if he told his secret to the listener.”

Though the tale relates to Hampton’s life as a gay man, he doesn’t think the material speaks only to the queer experience. That was the feedback he got when he workshopped the show at one of Rebecca Northan’s salon evenings in the summer of 2011, where audiences of all sorts told him how moved they were by the show.

“It mirrors and speaks to the hidden areas in everyone’s life, family secrets they don’t want to discuss or even think about. It’s healthier, I think, to talk about them rather than have them fester.”

Like that workshop, this weekend’s performances won’t be a formal experience Hampton, Loach and Bodie will mingle with viewers before and after the show.

“There wouldn’t have been a show unless the three of us committed to the material. At first, Patti and I futzed around trying all sorts of songs to see if they worked and where they might fit in the story.

“Only then did we ask Rae to direct. Knowing how to direct the ‘internal blocking’ for an actor, she can tell when I’m scared or not being fully truthful she encourages me with the warmest, gentlest hand to go through the stumbling block and out the other side.

“How we rehearse has informed how we perform – as friends who care about each other – and the result is personal, grounded and true, both for me and the audience.”

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