The world is a stage for musical lyricist Akiva Romer-Segal

by Maxine Fischbein

(AJNews) – Musical theatre lyricist Akiva Romer-Segal did some serious celebrating in Edmonton this past November as the Citadel Theatre premiered Vinyl Cafe: The Musical (VCTM), a holiday production based on The Vinyl Cafe, the popular CBC radio show that aired between 1994 and 2015, consisting of stories by the late Stuart McLean, including the unforgettable Christmas favourite “Dave Cooks the Turkey.”

The Edmonton Journal review gave the proverbial two thumbs up to the crowd-pleasing show.

It has been quite a journey for the multi-talented Romer-Segal, who was raised in Calgary and is now based in Toronto.

That he co-wrote the songs for VCTM – together with his former Henry Wise Wood classmate, composer Colleen Dauncey – seemed pre-ordained as Romer-Segal walked down memory lane during an interview with AJNews days after the musical’s world premiere.

“I woke up on Sunday mornings to the smell of my mother making French toast and to the sound of Stuart McLean’s dulcet tones regaling us with Dave and Morley’s latest antics,” recalled Romer-Segal.

“When the opportunity arose to write this show, I actually called my mom and said, ‘If I could write any musical for you, what would it be? She said Vinyl Cafe, and I said great, and I hung up,” chuckled Romer-Segal. “This one’s for my mom and dad.”

Romer-Segal, who recently celebrated his fortieth birthday, was not at all sure he would be able to travel to Edmonton for VCTM, given that the show was staged between two major surgeries following his diagnosis – just over a year ago – with stage 4 liver and colon cancer.

“It was really fun to experience in person…the joy that [VCTM] brings a live audience and the gleeful response,” Romer-Segal said.

It is hoped that the show, which was commissioned and directed by Citadel Artistic Director Daryl Cloran, will gain traction as a holiday tradition in other Canadian theatres and south of the border, where The Vinyl Cafe was also broadcast on public radio.

VCTM, says Romer-Segal, “… was conceived very intentionally as an alternative to A Christmas Carol.” The two plays were staged in adjacent theatres at the Citadel this past holiday season, giving audiences a contemporary choice in addition to the adaptation of the time-honoured Dickens classic.

Armed with a degree in technical theatre production from Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson), Romer-Segal spent the first decade of his career as a set and costume designer, often assisting major designers.

“Major design opportunities in this country are limited, and they were going to my mentors,” recalls Romer-Segal who felt uncomfortable with the growing realization that for his big break he would have to wait for his mentors to retire or die.

After hearing actor and singer Sara Farb at a cabaret, Romer-Segal wrote lyrics for a song he thought would be perfect for her. She told him that if he could get someone to compose the music, she would perform it.

Romer-Segal reached out to his friend Colleen Dauncey, with whom he had acted in high school and summer stock. She had moved on to other things, having earned a business degree and was living in Quebec.

Dauncey agreed to write the music, and the song received great response, said Romer-Segal, adding that people began asking them what else they had.

It was not long before Dauncey relocated to Toronto. Colleen and Akiva (check out their website) began to write more songs for Farb (who has performed on Broadway and at the Stratford Festival and will portray Fanny Brice in her Shaw Festival debut in a production of Funny Girl set to open this coming spring.)

“At a certain point Sara Farb said, well, if you write enough songs, I’ll produce a concert or a song cycle. So, we wrote our first show…called The Subway Songs, which has now been retooled into a show called Going Under,” Akiva said.

A licensable show, Going Under “…explores connection through a group of high schoolers en route to their graduation, when the subway they are riding comes to a screeching halt.” The play has been popular with youth theatre groups, Akiva said.

Things started to take off for Colleen and Akiva, who self-produced their first Toronto Fringe Festival show, Bremen Rock City, for which Farb wrote the book. The show – a family-friendly rock musical based on a Brothers’ Grimm fairytale – was a hit at the Fringe.

Next came The Louder we Get – originally produced as Prom Queen: The Musical – based on the true story of Marc Hall, an Ontario teen who took on the Catholic school system in his fight for the right to take his boyfriend to his school prom. The play was staged at Theatre Calgary, the Segal Centre in Montreal, and the Grand Theatre in London, Ontario.

“My writing career started taking off, and it got to a certain point where I had to decide between writing and set design,” Akiva said. “The writing won.”

Like so many in the theatre community, Akiva had to take on other jobs in order to make ends meet. He spent more than a decade with the JCC at Bloor and Spadina serving in various capacities.

“In Canada, there are maybe a handful of people who can say that they are full-time musical theatre writers,” said Akiva, though he and Colleen got to the point where most of their time was spent writing, traveling, and workshopping shows.

In 2020, The Louder We Get opened at Theatre Calgary. Another of their shows, Grow, was set to open at the Grand Theatre in London, Ontario when the COVID-19 pandemic thrust the world into chaos. Colleen and Akiva found themselves grounded as theatres went dark and projects were put on hold.

Akiva got a job at a marketing firm, working remotely. Once the theatre world was back up and running, he had the flexibility to travel and work on shows while they were in preview.

Then, just over a year ago, Akiva received his cancer diagnosis.

Ironically, his close friend, writer Andrea Scott, got hers around the same time.

“We’ve sort of been going through this together,” said Akiva, who has since undergone 11 rounds of chemotherapy and, just weeks ago, his second surgery.

Before that, he traveled – with his medical team’s blessings – for the preview performances and premiere of VCTM.

“Previews are one of my favourite parts of the process,” said Akiva who thrives on the collaboration that takes place as theatre professionals take notes, observe audience reactions and tweak a show during the following days’ rehearsals, making changes to scripts, orchestration, and sets. The real-time metamorphosis unfolds through to opening night.

In Edmonton, Akiva had a cheering section of his own, including friends and family who traveled from Toronto, Red Deer, and Calgary.

He was the toast of Edmonton that evening and remains the pride of Calgary.

“A lot of my formative theatre and cultural arts experiences were in Calgary,” said Akiva who recalled the “surreal feeling” of watching a dress rehearsal for The Louder we Get from the same box at Theatre Calgary where he watched Into the Woods with his mother and grandmother when he was a kid.

Akiva, who was 10 years old at the time, vividly recalls how captivated he was by the action, both onstage and backstage.

“I had a slight peek into the wings where you could see the show behind the show and it…opened my eyes to this idea that there are people behind the scenes that are helping tell this story.”

The experience was “formative,” said Akiva, as was his later discovery of a musical theatre cast recording section at the Calgary Public Library.

“Those two experiences formed into this idea that I could be someone that is on the other side of the performance,” Akiva said.

As a student at Henry Wise Wood High School, Akiva met Colleen, with whom he performed in school musicals, including Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Together they also acted in plays staged by the Summer Stock Conservatory program at Olympic Plaza, including Guys and Dolls, Fiddler on the Roof, and Annie Get Your Gun.

Akiva fondly remembers the early influence of Lana Skauge…a storyteller and performer who has worked with students and teachers throughout Calgary – including those at Akiva Academy, the Orthodox Jewish day school where Akiva attended elementary and junior high school.

Skauge – who has influenced countless kids in the performing arts – later taught Akiva at the Theatre Calgary Drama Camp.

“I think of her sometimes as a very early mentor that saw the artist in me and fostered that,” Akiva said.

As he continues to heal, Akiva looks forward to the opening of Grow at the Segal Centre in Montreal this spring.

“The show is about two Amish twin sisters who leave their sheltered community for the first time to explore life in the modern world and get caught up in the world of cannabis,” said Akiva.

That smells like fun!

‘The legalities and culture around [cannabis] have changed so much in the last nine or so years that the show has been around,” said Akiva. “We’ve had to rewrite from scratch every few years because when we first wrote the show, [cannabis] wasn’t even legal in Canada.”

So, Akiva has more lyrics to write as new ideas for future projects with Colleen also continue to percolate.

The shared cancer journeys of Akiva and Andrea Scott may lead to another interesting project.

“We have been scheming up a TV show very loosely inspired by us, about two younger best friends who get a cancer diagnosis around the same time and their journey through that together,” Akiva says.

It is a dark comedy, just the kind of thing, he adds, that has “become essential to my healing.”

“I think it’s also been a really interesting way to track the people around me and the way that they’ve come to deal with the news of my diagnosis,” Akiva says. “People who couldn’t say the word cancer about a year ago are now sending me really dark jokes. They know that’s our way of getting through this…. You have to laugh or sing through the darkness sometimes in order to survive.”

Akiva’s friends and family have been there for him, including his brothers Yannai and Hananel and parents Agi and Eliezer, whom he credits with planting the seeds of creativity.

Eliezer Segal, now Professor Emeritus at the University of Calgary, where he specialized in Rabbinic Judaism, is also the author of the delightfully whimsical rhyming children’s book Uncle Eli’s Passover Haggadah.

Agi Romer Segal – who together with a friend worked backstage on McGill University plays – earned a degree in library sciences. A writer and translator, she worked for many years as the archivist at the Jewish Historical Society of Southern Alberta and, before that, as a beloved kindergarten teacher at Akiva Academy. Her son Akiva recalls the tremendous creativity she brought to making crafts and puppet shows depicting biblical stories.

“There certainly was a creativity bubbling,” said Akiva of the home in which he grew up.

“Vinyl Cafe is very specifically an ode to that,” he added.

Akiva’s parents can still pinpoint moments they knew their youngest son was destined for the arts.

“There was no choice. Since he was two that was where he was going to go, said Agi Romer Segal, thinking back to the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary.

“He liked to watch the ‘finger skating,’ that was what he called it, and mostly the twirling,” recalled his mom, who saw that it was the showy parts of the sport that really tickled her son.

Akiva was around 11 when his family first laid eyes on their Braeside home, and he noticed that the house had two decks, one overhanging the other like a balcony.

“Akiva said, ‘Yes, we have to buy this house, there’s a stage,” recalled Agi Romer Segal.

According to his parents, Akiva thrived at Akiva Academy, where he enjoyed participating in talent shows. He benefited from small class sizes and the way teachers encouraged student creativity. He took music lessons in Calgary with the late Fran Snukal and spent Grade Nine in Israel with his parents while they were on sabbatical, participating in plays based on biblical passages.

Speaking of Israel, Akiva adapted the Israeli play Layla Echad B’April, by singer and songwriter Keren Peles, helping to ensure that the play would work for American audiences and penning English song lyrics that would fit the rhythms of Peles’ original compositions.

April Fool – as the play became known to English-speaking audiences – was staged at the Segal Centre in Montreal in a 2022 production directed by Moshe Kepten, artistic director of HaBima, the National Theatre of Israel.

All the world’s a stage for Akiva, who has had the opportunity to gain experience from giants in the musical theatre world.

“In 2017 we were invited to present excerpts of Grow at The ASCAP Musical Theatre Workshop in Toronto, in front of a distinguished panel that included Broadway legends Stephen Schwartz, Joe DiPietro, and Bob Martin,” said Akiva. “Schwartz had some high praise for our ballads, which was a great compliment coming from the king of the genre.”

The following year, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber attended a workshop presentation of The Louder We Get at the Other Palace, a theatre Lloyd Webber owns in London, England.

“He ended up attending our show, and when we met him afterwards, he had some very kind things to say and invited us to tea the next morning with his wife. They were both quite lovely,” said Akiva, who added that they discussed his show and future projects, as well as some of Lloyd Webber’s.

“He was very encouraging,” Akiva said.

These days the theatre community is rallying around Akiva as he continues his recovery.

“During his illness, people have really shown up for him,” says Eliezer Segal, including Akiva’s brother Hananel and his wife, who have created a comfortable space in their Toronto home, where Akiva has stayed at intervals while recovering from chemo and surgery.

“The care has been so caring,” Agi Romer Segal said of her son’s medical team and supports, among them, the community of cancer patients who truly look after one another.

There is great material there. And, no doubt, Akiva Romer-Segal – who looks to the future with optimism – is already imagining lyrics that will soar as his star continues to rise.

Maxine Fischbein is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter