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| Newspaper Articles Here you will find numerous articles collected regarding Jeff and his ongoing career as an accomplished dancer, singer and actor. If you have any clippings you'd like to add, please e-mail me. Thank you to Jeff's sister for her large contribution to what you see below! |
| Taken from: The Vancouver Sun Friday, July 18, 1980 Return to Newpaper Articles Return Home |
| respond to comments on shows, per se. Maybe its difficult for them to see forests for trees, just as some musicians are stuck for the name of the composer of the piece they're playing. Even so, he's not blind. Some instinct saves him � he manages to be as natural as possible in the role, and likeable, all considered. He talks about his aver-sion to playing it up, going for the easy laugh. He likes to keep the connection with 'the realist" aspect of his character. When he sings, it's with a singer's integrity, when he dances, it's a dancer's integrity. He gives the best of himself. " 'I am doing�," he offhandedly para-phrases Bette Midler, with whom he once did a special. He's the classic local boy who made good. He came from an era at UBC that for some reason boomed with talent: Hyslop, Ouzounian, Pat Rose, Ann Mortrfee, Brent Carver, Ruth Nichol, all of whom have risen vis-ibly above the insularity of the Rockies. His dance teacher, for whom he still has nothing but the greatest respect, was Grace MacDonald. People are amazed when they discover he hasn't had 15 years of training with the National Ballet. "Grace gave me such a strong technique, I might as well have had those 15 years." His talent was so phenomenal that at 16 he was offered a contract with the Bolshoi Ballet. There were three years of training at Charlottetown where he played Gilbert BIythe in Anne of Green Gables, and then Godspell and Dames at Sea for David Lui. They helped launch him into the international touring compa-ny of A Chorus Line and the world of the TV special and Superspecial: three Burt Bacharachs, Glen Campbell, Sandy Duncan, Paul McCartney, CBC�s The Raes, Andre Gagnon, Karen Kain, Debbie Lon Kaye� After Pippin, he goes back to Toronto for his own Superspecial, which he will choreograph. Do the specials ever seem special, let alone super-special? "TV is the only medium that can link a country as large as this. When I went to a New Years party at CBC Studio 7, it was so exciting to see all these Cana-dian stars, a lovely talented group of people that you recognized.� On the other hand, �I find stage people to be more real. TV people are kind of surreal. The pressure makes them that way� take after take in bits, nothing making sense, |
| BY LLOYD DYKK LATE IN THE afternoon, Jeff Hyslop arrives at the almost vacant Granville Island Arts Club, a place he knows all too well by now. He seems a little tense, but it�s the tension peculiar to people who put everything into their work, for whom daily details might be a bit unreal, to be dealt with civilly until the big moment ar-rives, the curtain opens on the real illusion, and he finds himself on again, then exultant and expansive after it's over, then drained. And then the next day . . . The Arts Club brought him in from Toronto to take the lead in Pippin. (Had it not been for his conflicting involvement with the film Jesus Christ Superstar, he would have had a part in it when it opened in New York.) Pippin is one of the few professional full-scale musicals to have been seen in a Vancouver production � the first legitimate production of it in Canada, Hyslop feels. No script changes, full cast, costly sets, not the truncated little revue we re used to. Sunday is his one day off in the run. Six days a week he has to be Charlemagne's eldest son. Six days a week he has to sing about finding his own corner of the sky and, in the Holy Roman Empire of show business, to conquer not only the Visigoths of some formidable choreography (which he does spectacularly) but also the Huns of the shows cliches (which seem insur-mountable). I agree with Wayne Edmonstone that it is, at least, a musical that's musical, but Pippin is a musical in search of a book, a bright spotlight with nothing to il-luminate. Sentimental and cynical by turn, its origina-tors can't have believed in its Sesame Street philoso-phy. It has the late '60s-early 70s aura all over it: war is bad, do your own thing (rather, I've gotta be me), only it mouths these slogans in a canny, commercial mid-cult way sure not to offend the most bourgeois tourist from Schenectady out to see the Great White Way for the weekend. There's an awful scene of cut-rate Pirandello at the end where Pippin, his lady Catherine and son are divested of their illusions: as they hang their heads abashed, the props, lights and parts of their costumes are stripped away. I mentioned to Hyslop that while I admired the professionalism that went into Pippin, I disliked Pippin, a remark that went strangely by the board, seeming not to compute. Performers manage not to |
| playing to a camera that gives you nothing back but tension, a floor director that makes you do another take without telling you why." He's 29. It's surprising to see gray amply drizzled in his curly hair, so youthful looking from a distance. He�s sampled the world and seen how it sells things, how Universal had a $1.2 million promotion budget for two films in the can at the same time: Jesus Christ Super-star (he was lead dancer) which had no bankable stars, and The Sting, which had stars. The $1 million went to push The Sting, and the $.2 million nudged JC Superstar. JC could have been The Sting that year. His greatest experience was six months in London, with the international company of A Chorus Line. Hyslop played the character Mike (I Can Do That). �The city opened up its arms [he gestures]. There was so much buildup, we had to be greater than expectations. The critics fell all over themselves trying to say some-thing bad about the show. Then there was the glitzy aspect, 700 special guests, Peter O'Toole and just crazy people all night. For six months we just kept going higher and higher and so did the show�s suc-cess. A city reacted!" But why wouldn't it feel special? A Chorus Line is a show about success and failure in show business, stage people's sentimental self-congratulation. He was one of the five chosen from 400 auditioned in New York. (How cruelly comic it would be to flunk a Chorus Line audition.) It's not so difficult for him and his wife. Ruth Nichol, to centre themselves in friendly Toronto, roughly equi-distant in emotional terms from New York, Los Angeles and London, and within easy access of them all (once you have made it). Perhaps the popularity of Pippin (a pip in the apple) on Broadway proves the entertainment world isn't so great after all. |
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