Bedtime Stories At The Firehall Theatre
Bedtime Stories, a 2006 comedy by Norm Foster, which just opened at the Firehall Theatre in Niagara Falls, Ontario, is unusual for a Foster comedy. It also marks an unusual collaboration between the Foster Festival and the community theatres of the Niagara Region.
As Emily Oriold, Artistic Director of the Foster Festival, explained it in an introductory speech before the show, various community theatre groups have frequently turned to the Festival for information, tips, and support. So why not put on a Foster vehicle with the the best amateur performers, drawn from a number of community troupes, to give them an up-close exposure to the ways and means of professional theatre? This revival of Bedtime Stories, billed as a Special Community Event, is the fortuitous result.
Bedtime Stories is an unusual, maybe even unique, entry in the Foster canon in that it has a cast of 15. That amounts to a “cast of thousands” in Foster’s oeuvre and makes it an ideal choice for a community theatre. These companies typically have more actors than they know what to do with and they don’t suffer from the budgetary restraints that incentivize professional troupes to mount small-cast plays.
The structure of Bedtime Stories is ingenious. It consists of six vignettes set in various bedrooms in an unnamed backwater of a mid-market city. While each vignette is quite funny and seemingly self-contained, Foster has cleverly linked characters in each scene with characters who appear others. Jokes, surreptitiously set up in Act One, pay off hilariously in Act Two as the audience catches on to the intricate web of relationships linking the folks in Foster’s version of “our town.”
As the title suggests, the play seemingly revolves around sex, some of it kinda edgy, like a middle-aged couple having sex live on the radio while their teenage daughter is offering up her body to an ancient rock star. But this is a Norm Foster play after all so Bedtime Stories is really about love – love lost, love betrayed, love won, and love rediscovered. And, yes, it has a happy ending.
As Oriold explained, all the backstage and “creative” elements are handled by professionals – the sleekly efficient set by Beckie Morris is especially nice – while the entire cast is amateur, although it seemed to me that most of them weren’t more than a hair’s breadth away from being viable on the professional stage.
Oriold and Jamie Williams, the executive director of the Foster Festival, co-directed, presumably divvying up the vignettes between themselves. They have done an excellent job of bringing out the best in their cast.
I particularly enjoyed Kathleen Phelan-Savage as the radio sex star, Diana Moser as an accident-prone exotic dancer, and Tim Denis as the aging rock star.
Ontario’s Niagara region has a rich community theatre culture. I counted over half a dozen mentioned in the cast bios. This production is a fine testament to the excellent work they are doing and to the richness of the performing arts ecosystem in Canada.
Bedtime Stories continues at the Firehall Theatre through June 1, 2025. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit the Foster Festival website.
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