- In Tune Conference: Creating the Great Canadian Musical, Granville Island various venues through June 28. For more information visit touchstonetheatre.com/productions/in-tune-conference/.
JOHN Candy, that icon of good-natured Canadian comedy, padded toward her, placing his hands on her shoulders.
"We're doing a sequel and you're coming with me!" Candy proclaimed.
After years of singing six nights a week, taking any acting job that came along and poking her head above the poverty line like a plastic carnival mole venturing upwards only to be whacked again, Beverley Elliott had made it.
She'd been flown to Los Angeles, Calif., to reshoot the ending of Who's Harry Crumb? The 1989 comedy was intended to be a TriStar franchise with Candy playing his version of a gumshoe and Elliott as his sidekick.
"Unfortunately, the movie didn't do well enough to merit a sequel," Elliott says. "It's one of those many times in a career where you think, 'Oh, this is it, this is where everything's going to break open. And then you realize, after 30 years being in the business it never really breaks open, you just keep plugging along."
Best known for her recurring role as Granny on the reinvented fairy tale Once Upon a Time, Elliott is set to take the stage June 23 at the Arts Club Theatre for a celebration of Canadian musicals as part of Touchstone Theatre's In Tune Conference.
Two weeks before her performance at the Arts Club, Elliott is still trying to memorize "A Day with Julia" from the Norm Foster/Leslie Arden murder mystery comedy The Last Resort.
"I'm happily going to be a part of it, but I'm more at home singing Carole King songs," she says. "I'm learning the song for the show, it has like a zillion words."
The song is about the singer's desire to punch her prim and proper sister in the face. The sentiment is far removed from a childhood in Listowel, Ont., where the young songstress performed acoustic experiments by singing Sunday school songs into the chasms beneath stairwells.
"I just imagined myself singing in front of throngs of people," she says. "I thought, 'Well, this is normal. . . . As I got older I discovered, 'Oh, it's not normal.'"
On the Listowel half-acre, normal meant digging potatoes out of the family garden and staying away from the arts as a career.
"We were farmers . . . so it was more like, 'Just do what your sisters did,'" she recalls.
Elliott's evolution as a performer began after moving to Vancouver in her early 20s.
"Up until that point the only time I'd been in front of an audience was when I was with my friends in college. We'd have a few too many drinks and they'd push me on stage."
"When I got to Vancouver I did sing a lot in piano lounges in Vancouver and gay bars. And that's when I started finding my personality," she says, her voice dissolving into peals of laughter. "Because anything goes."
It was the pre-AIDS days of the early 1980s.
"It felt like anything was possible," Elliott says. "I think it was so freeing to finally stand on a stage and go, 'Oh my god, this is what I've always wanted to do.'"
The agenda was to have fun and Elliott discovered the performances were about the audience as much as the performer.
"You really connect to a crowd the more revealing and honest you are. I just found out that I was funny," she says.
She found work as an actress quickly, netting a role as Jackson Davies's love interest on The Beachcombers.
"I lucked out that I got an agent, even though he didn't have teeth," she explains. "And there was a rumour that you had to cash your cheque pretty quick because he would go to the race track."
In nearly 30 years on stages, big screens and small screens, Elliott reckons she's played zero doctors and only one low-rent lawyer.
"Tons of waitresses. Lots of hooker with a heart of gold when I was younger," she says.
She spent six weeks playing Faith in the Clint Eastwood western Unforgiven, although she's erroneously listed on the Internet Movie Database as playing Silky.
What distinguishes many of Elliott's roles is a twist of humour, a personality trait that seems to have helped her maintain her sanity in a business filled with uncertainty and rejection.
"Is it ever discouraging? Oh god yes," she says, discussing the travails of show business.
"Keeping the wolves away from the door is the greater part of the work."
Asked if she's ever had a nightmare audition, Elliott laughs knowingly.
"I had one last week," she says, describing her attempt to wrap her tongue around the medical jargon required to play a coroner.
"Some parts, they just don't fit," she says. In those times spent searching for a role that does fit, Elliott does charity work as a singer and emcee.
"I do a lot of stuff for free and it gives me the illusion that I'm working and it's also my way to give back without reaching into my pocket. . . .
It keeps me creatively busy and alive."
"Enjoy the moment," Elliott advises. "Whatever's happening, enjoy it, 'cause tomorrow you'll be looking for your next job."
