Singer-actors Joanne Cutler and Merv Middling have a unique way of enhancing their marriage: when they audition for a play or a concert gig, they make it clear that they must be hired as a package.
“We always want to do our shows together,” says Cutler, who plays Gayle to Middling’s Lendall in the Côte-St-Luc Dramatic Society’s (CSLDS) Almost, Maine, which is playing at the Harold Greenspon Auditorium from Feb. 20-24.
They sang backup in the CSLDS’s Grease and played the snooty parents of the groom in the Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre’s production of It Shoulda Been You.
Their roles in the current John Cariani comedy parallel real life, insofar as their courtship went on for 13 years before Middling proposed to Cutler three years ago in Israel.
The characters they are portraying have similarly been dating for 11 years and it’s time for Lendall to propose or get off the pot, so to speak.
“In the play, Gayle is fed up that Lendall hasn’t asked her to marry him yet, so she decides to bring all the love he ever gave her back to him and she requests back the love she gave him,” says the play’s director, Anisa Cameron.
The love is literally in giant red garbage bags, a magic realist aspect that colours the play throughout with whimsy. “It’s a touching and humorous look at long and patient relationships when the patience has finally worn thin,” adds Cameron.
It’s but one of nine 10-minute-long independent but subtly linked scenes on the theme of love that compose the entire play. The segments make it less time-consuming for the actors to rehearse.
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Côte-St-Luc, Que., Mayor Mitchell Brownstein, the founder of the CSLDS and co-producer who plays opposite Jodi Lackman in one of the vignettes, is therefore finding it easier to simultaneously juggle his mayoral and law firm duties.
“My first love shows up on my doorstep and it’s about how her life went one way and mine went another way and the audience wonders how it’s all going to end, but, of course, it doesn’t end the way you think. Every one of these scenes is full of surprises,” says Brownstein, who is enjoying a romantic lead after playing the florist in the CSLDS’s Little Shop of Horrors and the father in Hairspray.
Cutler’s theatrical odyssey began with dance lessons when she was a child. At the age of 19, she discovered community theatre while applying makeup for the actors in a Beth Tikvah production of Guys and Dolls.
“I said, ‘Next year I’ve got to be onstage,’ and I was, as a dancer in Chicago. I got the bug and literally found my voice singing with the Arcadians, the Y’s World of Entertainment, the Lyric Theatre and the Lyric Theatre Singers,” she says.
She co-founded the professional children’s singing duo Toony Loonz, which entertained at parties for a dozen years. Middling, an Australian, launched his theatrical odyssey performing at Club Med. He memorably saved the day for the CSLDS in 2015 when, at the last minute, he stepped into the lead in Haven’t Got a Clue.
Next up for the couple is singing in the Segal Centre’s fundraiser, Legends: Past & Present, on June 2. They also regularly perform in their easy-listening trio, Que Sera, with Cutler as lead vocalist, Segal Centre music director Nick Burgess on keyboards and Middling on percussion. Their music can also be heard on May 5 at one of B’nai Brith’s Sunday musical brunches for seniors at the Adath synagogue and online at queseraduo.com.
For tickets to Almost, Maine, visit csldramaticsociety.com.