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review

Khari Wendell McLelland in FreedomSinger.Dahlia Katz

Do we want to celebrate Canada's multiculturalist mythology or face darker facts about this country's racial history in this sesquicentennial year?

Singer/songwriter Khari Wendell McClelland struggles with this question in a new show called Freedom Singer – a mix of songs, personal monologues and verbatim theatre. The Detroit-born, Vancouver-based musician (from the roots gospel group The Sojourners) begins the play on a genealogical journey: He wants to learn more about his inspiring great-great-great-grandmother, Kizzy, who escaped from slavery in the 1850s to Amherstburg, Ont., via the Underground Railroad.

Being a music man, McClelland also wants to find out what Kizzy and others escaping slavery might have sung as they made their way to Canada, and to freedom. He sings many of his discoveries – composing new musical settings for found lyrics whose original melodies were lost long ago – throughout.

At the start of his quest, McClelland – a soft-spoken slow talker who sports a newsboy cap and red socks under unlaced sneakers – sets up the kind of cross-border comparison Canadians love more than ever in the era of Trudeau vs. Trump. He depicts the United States as a place where black people still fear violence, and Canada as a country of relative peace. He describes growing up in Detroit fearful of gunfire, and the freedom he first felt moving to Vancouver.

As he interviews historians and authors and curators hoping to learn more about Kizzy and her music, however, McClelland finds his initial presentation of Canada as a final destination for freedom being complicated.

Some wonder if he's asking the right questions in the show he plans to write – if perhaps Canadians know too much about the Underground Railroad (as seen on TV in a Heritage Minutes short!) and not enough about the history of slavery in British North America or the various oppressions, subtle and not, that many groups have faced on this side of the border.

The young singer even begins to question the meaning of Kizzy's own story. After she made it to freedom, she was betrayed by a man and lost her legs to the cold. If Canada really was (is) the promised land, why did Kizzy go back across the Detroit River? (And why does McClelland's mother still live in Detroit?)

McClelland finds personal strength in the story of Kizzy's journey to Canada, which inspired his own, so is it worth facing hard facts if they only demoralize him? Freedom Singer asks intelligent, open-ended questions about how to think about history – and balances them with more emotional musical moments. McClelland's indisputable musical talent gets great backup from Polaris Prize-nominated soul singer Tanika Charles and guitarist Noah Walker. From a theatrical perspective, however, Freedom Singer is not entirely satisfying – or perhaps not yet in its best-possible form.

Andrew Kushnir – artistic director of Project: Humanity and playwright of such boundary pushing documentary plays as The Middle Place and Small Axe – is co-creator of the show. He's also the director, and his approach is at times too aloof and at others too high concept.

McClelland, as mentioned, is not the fastest talker, and he's not an actor either, so when the monologues or scenes get longer than your usual between-songs banter, the proceedings can become too loose. A show that could be a little more than an hour in other hands stretches to almost two hours, with no intermission.

Kushnir's production also features audio interviews that are, at first, played over speakers – and then turned into dialogue by McClelland and, occasionally, Charles, as they keep listening to the recordings through headphones. I've seen this avant-garde performance style work before, but it just doesn't fit in a show that is at its best when McClelland forms a low-key, natural rapport with the audience.

The concept that the creators are aiming for comes together most extraordinarily when McClelland plays a recording from 1940 where a Halifax man sings a traditional song called No More: "No more auction block for me." The production seamlessly segues from the recording to McClelland's own performance of the song – and then to his own updated version. It comes early, but feels like it could be the climax in this show which soon takes off from Toronto for a Black History Month tour across the country.

Freedom Singer continues at the Streetcar Crowsnest to Feb. 11 – then tours to Regina, Calgary, Winnipeg, Halifax, Montreal and Ottawa. (projecthumanity.ca).

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