The eight main characters of End of the Line, the new musical from Walk&Talk Theatre Company, are united under one roof, each living somewhere between the basement and the penthouse of the Watershed, a bougie apartment complex in the dammed River District of Heart City.
The three co-founders of the company itself don’t live in the same building, but Duncan Cox, Tanner Manson and Ben Townsley can trace their origins as a trio to a single street address – 400 Colony St., an outlier building on the University of Winnipeg campus that houses the misfits and dreamers of the school’s theatre department.
Ten years ago, Cox and Manson, who knew each other a bit in high school, reconnected during their first-year performance course in the building.
“Eight-thirty a.m., on a Monday,” says Cox. “What a joy.”
Then they went around the corner to Booster Juice, taking their overpriced smoothies to the front of Wesley Hall, sipping Strawberry Sunshines from the plateau of the Rock — a 25-tonne piece of granite overlooking Portage Avenue.
The next year, during a second-year acting class, Manson befriended Townsley.
“Me and my friend Montana Lehmann thought he looked nice, so we asked if he wanted to sit with us. I think a week later, I asked you to come build a cabinet in my new apartment,” Manson says.
Little did they know that those blended fruit drinks and cupboard installations would lead to the development of a theatre company that has created fringe shows about three bargemasters on the River Styx and three world leaders on a trash heap; Afterlight, a rollicking musical about a centuries-old vampire in love; The Last Garden, a floral dance musical; and now, End of the Line, a romp about eight disparate souls caught in the currents of a great urban flood fuelled by swimming pools.
From the start, Manson, Cox and Townsley — who specialize in movement, music and lyrics, and storytelling, respectively — say they shared an interest in offbeat humour, history and the contemporary mythologies of humankind.
That was well-exemplified in 2017’s King, the fringe-in-the-dump show, where the trio played Henry VIII, Nero and Napoleon Bonaparte, who each took turns sitting on the hot seat, a detached toilet surrounded by liberally strewn garbage.
That was their first show.
“I think in one of the reviews, we were called ‘a delightful fringe surprise,’” Manson says. “We would have settled for delightful.”
The collaborators enjoyed the experience so much they went back the next year, producing The Ballad of Johnny Boy, a life-in-the-rear-view story that, like End of the Line, is connected to the water.
“I have a huge affinity for the water, and sometimes I drag the rest of the team into that esthetic,” says Townsley, who says if he wasn’t working in theatre would like to be a “little bearded guy on the dock catching (crustaceans).”
With End of the Line, it was apparent that Manson and Cox were more than willing to swim at Townsley’s side. The musical, which is being co-produced by Theatre Projects Manitoba, began its development in 2018.
“We had this idea about a one-way, dead-end road,” recalls Townsley, who later abandoned the road for the call of the ocean, spurred by an interest in the story of Noah’s Ark.
He then started to work on the development of Heart City, whose flood was caused not by God but by the explosion of faulty swimming pools.
“But a place needs people,” he says. So he came up with several character sketches in the form of short stories, sending them off to Cox, who wrote 11 songs in two weeks based on that material.
“It was wild, because before that we had such a period of stagnation.. And then when we finally had something that felt important to us, it came gushing out,” Townsley says.
In the period since, Walk&Talk gained momentum with its fall 2023 production of Afterlight, starring Cox and Sharon Bajer in the first musical ever presented by Rainbow Stage at a venue other than its own in Kildonan Park. The success of that partnership, along with the company’s collaboration with TPM, helped fuel End of the Line.
Cox, Manson and Townsley each perform in the musical alongside their friends Kamal Chioua, Victoria Emilie Hill, Hera Nalam, Montana Lehmann and Jean Van Der Merwe, with a four-piece band providing live instrumentation.
Six years after the idea first bubbled up, the musical, directed by Andraea Sartison, opens Friday. The threesome hopes it goes swimmingly.
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