REVIEW: Tomson Highway’s three-act musical Rose makes long-awaited world premiere at Ottawa’s NAC

National Arts Centre (NAC) Indigenous Theatre artistic director Kevin Loring first encountered Tomson Highway’s work in university. Reading Highway’s Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing was a formative experience which catalyzed his love for theatre. Loring isn’t alone — Highway’s Rez cycle plays, The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, are critically acclaimed and internationally celebrated, but perhaps more importantly, they’re staples in high school and postsecondary classrooms across and beyond Canada. 

Personally, I had the pleasure of reading The Rez Sisters in both high school and university, and virtually watched Jessica Carmichael’s 2021 Stratford Festival production of the play. Some of Carmichael’s cast members have now reunited for Highway’s third installment in the Rez cycle, the new musical Rose. Directed by Loring (who mentioned his long-standing relationship with Highway’s work in a pre-show speech), this third chapter premieres at Ottawa’s NAC nearly four decades after The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips’ late 1980s debuts, and is bigger in every way — in its musical form, its cast of 19, its ambitious three-act runtime, and the scale and complexity of its interlocking storylines.

The musical follows Emily Dictionary (Patricia Cano), a character from The Rez Sisters, who is grieving the losses of her lover and unborn daughter, both named Rose. Meanwhile, her half-sister Pelajia Patchnose has just become the fictional Wasaychigan Hill Indian Reserve’s new chief, titled Big Rose. As Big Joey (Trevor Duplessis), the father of Emily’s lost child, plans to open a casino in the rez — financed by the Sudbury, Ontario mafia — the women of Wasy join forces with Emily’s former biker gang friends to protect their community.

Highway’s script is both fun and sensitive, but at times seems encumbered by its need to contextualize itself, frequently reminding audiences of the events of the previous two plays. That being said, this emphasis on revisiting lends itself well to musings on the persistent nature of grief. There’s also repetition-based comedy, such as Chief Big Rose’s consistently hilarious repeated cancellation of meetings with increasingly significant people, from Doug Ford to Jesus.

Much of the musical, particularly its latter half, deals with the difficult subject of violence against Indigenous women, including suicide and lateral violence within the Wasaychigan Hill community. The piece situates its action in the broader MMIWG2S crisis through subtle references. For example, Philomena Moosetail (Krystle Pederson) carries a “No more stolen sisters” sign. One character experiences a moment of danger while standing on a highway dividing line evoking the Highway of Tears, and another utters the name Helen Betty Osborne. Rose dives into the brutality of the topic — one particularly visceral image occurs when a missing female character appears naked, hanging by the wrists from her lover’s ceiling — but it is also attentive to audience care, particularly through strategic shifts from pain to comedy. 

A three-storey mountain of broken motorcycles dominates Rose’s set (designed by Bretta Gerecke). Emily’s late lover Rosabella Jean Baez (Cheri Maracle), in an elaborate red-feathered showgirl costume evoking both regalia and the petals of her namesake flower (design by Yolonda Skelton), presides over most of the production from the mountain’s peak, holding court over a vanity mirror and a jukebox. 

Both the actors and the set are constantly on the move, bringing the action to various locations on and off the reserve. The mountain’s lower two levels open and close over the course of the production, revealing the snake tank of Jealousy Y Come Again (Josée Bourgeois) and, at the lower level, the cavernous space of Big Joey’s bedroom/basement casino. The surface of the plaster mountain also serves as a projection screen (designed by Candelario Andrade and Quill Christie-Peters), as does a row of suspended panels to the mountain’s left, whose starburst-like shape evokes stretched, drying animal hides.

Maracle is distant yet magnetic. Her chemistry with Cano’s Emily — whose ability to wear pure emotional devastation on her face is genuinely breathtaking — is on particular display in the first-act finale, “Jukebox Lady.” Brefny Caribou as Big Joey’s girlfriend Gazelle Nataways and Kelsey Wavey as Emily’s sister Annie Cook deliver standout vocal performances, and Renae Morriseau’s Chief Big Rose is world-weary yet intensely charismatic and vibrantly funny.

The production is unabashedly theatrical and committed to its musical form, supported by musical director and pianist John Alcorn’s lively band. Several musical numbers are diegetic, the most frequent in-world performers being “the La Crème,” a touring musical trio composed of Emily Dictionary and her fellow ex-bikers, who introduce themselves delightfully as “Liz Jones, dyke” (Nicole Joy-Fraser) and “Pussy Commanda, straight as a board” (Melody McArthur).

Rose’s cast of 19 combines the characters of the Rez cycle’s first two installments. Its three acts result in a listed runtime of three hours, plus two 15-minute intermissions. On opening night, the evening ran even longer, and the 7:30 p.m. show didn’t end until past 11:30. The musical acts and multiple storylines use the time well, but four hours is still a lot to ask of an audience, and may turn away some spectators in advance. 

I’d argue it’s worth the plunge. Rose is, in many ways, a story oriented around grief — particularly queer and lesbian grief for Indigenous women. But it also centres humour, kinship, and a celebration of Indigenous artistic and cultural production. After a wait of more than 30 years, four hours isn’t too long to ask for this ambitious and intricate musical extravaganza.

Rose runs at the NAC until April 4. More information is available here.

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WRITTEN BY

Madeleine Vigneron

Madeleine Vigneron (she/her) is a graduate student in English Literature at Carleton University. She is an editor at Augur Magazine. Her writing has been published in khōréō, Quilt, The Undergraduate Review, Collective Reflections, writing in the gallery, and performed by the Dan Studio Series. Madeleine is based in Ottawa, Ontario.

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