When producer Peter Peroff decided to mount Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap at his tiny Belmont Street Theatre in 1976, he was pretty sure he had a hit on his hands. After all, the production had already played to sold-out houses the previous year in a larger venue, the former Colonnade Theatre. Forced to find new quarters for his Toronto Truck Theatre, Mr. Peroff rented the 160-seat Belmont (a former Pentecostal church) and added The Mousetrap to his subscription season for a run of six weeks. The show proved so popular that, the following August, Mr. Peroff staged it again. That run never ended.
Only now, more than 26 years and 9,500 performances later -- the longest-running show in Canadian history -- is the production of Ms. Christie's little whodunit about to close: It will be given its last Toronto performance Jan. 18.
When the show started in 1977, tickets sold for $3.50; today, they are $26. Ian Morfitt, who played the role of Giles for nine months in 1990, fresh out of theatre school, recalls that the actors occasionally tried to inject freshness into the script by throwing in words from other films and movies and television. "We'd have a Star Trek night or a Jabberwocky night and just slip in the odd word," Mr. Morfitt says. "The audience wouldn't necessarily know. It was just for our own amusement, to keep it interesting."
He also remembers that the actress who played the part of Mrs. Boyle -- murdered at the end of Act 1 -- never stayed around for curtain calls, but took the subway home.
For Mr. Peroff, a dapper, well-dressed man of 55, the final curtain will be a bittersweet moment. Sweet, because after all these years, it will free him to travel and enjoy his two favourite avocations -- fine wines (he's a certified sommelier and his Rosedale wine cellar boasts more than 3,000 bottles) and antique Oriental rugs ("I probably have the best collection in Canada. I'm maniacal"). But somewhat bitter, because The Mousetrap has been an enormous commercial and popular success, "a confident thing you could rely on year after year."
"I had no fear in those days," Mr. Peroff says, trying to explain the elements that went into The Mousetra p's longevity. He's sitting in one of the bleached pine pews that were part of the original church. "We worked 20 hours a day. And it was a time when baby boomers had the interest, the money and a taste for culture."
During Toronto Truck's peak in the early 1980s, Mr. Peroff was staging shows at three venues, including the Belmont, the 520-seat Bayview Playhouse and the 800-seat Bathurst Street Theatre, and employed 93 people.
It also helped that Ms. Christie's will expressly and wisely stipulated that no movie version of the play could be produced until six months after its closing in London. There, the show is now in its 51st year and is still going strong -- in large part because there is no competition from a cinematic adaptation on tape or DVD.
Mr. Peroff's production licence benefited from the same injunction. But what he could not ultimately contend with was a steady decline in attendance that began last year with the buildup to the Iraq war and worsened with last spring's SARS epidemic and the mad-cow scare. As tourism from the United States evaporated and Torontonians cocooned, his box office revenues dropped 40 per cent.
Another, smaller factor was the steep increase in royalties being demanded by the play's British copyright owners.
Through the years, the Toronto production has been seen by more than a million people. For many young people, The Mousetrap was their first theatrical experience. About 190 actors have played the roles of Mollie and Giles Ralston, Christopher Wren, Major Metcalf and the other, largely two-dimensional characters. Dozens got their professional start in theatre in the show, later joining the ensembles of the Stratford and Shaw festivals and other local troupes.
Mr. Peroff, who is of Macedonian descent, took a master's of arts at the University of Toronto's drama centre in the early 1970s and moved immediately into production. His focus from the beginning was commercial theatre, popular plays like Charley's Aunt , The Importance of Being Earnest and The Royal Hunt of the Sun.
Spurning government grants, he says, perhaps made him hungrier. He bought the old Bayview Playhouse for $240,000 and later sold it for $3-million. He could have bought the Belmont for $160,000 in the mid-1970s but lacked the necessary funds. In 1985, he paid $400,000 for it. "Having the real estate was an important thing," he says, "It gave us stability."
He may continue to mount plays in the Belmont, but he says his family and friends "have been admonishing me" that it's time to leave. He would like to see it remain a working theatre, but won't insist on it. And in truth, with its tiny, cramped stage and serious lack of wing space (actors still have to go outside and around the building to enter from the other side), it would need substantial renovation to be made suitable for most productions.
Mr. Peroff plans to hold a party after the final performance, probably in the theatre's basement lounge, inviting all former cast and production members. Afterward, he hopes to visit Iran, the centre of fine rug making, and Prague.
Although he is deeply appreciative of the backing the show has received from Torontonians through the years ("that support is vital if you want to keep your arts institutions"), Mr. Peroff says the audience has changed. "Plays now move more quickly into film or television and once available in that format, they'd rather stay home. But you also have to support the live events. Otherwise, they just won't get staged."
Sadly, The Mousetrap's longest-serving cast member, Garnet Truax (he played Major Metcalf for more than 19 years and 4,756 consecutive performances, a world record for an actor in a single role) died Dec. 22. He left the show in 1996.
"We somehow thought he saw the article in the newspaper that the show was going to close and it gave him a heart attack," Mr. Peroff says. "It's a terrible thing to laugh about, but it crossed everyone's mind."