NEVERMORE
A Poseur's Guide, The Calgary Herald

1. Be a Quick Study: New Year's Eve is a particularly debilitating date on the poseur calendar (all that cocktail-party chatter). If you've run out of time to prepare for the arrival of Nevermore, keep it simple. Memorize this Poe quote: "All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream." That nugget serves as Nevermore's animating principle. "Given how his life unfolded, his inner world was so real to him," Jonathan Christenson says. "It became more tangible to him than what was going on around him."

2. Follow the Clues: Christenson is Nevermore's writer, director and composer, and if the subtitle didn't clue you in that this is not a bio-play, perhaps that last job title will. Christenson and designer Bretta Gerecke (they are the co-founders of Catalyst) did not feel constrained when they created the musical. The poseur should point out that Poe himself was similarly unrestrained. "His style is so florid, there's a sing-songy, almost lyric poetry quality to it," Christenson says. "He takes it to such extremes that it just seemed we couldn't take it too far."

3. Love Love: That's not to say that Christenson and Gerecke didn't push the material. Poe's characters mingle with people from his life-- "dreams within dreams," remember--to create a stylish phantasmagoria. The two riffed off each other's ideas in a process Gerecke likens to a tennis match, one in which the writing informs the design and vice versa. "I have to see the world before I can start writing--not a finished world, but I need to get glimpses through the mist of what it looks like," Christenson says.

4. A Voice From Beyond: Catalyst's Frankenstein was part of last year's Rodeo. It, too, was a musical; poseurs will have detected a pattern. "I like tapping into the spirit of the writing," Christenson says, "but finding a way to make it speak in a contemporary voice."

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