I hate to admit it, but I was skeptical. When Hannah Moscovitch—one of Canadian theatre’s brightest-glittering luminaries—told me that her two-part, six-hour adaptation of the classic novel Fall On Your Knees was stuffed with songs, I couldn’t picture how this story could swing into musical territory: Ann-Marie MacDonald’s opus about the Piper family begins with the bleak beauty of an isolated life in Cape Breton’s highlands, pulsing with loneliness before it careens off a cliff into the really bad, really sad stuff—like domestic violence (and worse).
If anyone could take MacDonald’s 500-plus-page Can-Lit classic to the stage, I knew it’d be Moscovitch, who has made a career out of writing plays that act as a dispatch from the swamp where sex and power intersect. (Past plays by the Governor General award-winning playwright have featured plots like re-evaluating a student-teacher romance from the student’s side or watching a powerful CEO crumble as he faces his own history of being a sexual predator.)
But how would music fold in, tonally? I wondered, settling into my seat at Neptune Theatre.
It turns out that Moscovitch’s vision of MacDonald’s work uses music as a conduit, leaping off from its key role in the story’s opening sequences (the first generation of Pipers meet while the future patriarch is tuning the piano in the soon-to-be matriarch's childhood home) and allowing it to be the framework both through which the plot is propelled and the characters are defined.
"Even as the story pivots between New York and Cape Breton, the Pipers are trapped in their own echo chamber, forever plonking the keys to each other’s hearts."
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It’s even true of the set, which has anchored strips of fabric backlit, mimicking the inside of an upright piano: Even as the story pivots between New York and Cape Breton, the Pipers are trapped in their own echo chamber, forever plonking the keys to each other’s hearts.
When words fail the women of the story—which is common, given MacDonald’s implicit understanding of the way silence carries untold truths, particularly in the rural cadence of mid-century Maritimes—the family piano speaks for them.
And, the audience gets a true sense of what a monster the family patriarch threatens to become when, early in the play’s first act, he snaps the lock shut on the piano. (When the violence worsens in act three, Moscovitch’s only major misstep is to have much of it unfold onstage, causing everyone seated in my row to recoil in horror as we watch, too sickened to even gasp.)
A jubilant, hard bop jazz soundtrack traces main character Kathleen’s coming into her own as she escapes her family’s dysfunction and violence, finding her footing during vocal training in New York; her love affair is hinted at through a repeating, shifting time-signature that swells as the romance crackles. (“Life finally feels like it’s in the present tense,” Kathleen narrates to her diary during the New York days’ apex, with the melody cresting as the chemistry with her beau fills the 458-seat theatre.)
And while there might be one Ma Rainey-feeling number too many in the play’s second sitting, it does carry the audience away on the same cloud of possibility Kathleen would’ve been riding.
Back in Cape Breton, the long reach of past traumas is perfectly illustrated through the ringing of singing bowls. Secrets remain concealed by music (or its echoes) purposefully overpowering dialogue at key points, keeping the out-of-order narrative full of mystery for the audience and characters both.
"The show’s star performance by far, Deborah Hay’s Frances is equal parts Jo March and Manic Pixie Dream Girl."
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Music builds the interior world of Kathleen’s sister Frances, too: The show’s star performance by far, Deborah Hay’s Frances is equal parts Jo March and Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She sings and strips at a Cape Breton cabaret that contrasts sharply with Kathleen’s opera diva ambitions and the Harlem clubs that make up the majority of Part 2 in both its vulgarity and utility.
It’s through Frances’ musical performance, though, that we see her cutthroat brilliance. She pivots between personas to work the stage-within-a-stage, and keeps up the act even after her set to ensure her own survival in what’s proven to her to be not only a man’s world, but a woman’s living nightmare.
Even younger sister Lily’s (albeit bloated) storyline is shaped by music: Her beatified status is illustrated through a singing voice that brings peace to suffering strangers.
Across the play’s two evenings (a format that is a time commitment, yes, but also allows the audience to marinate in the story in a way that felt like the ultimate cure to the modern binge-watching age), music is a respite for both the audience and the characters. It helped viewers get to know the Piper sisters the way going through a friend’s records can.
And when a quiet gasp ends the play’s final moments, it juxtaposes strongly with the preceding melody-packed six hours: The sudden silence hits as strongly as a piano suddenly snapping shut.
Fall On Your Knees plays at Neptune Theatre until March 5.