It was six months so packed with shows of every stripe and colour that tourists were often outnumbered by the locals
Peter Birnie
Sun
Roy Orbison was one of the featured performers appearing at Expo 86. Photograph by : Steve Bosch, Vancouver Sun Files
Princess Diana and Bryan Adams shared a laugh during the intermission of the Gala Entertainment evening at Expo Theatre. Photograph by : Mark Van Manen, Vancouver Sun Files
Stevie Ray Vaughan appeared at Expo ’86. Photograph by : Steve Bosch, Vancouver Sun Files
When the world’s most famous opera company comes calling, you’d better sing its tune. But the tables were turned when La Scala arrived at Expo 86 from Milan to perform Verdi’s I Lombardi. Hamilton McClymont was Expo’s entertainment director and recalls his astonishment that the celebrated troupe was willing to meet some strange new demands.
“They agreed to play in a hockey rink [Pacific Coliseum], which they’d never done before,” says McClymont. “They agreed to surtitles [a projection of lyrics in English], which they’d never done before, and they agreed to sound reinforcement.”
Which, it turns out, they’d also never done before. Such was the mood of magic in the air at Expo 86 that La Scala not only played by B.C.’s rules, but came out a winner for it. When word spread after opening night that the production was a success, weak ticket sales were turned around the next day and all remaining performances sold out.
Entertainment at Expo 86 covered every part of the fair’s enormous site and spilled offsite as well. Chris Wootten was instrumental in shaping the world fair’s cultural side before being fired, just five months before events began. He says a strong commitment to live entertainment at the fair by Expo president Mike Bartlett, who came from the world of theme parks and would also be fired, was key to the event’s enormous success.
“I was able to take Bartlett’s realization that entertainment was fundamentally important to an exhibition,” says Wootten, “and convert that from theme-park entertainment, which is like white trousers and white shoes, into quality entertainment. It couldn’t have been done without somebody who believed in entertainment the way Mike Bartlett did.”
The result of the work by Wootten and then McClymont, and their teams, saw six months so packed with shows of every stripe and colour that tourists were often outnumbered by the locals who kept coming back, again and again.
“Because people could buy passes through the Royal Bank relatively cheaply,” says McClymont, “they made it a point to drop down after work on a regular basis, two or three times a week. We wanted the entire program to be rolling, different stuff from week to week and sometimes even day to day, so that there was always something new to appeal to our own market.”
That meant classical presentations from dozens of orchestras and choirs, jazz and folk and pop concerts by virtually all the era’s leading artists, comedy from such greats as Red Skelton and Bob Hope, and dance ranging from the ballet of Baryshnikov to the leggy offerings of Mitzi Gaynor. A Royal Bank World Festival offered music, dance and drums from around the world, specially made movies like Rainbow Wars packed in the crowds and the visual arts were represented by everything from the wild and wacky, such as Bill Lishman’s
30-metre-tall Transcending the Traffic (the top figure was inspired by the legs of Tina Turner) and the frozen-in-motion freeway of Highway 86, to the sublime beauty of Egyptian artifacts in a pavilion fronted by gigantic columns echoing the ancient Hypostyle Hall at Karnak on the Nile.
Many of the fair’s roving buskers proved so popular that their presence near a line-up for a pavilion could result in congestion. A policy was developed to keep them far enough from bottlenecks to prevent gridlock on the often-packed fairgrounds. Each nation participating at Expo 86 received its own special day to celebrate; organizer Shel Piercy remembers a bit of a brouhaha over Japan’s day.
“As part of a traditional Japanese ceremony they would break these massive barrels of sake,” Piercy recalls. “We of course had to go to the liquor control board and tell them that what we intended to do was break these barrels of sake, which would then spill all over the place, then serve people a little cup of sake as part of the ritual.
“They were absolutely aghast at the idea. There were six or seven thousand people in the Plaza of Nations that day, and we were forced to have scores of staff there to keep children from diving into the spilled sake and make sure that anyone who was served a cup was actually 19 or older.”
The effect of Expo’s massive entertainment package on Vancouver’s arts scene was mixed. The Alliance for Arts and Culture was founded before the fair to address its impact on local presenters, and co-creator Paddy Macleod says the organization’s advocacy (which it still performs today) helped a great deal.
“My eternal view is that there’s power in unity,” says Macleod. “We were very anxious about being obliterated during that period; in my view we got a fair crack at performing at Expo.”
But while Vancouver Opera, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, the Vancouver Bach Choir and many other local organizations enjoyed a successful liaison with Expo 86, some other groups suffered for their disconnection from the fair. Poor ticket sales led to cancellation of the last two weeks of a Vancouver Playhouse production of Noises Off, followed by even worse box-office figures for A Chorus Line. At the Arts Club Theatre, artistic director Bill Millerd planned ahead and scheduled remounts of his already popular shows Ain’t Misbehavin’ and Sex Tips for Modern Girls.
“I felt it would be very difficult in the midst of Expo to try to run something different or unusual,” he told the Montreal Gazette at the time. “The best thing we could do to survive would be to put on things people recognized or had heard about.”
While Wootten mourns the loss of the Expo Theatre, a 4,000-seat facility built to be dismantled but instead was destroyed after the fair, he says there’s a bigger legacy.
“It’s in the city’s sense of confidence. The way it put Vancouver on the map in terms of tourism had a huge impact. Expo really was a turning point for Vancouver, and I’m proud that I was part of that.”
In 1983, McClymont had organized the enormous event at B.C. Place (budget: $600,000, performers: 7,000) where Queen Elizabeth II invited the world to Expo. And on four weeks’ notice he and his team whipped up a memorable closing ceremony for the fair. But his proudest moment came on Expo’s opening day, when the Prince and Princess of Wales stepped ashore at False Creek, then took the time to speak to each member of a first nations dance troupe.
“I never saw such proud people in my life,” McClymont recalls, “and it made me think that all the work we did with the Musqueam band paid off at that moment.”
© The Vancouver Sun 2006