Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Beyond Eden rock musical, setting the record straight

None of the reviews I've read of the Vancouver Playhouse's rock musical Beyond Eden (January 16-February 6, 2010), and that includes those of the Globe and Mail (January 22, 2010) and CBC News, mentioned that the 1957 totem-pole-collecting expedition on which Bruce Ruddell's musical is based, was jointly sponsored by the British Columbia Provincial Museum (now the Royal BC Museum) and the University of British Columbia. Ironically, anthropologist Wilson Duff, on whom the character Lewis Wilson (played by John Mann) is based, worked for the Provincial Museum until 1965 when he became a professor at UBC. The BC Government filmed the expedition, the production is called The Silent Ones, with CBC also filming it and calling their work Totem. You can see a shortened, retitled version of Totem on the CBC Digital Archives ("Bill Reid's rescue mission for Haida art"), originally broadcast on May 21, 1959 in the series Pacific Eight.

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