Steven Larocque
Speaker Editor
COBALT – This year marks the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I and the Cobalt Classic Theatre is taking a trip back in remembrance.
Canadian Corps WWI in Story and Song will be presented Friday, November 2, at the Classic.
Produced and written by David Wight, the show is a fundraiser for the Bunker Military Museum. It starts at 7:30 p.m.
“The show is a history of the Canadian Corps in World War I,” said Wight in a telephone interview.
“We start in 1914 and we give a narrative of what happened, interesting events, interesting stories, some of the officers and some of the techniques that are actually pioneered and used by the Canadians and make a difference in the war,” he said.
“The narrator is about half the show and the other half of the show is music, some of it World War I songs, some of it specific songs about the events that take place in World War I,” he said.
“The music’s all done by local musicians,” he said, with tunes like Smile and Over There sung by The Overtones.
Wight said there are about 15 people involved in the production which will last a little over two hours with an intermission in the middle.
Wight presented a show last year at The Classic which centred on the Passchendaele battle.
“We had a wonderful response as to emails and comments about the shows,” said Wight. “We didn’t have quite as big an audience as we would have liked, but I think one of the things is that people don’t really understand or know an awful lot about World War I and so they’re not sure what it is I guess.”
He recently staged a “slightly different” version of the November 2 show in Gananoque featuring his son and daughter performing the songs.
“It went over really well,” said Wight.
The Canadian Corps show is sure to please music fans and history buffs, it has “a little bit for everybody,” he noted.
“I throw in a little bit of local history on the Algonquin 159 Battalion. World War I is a big part of the history of our area, even the fact a third of the miners sign up and go and the influence of Northern Ontario is pretty strong in the Canadian Corps.”
The last hundred days of WWI were probably, said Wight, “the most influence that Canada has ever had on the world stage and everybody’s forgotten that.”
Tickets are available at Chat Noir, The Temiskaming Speaker and at the Bunker Military Museum.