MUSICAL THEATRE: FEATURE INTERVIEW
Chameroy for Christmas
14 Dec'10

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency

We’ve had the obligatory dusting of snow, boxes of clementines are stacked in every store, tree vendors are doing a brisk business, and Dan Chameroy is about to start cutting up on stage. It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, Toronto.

This year, Chameroy, who spends his summers quite happily these days on the stages of the Stratford Festival, isn’t doing the over-the-top Dame drag in Ross Petty’s Christmas panto as he has for the past two seasons — at least, not in any live sort of way. (He makes a brief but memorable video appearance as a “favour to my friend Ross,” he explains.) But on the live front, he’s shortened his skirts to tunic level to reprise his performance as the vainglorious and gloriously vain Captain Miles Gloriosus in the Mirvish presentation of the Stratford Festival’s A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM, opening Saturday at the Canon Theatre.

It’s not that he sees ‘Christmas as a comedic romp, although “I’m making a habit of it,” he admits, looking back on what has become his annual comic Christmas turn on the Toronto stage, “And I’m happy people keep asking me to do it.” What Toronto audiences may not know, however — or may not remember, considering he got his start in Toronto performing quite seriously in Les Miz — is that Chameroy’s career is not all funny games. Indeed, in more than a decade on and off at the Stratford Festival, with an occasional side trip to the Shaw, he’s racked up a list of credits that includes dramatic stints in A WINTER'S TALE, AS YOU LIKE IT, THE MAGIC FIRE and TIMON OF ATHENS, among others.

Throw in Chameroy’s facility for musical theatre, amply demonstrated in everything from BEAUTY AND THE BEAST to OKLAHOMA! and you’ve got some sense of the breadth and depth of his talent. But Chameroy isn’t merely showing off. “The goal has been to have longevity in the business,” the Edmonton-born and raised actor explains. “I’m not a crazy guy 24/7, but I do enjoy that stuff, and the dramatic stuff sort of grounds me. I like to keep the audience guessing and I like the challenge of switching things up.”

And he’s got no intention of switching off. For Chameroy, variety is not merely the spice of life, it’s also a pretty good work-out, regardless of the demands made on him — musical, comedic or dramatic. “I think it’s all the same muscle,” he reflects. “Technically, there’s a difference between singing a song and standing giving a monologue, but that is the only difference. I think the goal is to be able to bring as much depth to a play as you do a musical.”

As for focusing on any one style — deciding what he wants to be when he grows up, if you will — he’s not interested. “I wouldn’t be able to ‘grow up,’” the 40-year-old actor insists. “I wouldn’t want to make a choice. They all have such great things to offer me as an actor. It would be a bummer not to be able to do them all.” It might make things a little more normal at home in Oakville, one suspects, where Chameroy lives with his wife of 14 years, actress Christine Donato, and their beloved daughter Olivia, now four. “(She) is the greatest gift in the world,” Chameroy says of Olivia. “She keeps me grounded.”

But he admits to a bit of confusion since she started seeing her father on stage. “My daughter is trying to figure out if I’m a woman or a Roman soldier,” he says, recalling a phone conversation after she’d seen him on stage in the panto. “She was asking if I was putting my lipstick on. But she understands that I’m an actor,” he concludes.

Which means she probably understands, as well, that life with dear old Dad is never going to be dull.