Recently the Playhouse’s Marla Norrad sat down for a conversation with Peter Anderson, one of the talented performers in Tosca Cafe.

MN: What can we expect from Tosca Cafe?

PA: I think you can expect a really surprising, rich stew of entertainment. The dance in the show is just extraordinary with both ballet and modern dancers. I think it’s one of the best fusions of theatre and dance that I’ve been involved in. The piece moves from the 1920s up to the present and it goes through the decades with wonderful music from each decade. There’s this beautiful pas de deux in the 1940s with Rosemary Clooney singing “What’ll I Do” and in the ’60s we’ve got the Jimi Hendrix guitar solo on “Little Wing”. It’s a lot of fun that way with this movement through the decades. The music is extraordinary. It also draws on the opera Tosca after which the real cafe was named and that’s been woven into the storyline of the bartender. The biggest change since San Francisco has been that Dean Paul Gibson has really contributed a lot to telling that story of the bartender who opened this bar. One of the ideas we were working with was that any bar like that is a gathering place, a place that took people in.

Nol Simonse, Peter Anderson and Dean Paul Gibson in Tosca Cafe at the Vancouver Playhouse Oct 8-29, 2011. Photo by Kevin Berne.

MN: Tell me about how you became involved in Tosca Cafe?

PA: It was through The Overcoat, which was presented by ACT in San Francisco in 2005. Carey Perloff the Artistic Director of ACT, was really excited by the show. San Francisco audiences really like that form of non verbal physical theatre and Carey wanted to do her own piece. At the same time she’d been working with Val Caniparoli, a choreographer from San Francisco Ballet. Val saw The Overcoat and said this is great, we should do something like this with dancers. They went to speak to Jeannette Etheridge who runs the Tosca Cafe in San Francisco and is really heavily involved with ballet. At that meeting Carey saw this beautiful bar at the Tosca Cafe in San Francisco that was opened in 1920. It’s been a real hub in North Beach, which is the bohemian section of San Francisco. It’s been a hub for a lot of artists and dancers over the years: Sam Shepard, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Hunter S. Thompson, Frances Ford Coppola, the names go on and of people that have hung out or still hang out there. So then after about 4 years of workshopping the piece, last summer ACT committed to put it in their season and it played in June to really great success.
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