Our lives take detours. People come and go.
Those we form connections with define seasons of our lives, sometimes in association with spaces, be it the city or the countryside. And through it all, the music we discover, the music those we feel connections to have introduced to us, colours all that time. Years later, a song and the faces and spaces it may evoke can draw us back to those distant connections.
This sojourning storytelling is staged playfully and tastefully in Centaur Theatre’s production of Strawberries in January.
In this musical, a pair of very dear friends make a juicy pact to marry and start a family, a pact proposed with a basket of unseasonable January strawberries. Two other strangers become entangled in a country inn and form a tether that must be followed like unravelling yarn to their reunion. All four are connected by fond friendship spanning seasons, and so many songs.
The path to the happy endings for these two couples is meandering and musical, preferring quid pro quo comedy to conflict or drama. The opening night audience took this in with good faith, generous laughs, and relief. Because a romantic musical must be part of a balanced diet of theatre-going.
The story of Strawberries in January, originally Des fraises en janvier, written in the 1990s by Montreal playwright Evelyne de la Chenelière, seems perfectly suited for musical adaptation. Many composers have contributed tunes to this piece over the years of its development, including acclaimed composer Habib Zekri.
Nick Carpenter, musical director of Strawberries in January spoke with me about the original songs written for this production, the songs which have endured from previous — originally Francophone — productions of this piece, and the folk flavour that makes this play distinctly Quebecois in either language.
“All these different cooks added their voices, their idiosyncratic methods, and styles to the show,” Carpenter explains. “The big question has been, how can this work? Can this show hold all these different voices? One of Habib’s contributions is that he can write a Broadway number. He really understands the Broadway idiom. But it’s all held together by the band we have. The band is still a folk band. Plus, our actors who play instruments on stage — guitar, piano, ukulele.”
On the French side of our theatre scene, Montreal hosts large-scale Francophone productions of Broadway hits like Mamma Mia, Waitress, and, this summer, Chicago. But our English theatres are more selective with the musicals they stage. Strawberries in January struck a specific intersection that no other musical this year has, representing Montreal and the province of Quebec with a minimalist sensibility to arrangement and design, and showcasing some of our city’s most exciting talent on stage and in the wings.
Unique to this production among previous stagings of de la Chenelière’s beloved play is its subtitle. What made Centaur’s production “a musical fantasy?”
“A fantasia is a piece of music where a composer just follows their heart,” Carpenter explains. “They’re not staying inside of a prescribed form. So, they’re not writing inside Sonata form, or within an A-B-A structure. They’re just letting loose and letting their own voice and feelings sort of take them where they may. And that’s a little bit like what this play is.”
The structure of this musical adaptation flows seamlessly between action and song, defusing the awkwardness often associated with musical theatre. Carpenter intended it that way.
“There’s certainly the eccentric dramaturgy of the play,” he tells me. “There is a fantasia-esque quality. There are songs that sometimes just erupt and then they’re gone. And that is also part of the fantastical. Anything can happen. A song can show up, and it can be any gosh darn shape it wants to be.”
In 2023, the Centaur’s Artistic Director Eda Holmes spoke about her desire to program delightful diversions on her stage, saying “We’re not making broccoli,” meaning theatre is not meant to be joyless but insistently good for you.
Strawberries in January: a musical fantasy delivers on this promise — the kind of show that brings warmth and joy in the dead of winter. Moreover, it rounds out the winter theatrical programming of a city that takes its theatre seriously, and speaks to the tensions at home and abroad, among which there must be room for the romantic.
Strawberries in January was just the light and sweet treat that Montreal’s English theatre community needed, a welcome detour through our city’s bleakest season.◼︎
Cover image: Éloi Archam Baudoin, Métushalème Dary, Ryan Bommarito, and Madeleine Scovil. Andrée Lanthier for Centaur Theatre.
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