For both romantic leads in the Classic Theatre Festival’s season opener, the John van Druten romantic comedy Bell, Book and Candle, the power of theatre as a community-enhancing force is a major attraction that sustains their multifaceted careers in the arts.

         Erica Wood, who  plays Gillian Holroyd, a witch who longs to find her special someone (the inspiration for the TV series Bewitched), and Scott Maudsley, who plays the role of New York publisher Shepherd Henderson, will no doubt have much to talk about behind the scenes when they’re not heating up the stage at the Mason Theatre from July 8-31, the wheelchair accessible facility at 13 Victoria Street where the Festival will be held this summer.
 
An Early Start
         Wood’s passion for the theatre developed early, starting out in community theatre at age 12 and attending the Claude Watson School for the Arts. She graduated from the UK’s prestigious London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, where she’d been blessed to share her time there with an international class exposing her to Shakespeare and Shaw through the lens of multiple languages and styles, in addition to cheap student tickets to the London stage, where she thrilled at seeing Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, Judi Dench, and Derek Jacobi in shows like Much Ado About Nothing.

         On her return to Canada, Wood played in theatre for young audiences and also did voiceover work and TV too, including a Friday the 13th episode for which she still gets residuals.

         “I love the connection with the audience in live theatre,” she says of a career that has seen her play at Magnus Theatre in Thunder Bay, Penetang, The Stage Co, and a Smile Company tour, among many other venues.

         A multi-talented artist who writes and teaches as well, Wood is particularly fond of her role co-writing and starring in Girls in Love Be Harlots, based on the life of legendary poet Elizabeth Smart, whose By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is an international classic.

         Wood also teaches core curriculum using theatre, and recently worked with a grade 11 class to explore youth justice issues. “It’s wonderful to see how creative people are and to hear the voice you have, and students definitely find it fun to learn in a different way. Drama has so many access points for people,” she says.

         “Bell, Book and Candle is a bit of everything, a love story, great characters, great dialogue. It has a contemporary resonance, a woman trying to balance her career, her ethics, and her beliefs. For a woman in 1951 Gillian Holroyd was definitely ahead of her time.”
 
Multiple Approaches to Theatre
         She has found that approaching theatre from multiple viewpoints makes for a symbiotic strengthening of all her talents. “My acting helps the writing and my writing helps the acting. And with teaching you learn that asking is more important than telling.”

         Wood’s latest passion is Forum Theatre, inspired by the Theatre of the Oppressed techniques developed by the late Augusto Boal that allow audience members to become active participants who learn through theatre pathways for transforming their lives.       

         “There’s so much that theatre can do for the community,” she says, and it’s an approach that is embraced by her co-star Scott Maudsley, whose career path became clear when he entered a unique “London Semester” offered by the University of Guelph. The program, which offered 30 arts students the opportunity to immerse themselves in British culture, focused on playgoing, galleries, and concerts, but “it was trips to London’s West End, Stratford-on-Avon, and the Royal Shakespeare Company that turned performance into a passion and an obsession,” he says.

         “I imagined myself up there vicariously in the position of the performer,” he says, confronting stage fright with the balancing dose of excitement that comes with live theatre. “It’s that great communion of actor and audience, the laughs, the gasps, that’s when it all clicks,” he enthuses.

         Maudsley’s passion for all aspects of the theatre – acting, writing, performing – always finds him coming up with new projects on stages across the country, including Edmonton, Calgary, Thunder Bay, Port Hope, Millbrook, Collingwood, and Cornwall.
 
Embracing New Discoveries
         “Part of the job I really like is getting to know different places, and I’ve never been to Perth before. Doing theatre is so fantastic, because it infuses the community with life.” Maudsley picked up a teaching degree at Queen’s—always good to have another flexible vocation while working in the arts, he notes – and has worked with the artist in the community program, for which he  wrote Flying Elvises, a Christmas show for kids featuring seven dwarves who were Elvis clones.

         Maudsley sees in himself “that natural Canadian proclivity to find the laughs in everything, it’s one of our most exportable treasures,” though he is equally intrigued with the flip side, and loves dramas based on family dynamics.

         He wrote Brothers, a one-man show about growing up in Sudbury that touched a nerve with a lot of audience members who recognized something of themselves in his story. “When they see you pour your heart out, they want to talk after the show and share their stories — about growing up, and the things we as youth take for granted.” He also staged Straight to Video, an Oscar spoof show with his wife, Liz Gilroy.

         Maudsley is also a director — he worked in collaboration with the community of Creemore to produce The Wake of the Asia, a musical historical play about a ship that sank in Georgian Bay in the 1800s and the budding romance of the two survivors who got to know each other in a lifeboat.

          “There’s nothing better than when you’re working,” he says. “It is playing in a focused, serious kind of way, and we play really hard. What could be better? This is not clock punching, this is our life.

         Tickets for Bell, Book and Candle are available at www.classictheatre.ca or by calling 1-877-283-1283, or in person at Tickets Please, 30 Foster Street in Perth.