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Seana-Lee Wood

article by Karen Mills, photos by Ann Baggley

Singer, musician, actor and dancer Seana-Lee Wood has been busy. She recently played the raucous Diamond Tooth Gertie in Dawson City, Yukon, was a chorus nun in The Sound of Music in Toronto, and sang many nights away on cruise liners. Recently, the seasoned performer also appeared nude as a Calendar Girl.

Seana-Lee completed three back-to-back plays over the summer – two in Vancouver and one in London, Ontario. The play Calendar Girls at London’s Grand Theatre gave her the chance to play a character completely different from the roles she normally receives – the strong, sexy, high-heeled, high-status female roles. The play depicts the true story of a group of middle-aged Yorkshire women wanting to raise money for leukemia research (Helen Mirren did a 2003 movie version of the story).  Seana-Lee plays Cora, a church organist, “suppressed by the church and her father and her upbringing, a single mother who doesn’t have a lot of money.” 

“I could not have done this [appearing nude] ten years ago,” says Seana-Lee. “It’s fun and it’s titillating and it made us laugh – a LOT! I don’t have the perfect body [but] it’s a real sense of freedom that I didn’t know I’d ever have in my career, body-wise. I came up to musical theatre through the dance world. I was always SO critical of my body because of perfectionism as a dancer.” As the actresses pose for a group photo in the play, two gigantic, round reflector shields are whisked away. “The audience sees the little crack, my naked back, and I’m holding my boobs so you don’t see anything, and I put one hand on the piano … Everyone is strategically hidden by some kind of prop.” Then ‘Miss July’ responds, “Whuuh!  This is what you get honey!”

Seana-Lee has also done a lot of work on the West coast. In the spring of 2012 she played Florence the maid in High Society at the Arts Club Theatre in Vancouver. Unfortunately the play didn’t sell well, possibly because “the audience doesn’t like the characters!” Her second show was a two-month run of Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story at the same theatre.  Seana-Lee played the role of Vi Petty, the piano-playing wife of Holly’s first manager Norm. “It’s this amazing success story. We had standing ovations every night. In the summer, Vancouver is a very difficult place to sell tickets because if the weather’s nice people won’t go to the theatre. They’ll stay out on the beach until ten at night.”

More and more opportunities have opened up for Seana-Lee to combine her acting and musical talents. However, “as I’m getting to my mature years, it gets harder to get work 'on land'. For women, roles are very rarely in the age between 45 and 55.  It’s like a no-man’s land for women – a no-woman's land.” 

Her first cruise ship contract was in the 1980s. “They want the young, sprightly girls in the little white shorts” for the cruise staff, “so I wasn’t actually hired as a singer when I first got on,” she remembers. “I would be up at 5 a.m. handing towels to people by 6, saying, ‘Have a nice day on the beach!’.  I’d do that for four hours. Then I’d be called for a racket ball game, then a pool volleyball game, and so on. Then at midnight I’d have to be in the disco leading the conga line, then sleep for a few hours if I could. That first ship was a refitted war ship, so the doors were all raised. So on our very first day we did a whole song and dance about how to ‘Lift your foot!  So you don’t trip! Lift your foot!’”.  Zombie-like, she only lasted six weeks out of that three-month contract, vowing NEVER AGAIN!  “But hey, eight contracts later!” she’s still doing it.  “They expected you to go 24/7 with no days off.  But you’re not cooking, you’re not cleaning, you’re not shopping, ever!”

From the bottom of that cruise ship entertainment pyramid, Seana-Lee has almost reached the pinnacle of headline entertainer. “In Tahiti I got to swim with the dolphins and stingrays, do snorkeling and be on the beach all day, then go on board and play piano for tea time, then do a few sets at night. And I got to sing cabaret with the band, which is what the headliners do.”  But, “I need to refine my act. When I’m not playing a character on stage, I find it a little dull. You need to heighten life in order to make it interesting for a whole hour. So I’m trying to create a character that’s close to me, but not quite me. So it’ll be a little more fun!” She believes, “it’s the people who stop growing that stop working … Life isn’t about finding a niche and JUST sticking with it. This business forces me to change and I think that’s one of its joys”.

“My favourite thing to do is comedy cabaret. There are some hilarious songs that were written for a show and then discarded. Or they were written for cabarets.” Seana-Lee’s father was a heavy-duty supporter of the arts, and sent his daughter to piano and singing lessons. “Opera singing. He wanted me to be a serious artist. And then when I was about 11 he brought home the movie That’s Entertainment with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. That was the first time I went, ‘I want to do THAT!’ I liked the fun, the energy, everything. And I THRIVED in the dance studio that my father enrolled me in, except that I was chubby. That’s when I discovered how much I LOVED musical theatre and did NOT like opera.”

She and her husband returned to Vancouver in December so that Jim could pursue a music composition project and Seana-Lee could join her friends in the three-part female a cappella group Noel to do Christmas carolling in shopping malls. “It pays extremely well, and we dress up in Victorian dresses. They use me a lot because I can sing all three parts – melody, second soprano and alto.”

In spring 2013, Seana-Lee will be playing Golda in Fiddler on the Roof in Kamloops. When she then returns to Stratford, she’s toying with the idea of starting an unusual community choir. All the songs would be learned by rote, by simply listening to an MP3 recording. Seana-Lee got her degree in Music Theory at the University of Toronto, so the idea of a non-reading choir challenges her training. But lately she’s been thinking that “maybe there’s a JOY in music that you lose if you have to do the HARD WORK of learning how to read music”. People have lost having fun with music, she believes. “What it means overall is that EVERYONE – moms, dads, every single human being, if they want to sing, they could sing.”

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