Billy Bishop Goes to War: youthful and vigorous

Billy Bishop is back and this time it’s personal. The Arts Club Granville Island Stage presents a youthful, enthusiastic production of the classic Canadian musical, Billy Bishop Goes to War, more than 30 years after it was first performed by its co-creators, John Gray and Eric Peterson.

The play presents Billy Bishop as an honest smart ass, who describes how through hard work, huge mistakes and a combination of circumstance, luck, and timing, he travelled from Canada to fight the war in Europe, got out of the trenches to became a pilot, and eventually a war hero.

This is the first professional production to have an actor in his 20’s play Billy Bishop – close to the actual age Bishop was during his WWI experiences – and Ryan Beil gives a convincing and vigorous performance. Accompanying Beil on piano (as well as acoustic and electric guitars), is Zachary Gray, son of the show’s co-creator.  The material is close to the hearts of everyone involved (Beil and Gray are high school buddies), and director Sarah Rodgers keeps the staging impressively simple.

Beil takes on the role of Billy Bishop and 17 other characters in this journey of a middle class Canadian who is the “worst student the RMC (Royal Military College) ever had”.  Beil and Gray, dressed in WWI uniforms, inhabit a sparse stage designed by Kevin McAllister which is littered with crates, a ladder - the simple pieces come together in a magnificent moment to build Bishop’s plane - and of course a piano (the original production featured the senior Gray on piano). This time out there are also guitars, which Zachary Gray plays not just for songs, but for sound effects, participating in Bishop’s solo flights by actually standing with his electric guitar at the back of the ingeniously and crudely constructed plane, creating an eerie and immediate soundscape.

Beil does a good job of the various characters and although he’s keen to hit the comic beats, he also engages in the moments of fear and confusion that are the cornerstones of any war story. Beil’s least successful characterization is the French chanteuse, who he plays for laughs too obviously.

There is warmth between Gray and Beil which gives the production a fresh feeling of two army buddies telling a growing up tale of the transformative and bloody experiences of war. Because of their appropriate ages to the material, it brings home, especially when Canada is now at war again, the horrors of using youth for cannon fodder.

Billy Bishop Goes to War is constructed as a personal piece of theatre with musical accompaniment, and was created by two friends who found a way to show off the best of their talents. Rodgers crafts a telling to show off the best of Beil and the younger Gray for this production. They are admittedly not the best of singers, but they don’t shy from their desire to tell the story and show off their strengths, which they do well.

Billy Bishop Goes to War is a personal piece for me, too. As a dedicated high school drama geek, it was the first Canadian play I knew, or rather, the first time I knew there were Canadian plays. I even had an audio cassette recording of it (an early ‘illegal download’), and I watched the TV version on CBC. John Gray came to Langley Library as a guest reader/performer, and I was thrilled to get his autograph.

Sitting in the audience of this current production, watching it unfold, I was surprised to realize that I know it by heart. Not just the songs, but the story. It’s funny and moving, but flawed too; it’s a bit too light at times, and while Bishop writes in a letter to Margaret, his future wife, that she would be surprised by his blood thirstiness, it never really delves deeply into the psyche of someone who killed over 70 people in battle, watching from his plane, as each of them die.

On the night I attended there was a class of high school students, a number of elderly audience members and then the rest of us somewhere in between. This community gathering was further underscored when, at one point, we were asked to turn to a page in our program and join the performers in a song from the Great War.

Part of the play’s charm is that when it was written, it was a great surprise we had Canadian heroes; I don’t think we’d given it much collective thought. Thirty years later, this city has recently been awash with Olympic branded hero stories and images which, after enough cereal and soft drinks have sold, will mostly disappear into the ether. With Billy Bishop Goes To War, it’s nice to have the opportunity to sit back and view an iconic artistic telling of an actual life.

BIlly Bishop Goes to War continues at the Arts Club at the Granville Island Stage until April 17. For more info fly here.