Originally published in Frontier Thespian in 1999

Calgary Comes into Its Own

Last year I had occasion to attend the Sterling Awards in Edmonton. The U of A was being honoured with a "Lifetime Achievement" award, and in presenting the award Stephen Heatley made a comment along the lines of "Why is it, when Calgary and Edmonton are of such similar size, that Edmonton has so much more theatre?"

What? Ten years ago definitely, but times have changed, I thought to myself. OK, I admit it was just a gut feeling from having worked in the two cities, but I was pretty certain we'd caught up.

At the recent CAEA council meeting in Toronto, I found the proof. Usually we get a breakdown of how many workweeks have been contracted out in the most recent period compared the same period a year ago. This time they gave us something a little different. We received a packet detailing workweeks for last year broken down by province and theatre. David Caron knew I was interested in a comparison of Edmonton to Calgary, so he quickly did a breakdown for me (see table 1).

OK, so I was right. We are ahead of Edmonton by about 500 workweeks. This didn't fill me with joy as a big part of Calgary. s pulling ahead has to do with the downturn in Edmonton. They lost the Phoenix and Nexus theatre companies, and many of the companies who did survive the recession are now working in scaled back seasons compared to the heydays of the early 80s. In contrast, Calgary lost none of it. s leading theatres and have even added a couple players. Figure 2 shows the twelve major theatre producers (not including the two opera companies) in Alberta.

Stage West stands out at the top; obviously all those large cast musicals are employing a ton of equity members. Overall in Alberta, workweeks are up 6.3% in 1998 over 1997 (6181 in 98 compared to 5816 in 97).

Finally, we now have more CAEA members in Southern Alberta than in Northern AB and NWT: 171 to 160. This is also a result of both our increase and their decrease (they were once well over 200).