Elias
Kulukundis was born in London, traveled to Greece when he
was six months’ old and moved on to New York when
he was three. Although he always wanted to be a writer and
studied literature at Harvard, nevertheless he had a long
family shipping tradition to live up to. In his early twenties,
when he didn’t know which career to pursue, his mother
had a simple answer: “Do both”.
Growing up in Rye, a suburb of
New York, Elias felt the need to understand his Greek heritage
and wrote his first memoir, The
Feasts of Memory, then subtitled A Journey
to a Greek Island, at the age of twenty eight.
Elias’ next dramatic experience
of Greece was when he rescued his first wife’s father,
who had been a member of the last democratically elected
Greek government before the colonels took over in the 1960’s.
When the colonels arrested the former cabinet minister and
exiled him to the remote Aegean island of Amorgos, Elias
organized a daring small boat raid and spirited him away
to Turkey from where the prisoner could ultimately escape
to western Europe. An account of the rescue, recounted as
the culmination of Elias’s early life, is the subject
of Elias’ second and more complex memoir, A
Taste of Illusion (aka, "The Amorgos
Conspiracy").
A career in the shipping business
came next, and over thirty years after Elias wrote The
Feasts of Memory, he was building two
oil tankers in Korea and needed to do something at night
to keep his mind off work. Seeking a world where he was
the undisputed master, after struggling with builders, bankers
and managers all day, he started a play based on one of
the stories in The
Feasts of Memory. The story of the unfortunate
Doctor Nikolakis, betrothed to two women on the same day,
became the libretto for Thee Brides for Kasos.
Elias’ ties to Canada went
back to his regular attendance at the Cammac Music Center
in Quebec. In June 2002, the Cammac Anniversary Choir was
performing at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Elias knew
the director Pierre Perron, who invited him to come on a
cruise around lower Manhattan planned for after the performance.
Standing on the deck of the cruise ship, with the ghosts
of the Twin Towers looming overhead, Elias first met Mark
and Crystal Kolt.
“It was so dark, we could
hardly see the other’s faces”, Elias recalls,
“so even our conversation had an operatic quality,
since it was all about voices. When Mark Kolt said he was
a composer, I said ‘That’s interesting. I just
finished a play that I think will make a good musical’.
Mark asked what my play was about, and unlike most people
who asked that question, he really listened to the answer.
I could tell from his questions that he understood what
I was getting at.”
By the end of that summer
of 2002, Elias and Mark were collaborating on Three
Brides for Kasos. Though some might
consider them an unlikely pair to write a musical together,
they actually have a lot in common. For one thing, neither
of them is much concerned with looking over anybody’s
shoulder to get their creative ideas. “In Flin Flon
there are not many shoulders to look over,” Mark says,
“And in New York there are too many so where would
you start. We both do our own thing.
“Flin Flon is in a way
like a Greek island”, Elias responds. “It’s
in the middle of this large expanse. It doesn’t have
the sea around it, but you have to take a journey to get
there. That’s part of my tradition. You have to make
a journey to go places.”
Mark Kolt was born in 1959, in
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada He graduated from the University
of Manitoba’s Music Department in 1984 with a Bachelor
of Music degree in piano and ethnomusicology, and while
he was there he met his fellow student Crystal Klapecki,
who was to become his wife. Mark has composed and presented
original songs in French at College St.-Boniface and the
Centre Culturel Manitobain; and he won national recognition
for his work at the Festival de la Chanson Populaire de
Granby, Quebec (Canada), being one of four finalists in
1978 and the winner of the Best Song competition in 1979.
After Mark and Crystal arrived
in Flin Flon, Manitoba, they founded the Flin Flon Community
Choir, which quickly grew to over 100 voices. In 1999-2000,
the Choir presented Mark’s first original musical,
Bombertown, with a story set around the exploits of the
1957 Flin Flon Junior Bombers championship hockey team.
Mark composed the music, book and lyrics.
Mark’s next major work
of composition was the score to Three
Brides for Kasos, which sets to music
Elias Kulukundis’s libretto, exploring the misadventures
of a young doctor on the Greek Island of Kasos in the 1880’s.
In addition to writing original music, Mark incorporated
a dozen or so Greek folk melodies, which are sometimes heard
sung with the original Greek body and at other times appear
as instrumental underscoring for the play’s spoken
dialogue. In the instrumentation, Mark used many Greek and
Eastern Mediterranean instruments such as bouzouki, baglama,
Cretan lyra, laouto, oud, accordion and doumbek, which help
give the score the atmosphere and flavor of the Greek islands.
Crystal Kolt was born in 1960
and brought up in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Raised with a perfect
blend of Stompin’ Tom Connors and Frederic Chopin,
Crystal studied music at St. Mary’s Academy and later
received her Bachelor of Music degree at the University
of Manitoba. There she met Mark Kolt, and together the couple
began the study of piano-duo in New York City with Jeaneane
Dowis and soon embarked on series of musical adventures
that is still going on.
In 1990, when Mark completed
his law studies and was offered a position as City Solicitor
for the City of Flin Flon, in northern Manitoba, the couple
thought they were giving up music for a more stable way
of life. But little did they know what lay ahead of them.
Flin Flon is a strong community with a rich musical tradition,
and twenty-five years earlier, it was the home of the Flin
Flon Glee Club including the renowned tenor Jon Vickers.
Within a few weeks of their arrival, Mark and Crystal founded
the Flin Flon Community Choir, with Crystal as director
and Mark as piano-accompanist.
Since then, Crystal has directed
the Choir in numerous classical performances, including
the Schubert Mass in G and the Verdi Requiem, the Mozart
Requiem with the Saskatoon Symphony and Handel’s Messiah,
and Coronation Anthems with the Winnipeg Symphony. In addition,
Crystal has been invited to be guest conduct at workshops,
including the Manitoba Provincial Honour Choir Conference
in 2004. Under her leadership as artistic director, he Choir
has mounted several musical theatre productions including
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Titanic the
Musical, Sondheim’s Follies, as well as Mark’s
Bombertown.
In 2002, Crystal led twenty five
members of the Flin Flon Community Choir to New York’s
Carnegie Hall to sing in the CAMMAC Anniversary Chorus of
the premiere performance of Scott Manmillan’s Celtic
Mass for the Sea. There Mark and Crystal met New York author
and playwright Elias Kulukundis, and three years later,
the trio has enjoyed sold-out audiences at the premiere
performances of Three
Brides for Kasos in Flin Flon and the
stunning success of the show at the 2005 Winnipeg Fringe
Festival where the Winnipeg Free-Press dubbed Three Brides
“the surprise runner-up” in box office receipts
out of 139 shows at the Fringe. Raising a prodigious sum
of money from both private foundations and governmental
agencies, Crystal produced the show in both places, in addition
to playing both the cello and the Cretan lyra in the orchestra.
Brad McDougall (Director/Choreographer)
Brad received most of his theatrical training in Great Britain.
He studied at Trinity College of Music in London. While
in London he studied ballet, jazz and tap at the Floral
Street Studio Dance Works. Brad's West End credits include:
Chicago, Evita, HMS Pinafore, Little Me, Marilyn!, Time
and Follies. Brad has also performed at the Crucible Theatre
Sheffield, Royal Exchange Manchester, Salisbury Playhouse
and Theatre Royal Plymouth as well as several TV productions
for BBC and ITV.
The production’s Grecian
lucky charm is Nancy Ginakes, sister of Nia Vardalos, the
Winnipeg-born star writer of the big-screen hit “
My Big Fat Greek Wedding”. Nancy has supplied cultural
advice to Three Brides
for Kasos, and perhaps a bit of the
Vardalos stardust.
