Our two families met during an elementary school production of “Oliver!” back about 1990. In the musical, our daughter Whitney performed the role of the old thief Fagin and Lisa and Conrad Boyce’s daughter Alida played Mrs. Bumble, the wife of the workhouse caretaker. Of course, the girls were great. I didn’t realize it right away, but Alida probably had an edge. She was coached by a man steeped in theatrical experience as an actor, director, producer and critic. In a note to me this week, Conrad described his own stage debut.
“I played my first role in Grade 1,” he wrote, “a Canadian history pageant (in which I was) Maisonneuve, the founder of Montreal.”
That was in May 1957, exactly 58 years ago this month. In 1996, Conrad Boyce arrived and settled in Uxbridge, married Lisa Wesselo the next year and was well on his way to becoming an institution in our area. In the years that followed, he founded Uxbridge Musical Theatre, worked as conductor of Uxtet (a young women’s chamber choir), and assisted the merger of UMT and the Uxbridge Players to create OnStage Uxbridge. In that same note to me this week, Conrad pointed out, during his career thus far, he has participated in 260 professional and community productions, written about 25 plays, sung in 20 different choirs and supervised everything from lighting to lyrics. Sadly, this week, Lisa and Conrad have moved on to the Ottawa Valley. This town will never be the same. Together they have touched so many lives.
I’ll never forget the summer of 1998, during which the couple took on the responsibility of producing, directing and marketing several productions in repertory at the Academy Theatre in Lindsay, Ont. Conrad refers to that summer as the one in which “I lost my shirt.” He did, but to the Boyces’ credit, they paid every last debt those productions owed. As important, Conrad directed eight talented actors that summer, among them our daughter Whitney Ross-Barris.
“Conrad gave me my first paying gig as a performer,” Whit reminded me this week. “For me, as an 18-year-old, it was the first time someone regarded me as a legit professional. Of course, the pay cheque was great. … But both he and Lisa have continued to support me as a jazz singer…”
Conrad and Lisa put the township of Uxbridge centre stage in quite another way in the fall of 2005, when they launched the weekly Cosmos. Even though she worked at a rival printer’s facility to help pay their everyday bills, Lisa assisted at the newspaper in advertising and design. Meanwhile, Conrad had very specific designs as far as the Cosmos’s content was concerned, to the occasional displeasure of his board of directors who hounded publisher/editor Boyce to be more news-oriented.
“I’m not putting car crashes and fires on the front page,” he emphasized. “The Cosmos is about community.”
Among my fondest moments with Conrad (and he and I have worked closely together on so many inspiring projects, including when he was a stage manager as I emceed arts events, when he was an organizer/sponsor as I moderated candidates debates, and when he was editor – for the Cosmos’s first eight years – as I submitted my Barris Beat columns) was watching the birth of his first book. One autumn, as we prepared a Remembrance Day event at the Foster Memorial, he shared a writer’s what-if with me.
“Somebody ought to write a book about this place,” he said.
“That somebody is you,” I suggested.
I wasn’t alone. Two years ago, after much additional encouragement and work, Conrad enjoyed a once-in-a-lifetime experience – holding that first printed copy of “Jewel on the Hill: The Story of Ontario’s Thomas Foster Memorial” in his hands. Typically, Conrad deflected the praise he was due, choosing to share credit with photographer Terry Paul, designer Caitlin Christoff Taillon, as well as Bev Northeast and the Friends of the Foster. And, like an actor on stage, Conrad also thanked his apparent director in the project. “Tom Foster is smiling at us all,” Conrad wrote in his acknowledgments.
No tribute to Conrad Boyce would be complete without mention of his passion to help raise the profile of this town’s most famous artist, Lucy Maud Montgomery. In the summer of 2011, Jennifer Carroll starred in Conrad’s creation “Maud of Leaskdale,” which Barbara Pratt (of the LMM Society of Ontario) reminded me this week has been performed successfully for three summers here, in Toronto and in PEI. Barb also wrote a nomination to have Conrad recognized for his support of community arts; as a result, last year, Durham Region presented him with the Art of Transition Creative Award.
“The Uxbridge and area arts community has benefited immeasurably from Conrad Boyce’s talent and boundless enthusiasm,” Barb wrote in the nomination.
While we all wish Lisa and Conrad the best in their new adventure in eastern Ontario, I’m inclined to quote a line from that “Oliver!” musical during which he and I first met in the audience all those years ago:
“Please, sir, I want some more.”