By Matthew Behrens
            Although he won’t be playing any risqué scenes at this summer’s Classic Theatre Festival in Perth, veteran Canadian actor Allan Price does note with a certain whimsical pride that his bare bottom is featured in the cult film Cannibal Girls, a 1973 horror spoof that launched the film career of Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman and featured soon-to-be-discovered stars Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin. Price, playing the role of “Felix, the Second Victim,” can now be seen on DVD in the camp favourite that featured warning bells inside the theatre to alert those with weak stomachs when gory scenes were imminent.
 
This was part of Price’s journey to the status of working actor, which continues in Perth this summer playing the role of the eccentric, tipsy occult researcher Sidney Redlitch in the Classic Theatre Festival’s production of John van Druten’s Bell, Book and Candle (which inspired the TV series Bewitched). The show runs July 8-31 at the wheelchair-accessible, air conditioned Mason Theatre, 13 Victoria Street, in Perth.

 

Overcoming Stage Fright

            Too afraid to audition for high school shows, Price found his stage feet following a failed university romance, a time during which he also fielded questions about whether he was associated with the British rock group The Animals (founded by another Allan Price). Price’s mother, fed up with her heartsick son moping about, pushed him to get involved in something to take his mind off his lovelorn misery. It wasn’t long before he threw himself into a New College adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov at University of Toronto, directed by Basya Hunter, who had studied at the legendary Moscow Art School with theatre icon Constantin Stanislavsky.
 
            “She had us do exercises where we were a tree, the wind, a tiger, and I didn’t really get them, but I certainly got hooked on doing theatre,” Price recalls, adding he directed a number of variety shows featuring Bob Rae, currently leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. Price also struck up a lifelong friendship with the show’s assistant stage manager, Liz, who soon became his wife, and immediately became a member of numerous touring companies presenting theatre for young audiences at $5 a show.
 
Landmark CBC Shows
            “When we got a raise to $10 a show, I thought I had made the big time, and it wouldn’t be long before I became a millionaire,” Price says. “Little did I know that 40 years later, I could still make $10 a show,” he jokes, a reference to the low pay that is the plight of many professional stage actors.
 
            Price also did television work, including the Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour (which starred Lorne Michaels – later a founding producer of Saturday Night Live) and featured the likes of Gilda Radner, Alan Thicke, and Dan Ackroyd.
 
            With a young family and bills to pay, Price had to juggle his love of acting with his day jobs. Those economic pressures forced Price out of professional theatre for a time, but when his wife saw how miserable he was in the 9-5 business world, she stepped in, got a computer studies diploma, and entered full time work to allow Price the space to resume his professional acting career.
 
            Since then, he has worked across Canada on stage, and in television programs including Queer as Folk, Top Cops, Night Heat, Politics is Cruel, Path to 911, and The Piano Man’s Daughter.
 
A Character Actor
            “I get a lot of character roles, usually the Jewish doctor or the Jewish lawyer, and once, I did a Yiddish version of The Sunshine Boys,” he says, adding that apart from that niche which has seen him star in Fiddler on the Roof, The Diary of Anne Frank, and Little Shop of Horrors, he has also handled leading roles in Death of a Salesman, Treasure Island, The Wizard of Oz, and The Fantasticks.
 
            Despite the challenges, Price says he would choose no other life. “There are times as an actor where the stars line up and everything becomes real, you forget you are acting, and you actually feel, you are not pretending to feel. It is such a rush to be in that space with your fellow actors. This brings me back to what Basya Hunter tried to teach us, about finding the truth in that moment and living that truth.”
 
            Price particularly likes the writing in Bell, Book and Candle, noting “there’s a certain gentleness to it. Its approach to sexuality has a unique charm. So much stuff today is so overt, and we may be missing the wonder. Van Druten maintains that real-life tension, the ‘will they or won’t they’ mystery that makes for such a great story.”
 
            Tickets for Bell, Book and Candle are available at www.classictheatre.ca, 1-877-283-1283, or at Tickets Please, 39 Foster Street, in Perth.