Journeying through Havelock on any given day, it’s difficult to fathom the sleepy village east of Peterborough was the scene of so much excitement close to 55 years ago.

But great excitement there was indeed, as five men robbed the Toronto-Dominion Bank of more than $230,000 in cash and securities before making good their getaway. All were subsequently apprehended and arrested within a few days, and then put on trial, the result being the convictions of four (one of the five men died of a heart-related ailment during the trial).

And the stolen loot? Well, it hasn’t been found, its whereabouts a mystery that has endured and continues to fascinate. What’s not a mystery more than five decades later is 4th Line Theatre’s decision to restage The Bad Luck Bank Robbers this summer at the Winslow Farm near Millbrook.

Premiered to great acclaim and sold-out audiences last summer, the fast-paced comedy, written by Alex Poch-Goldin — he also penned 4th Line’s widely successful The Right Road To Pontypool — and directed by longtime 4th Line Theatre managing artistic director Kim Blackwell, The Bad Luck Bank Robbers all the required elements: the intense robbery as it played out on August 31, 1961; the subsequent comedic angst and bunglings of its perpetrators; the urgency of police as the search for the suspects is undertaken amid an atmosphere of local community paranoia; and the courtroom drama that brought convictions solely on the basis of circumstantial evidence — a first at the time on the Canadian judiciary landscape.

According to Blackwell, remounting the play was as close to a no-brainer as you can get. She points to the “the buzz” last summer’s inaugural run created.

“What we were hearing about (The Bad Luck) Bank Robbers is just how fun people thought it was; how much they loved the bank robbers,” Blackwell says.

“Comedy is so technically challenging. It is, in some ways, a very, very hard play to do. The bank robbery scene is almost 30 minutes long and it’s so technically specific as to where everybody is.”

With The Bad Luck Bank Robbers being staged on the heels of 4th Line’s season-opening drama The Hero of Hunter Street — which recounts the 1916 explosion and fire at the Quaker Oats factory in Peterborough — Blackwell welcomes the opportunity “to do something light,” adding, “They are such a sharp contrast to each other. If you were going to experience a season of theatre at 4th Line, this is a great season to experience.”

Reprising his portrayal of Jean Claude Lalonde (one of the robbers) is stage, film, and television actor Paul Braunstein.

“This is a heck of a story,” enthuses the Dora Award-nominated actor.

“It was not only a local story. It was also a national story. At that time, it was the largest single-day heist in Canadian history and so it was a big deal. Some people who were involved, who were at the bank (during the robbery), came to the show last year. That just really points out the immediacy of the story and how recent it is in a way. It was 1961 but for a lot of living people, they remember it happening.”

“The story we’re telling is true but the details are exaggerated,” Braunstein adds. “I have no idea how much I like that man (Lalonde) because there’s no actual record of the man’s behavior.”

That challenge aside, Braunstein admits to “a real joy” playing his role.

“You can feel a connection to the audience in a different way,” he explains.

“When you’re doing a piece of fiction that stands alone as a piece of art unto itself, it might not have any immediate resonance with the audience other than we’re all human beings and a good story told is a good story told in any form or shape. It’s really exciting to be part of something like this, where you feel there’s a real sense of ownership from the audience. For a lot of people who come, it might be their only theatre experience but they feel really connected to it.”

Noting his affinity for the 4th Line Theatre atmosphere — “I fish in that creek over there … you can’t fish at Tarragon (Theatre in Toronto)” — Braunstein draws particular satisfaction from working with the community actors among the play’s 28-member cast.

“To see people doing it (act) simply because they love it, who work hard and show up and don’t complain and end up being fantastic in the show, is an amazing reminder of why we’re doing this in the first place,” he says.

“This is my career but if you don’t have what they’re bringing to the table, then don’t even bother.”

Monica Dottor, who played dual lead roles in The Hero of Hunter Street and portrays a lovably ditzy café waitress in this play, is on same page as Braunstein, noting the chance to work with community actors “captures the magic that I felt when I was a young girl doing community theatre.”

As for the play itself, she agrees that restaging it is a smart move.

“There are still so many people who haven’t seen it and people who want to see it again,” she assesses.

“We knew it was a great, funny script that Alex had written. He really believed in it and we really believed in the possibilities of it. Kim (Blackwell) was so wonderful. She brought it all together. We had a great time doing it.”

It doesn’t hurt matters that Dottor’s husband, Ryan Hollyman, also stars in the production (he also starred as the narrator in The Hero of Hunter Street) and they’re enjoying the company of their son Arlo during their Millbrook stay. It is, as she puts it, “a family affair.”

One big change from last year’s staging is that 4th Line Theatre founder and creative director Robert Winslow isn’t involved. Last summer saw him portray one of the bank robbers. This summer, with professional actor John Tench in the fold, sees him taking very rare time off from acting to work full-time on new script development and other behind-the-scene projects. Winslow says watching another portray the role he knows so well isn’t as difficult as one might think.

“It’s difficult in your imagination — ‘Oh, how am I going to feel when I watch someone else playing the part’ — but when I stood there and watched rehearsal, I was fine with it,” Winslow says.

“There’s a different take on the character. He’ll do it his way, which has nothing to do with what I did. It’s instructive. But I don’t hang around and watch (rehearsals) too much. I don’t get in there and give my two cents on anything. One day I’ll write a play called Phantom of 4th Line and lurk in the barns and stuff.”

As for the play’s 2015 success, Winslow isn’t surprised.

“It’s local history but if you have two sides of the scale, local history on one side and comedy on the other side, I think this would tip up to the comedy .. whereas (The Hero of) Hunter Street was so much about the local story, the community history.”

“(The Bad Luck) Bank Robbers is more like what you might expect to come to see in a typical summer theatre setting, where you just want to laugh. There’s a kind of comic satiric take that Alex has in his writing that is very funny. Those are the parts that carry people through their enjoyment of the play.”

With both Braunstein and Dottor noting that 4th Line Theatre is gaining a solid reputation with actors based in Toronto and elsewhere, Winslow remains protective of maintaining what he envisioned 25 years ago and has nurtured ever since.

“I’ve got nothing against big-time actors and talent and skill, but if that turned into completely eliminating what this place is in terms of its community connection and the commitment to local stories, that would be a problem,” he says.

“Stories are our myths. That’s how we define ourselves. Our work is not so much just promoting those myths but criticizing them; under those myths that society uses to develop itself and survive.”

“4th Line has this great opportunity to tell the history and to really look at it critically,” Winslow continues. “If that’s gone, we would lose. I would probably be upset. If you’re just recreating history for the sake of pure entertainment or ‘Rah, rah, weren’t we a great bunch of people?’, well, it’s more complex; what happened versus what was said to have happened.”

“That’s a lot to try to accomplish for a theatre company whereas most (companies) are ‘let’s just get bums in seats, let’s just entertain the folks’. We’re more than that. That’s why we have the attendance, I think.”

Featuring original music composed by musical director Justin Hiscox, The Bad Luck Bank Robbers opens on August 2 and continues to August 27. Curtain is 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, with an added Monday performance on August 22.

Tickets can be purchased by phone at 705-932-4445, online at www.4thlinetheatre.on.ca or in person at the box office, 4 Tupper St. in Millbrook or at the Peterborough Museum and Archives atop Armour Hill in Peterborough.

Every Thursday, we publish live music and performance events at pubs and clubs in Peterborough and The Kawarthas based on information that venues provide to us directly or post on their website or social media channels. Here are the listings for the week of Thursday, July 21 to Wednesday, July 27.

If you’re a pub or club owner and want to be included in our weekly listings, please email our Nightlife Editor at nightlife@kawarthanow.com.

Since time immortal, high school bands have numbered a dime a dozen, delivering their raw sound to the masses in return for fleeting adolescent fame.

Rarer is a group of high school pals who stick it out, taking things to the next level well after receiving their diplomas.

Cobourg’s Ryan Hutcheson, Jed Atkinson, and Dan Farrell did the high school band thing. Working independently on lyrics set to music, Derrick Ballard was in the wings, eventually hooking up with the trio to form Gentlemen Husbands. That has since proven to be a most fortuitous union for the indie rock quartet, which headlines Peterborough Musicfest in Del Crary Park on Wednesday, July 20 at 8 p.m..

With Peterborough’s own Union City opening, the show marks the second consecutive double bill served up by the free summer concert series.

It was in 2008 that Gentlemen Husbands released its debut EP Something Along The Lines Of …, receiving rave reviews from music industry insiders in the process. Mixed and master in Los Angeles, the four-song EP brought club date invitations by the guitar case-full and more than validated the coming together which preceded it.

“We all listen to a ton of different music and aren’t afraid of blending genres or experimenting with those influences,” says Atkinson, the band’s bassist.

“At the end of the day, were just trying to write songs we would want to hear. Our mentality is that the song is the nucleus for everything and the only thing that really matters, so our job is to not get in the way of the songs and let them be what they want to be.”

That approach has clearly resulted in songs that others want to hear as well. Armed with close to 100 songs, Gentlemen Husbands hooked up with producer Gavin Brown, whose success with The Tragically Hip, Metric, and Billy Talent remains well documented. The result was the EP House of Cards, and the birth of signature tunes such as Wandering Eye and Do It In The Dark,

“I have a problem with the idea that a band can’t be liked by too many people or that anybody isn’t cool enough to listen them,” notes Ballard, the band’s lead vocalist.

Gentlemen Husbands has certainly practiced what Ballard preaches, having toured nationwide with Matthew Good as well as shared stages with the likes of The Tragically Hip, Ron Sexsmith, Arkells, and Matt Mays. The band is also remains a popular fixture on the festival circuit.

“You definitely haven’t wasted your Friday night with them,” raves Chart Attack out of Toronto. One can safely apply that assessment to a Wednesday night in The Patch.

Meanwhile, in bringing Union City to the Fred Anderson Stage, Musicfest is continuing its effort to bring homegrown acts to the mix.

Buoyed by the success of 2010 single “These Days” — it cracked the Top 100 on the American college radio charts — Matt Crowley (guitar/vocals), J. Kent Randall (keyboards/vocals), Ben Anderson (bass),and Mark Chamberlain (drums) inked a licensing deal with a number of American television networks.

The deal resulted in their music providing the backdrop for programs such as Keeping Up With The Kardashians and The Bad Girls Club.

In 2013, the band released a full-length CD, A Drop In The Ocean, online at unioncity.bandcamp.com, and is currently writing more material for an upcoming release.

“Shelter Valley” – Gentlemen Husbands

“Wandering Eye” – Gentlemen Husbands

“Love Lies Down” – Union City

Peterborough Musicfest is presenting 19 free-admission concerts during its milestone 30th anniversary season, each staged Wednesday and Saturday nights.

Overseen by general manager Tracey Randall and staff, a board of directors, and numerous volunteers, Peterborough Musicfest’s stated mission is to “provide diverse, affordable live music to enrich cultural and economic prosperity in our community.”

For more information on this concert and/or the 2016 season, visit www.ptbomusicfest.ca or phone the Peterborough Musicfest office at 705-755-1111.

The summer season is always a unique time for the Peterborough Theatre Guild. Slotted between the annual musical spectacular and the beginning of the next season, the summer season always seems to be a bit low key and the shows risk slipping just under the radar due to competition from a plethora of local events that compete in attracting tourists.

With this in mind, it’d be criminal if the Guild’s current show went unnoticed. Directed by Steve Russell, A.R. Gurney’s What I Did Last Summer is one of the finest shows performed at the Peterborough Theatre Guild during the 2015-2016 season. A charming coming-of-age dramedy that manages to capture the romance and spirit of seemingly endless summers from days gone by, What I Did Last Summer may be one of my favourite shows so far in 2016.

First staged Off-Broadway in 1983, What I Did Last Summer is to the stage what films such as Summer of ’42 and The Last Picture Show are to the cinema. Taking place during the summer of 1945, the play focuses on 14-year-old Charlie (Quin Shearer) and his family and friends at an upper-crust vacation colony on Lake Erie. With the final months of World War II as the show’s backdrop, the Germans have already surrendered but the fighting in the South Pacific rages on.

Charlie is a good kid who is at that awkward age where he’s highly impressionable. With his father away fighting, Charlie’s mother Grace (Heather Ross) brings her daughter Elsie (Bethany Heemskerk) and Charlie to the same vacation spot they’ve always gone to over the past few years in an attempt to maintain a sense of normalcy.

Charlie is reunited with summertime pals Ted (Liam Parker) and Bonny (Lily Gordon), but things are not as they were in previous years. The days of reading comic books and selling lemonade are long gone; the three kids are a mess of hormones they do not fully understand.

In an attempt to look more mature to Bonny, Charlie calls upon local bohemian Anna (Marlys Kerkman), known by the community as “the pig lady”, for a job. Considered to be an “undesirable” by the local elite, Anna takes Charlie under her wing and becomes the boy’s unlikely mentor, teaching him life lessons that he won’t find on the tennis court or at dances and parties attended by prep school snobs. However, there is an unspoken past between Charlie’s mother and “the pig lady,” and soon a tug-of-war for Charlie’s time and loyalty begins between the two women.

Does Charlie belong among the society that his mother wants him to be a part of, or will he find the answers back in the woods? Throughout the show all of the characters involved will learn and change, making the summer of 1945 the most important summer of their lives.

Out of all the shows I’ve seen at the Theatre Guild this year, few have worked their way into my heart and mind as much as What I Did Last Summer. I’ll admit I’m a sucker for coming-of-age stories, but Steve Russell has assembled a wonderful cast for this show. Only being familiar with a few of the actors in the show, I became an instant fan of those I was not so familiar with.

Throughout the show the cast, with the exception of Marlys Kerkman, break the fourth wall and address the audience directly. These small vignettes allow each of the performers to not only have a moment in the spotlight, but to connect with the audience in a unique way. The result is that a bond is created between the characters and the audience, who begins to believe in and care about them.

I can only remember seeing Quin Shearer (who plays Charlie) on stage once before, in a non-speaking role. In What I Did Last Summer, Quin has a lot more to say and it is a great pleasure to see him in a role with plenty of emotional depth. Quin is a wonderful actor, and he is perfectly cast as a young boy in that awkward age between comic books and girls. Quin gives an endearing performance and is an instant hit with the audience. I can’t wait to see more of Quin on the stage in the future and am curious to know what his next project will be.

Meanwhile, Heather Ross is wonderful as Charlie’s mother Grace. A well-meaning but flawed woman, Grace is living with the pressures of a husband away at war while trying to maintain a household for two children who don’t seem to have the same values or vision that she has. Although she often misunderstands her son and his personal needs for her own, her heartbreak over Charlie associating with the dreaded “pig woman” is only natural — but it unwittingly makes her the show’s antagonist as she tries to keep hold of her son by any means necessary. Despite this, Heather manages to endear Grace to the audience, who may not agree with her actions but can sympathize with her motives.

Grace’s foil is the eccentric bohemian Anna, played by Marlys Kerkman. The polar opposite of Charlie’s mother, Marlys manages to diferentiate herself from all the other characters in the show in every way possible. Anna symbolizes all the wonderful characters who come into someone’s life when they are at an impressionable age, influencing them in ways that will change them forever. Both wise and misguided at the same time, Anna’s influence on Charlie takes many shades of gray, but the connection between Marilyn and Quin is perhaps the most endearing pairing in the show.

With that cute “girl next door” appeal, Lily Gordon is simply adorable in the role of Bonny and embodies every summer crush any teenager has ever had. But she is much more than just the romantic interest in the show. She gives a three-dimensional performance of a girl who is still very much a little kid, even if the boys she used to pal around with are looking at her a little different. Just as Quin endeared himself to me in this show, so does Lily and I hope it won’t be long before I see her again on the stage.

Perfectly cast in the role of Ted, Liam Parker is an incredibly versatile actor who I have been following for years primarily in musical theatre. It’s great to see Liam in a role of this caliber. A year older than Charlie and Bonny, Liam’s character Ted feels a widening divide between where he is emotionally compared to the other kids. Both Charlie’s friend and his foil, Liam Parker brings a lot of depth to the character of Ted. There’s an interesting dynamic between Ted and the other characters, who were once close friends but have become separated by just growing up.

I must give a shout-out as well to Bethany Heemskerk in the role of Charlie’s sister Elsie. Throughout the show Elsie says “this play is not about me” and she’s right. It isn’t. But Bethany is a delight to watch and she plays a perfect supporting character to a show of big personalities who often compete against one another. Elsie is one of my favorite characters and is instantly relatable to anybody who was never the centre of attention. Witty, sarcastic, and with her own subtle anxieties, Bethany shines each time she steps on stage.

Beyond the story and the actors, high praise goes to the production of the show, including the simple yet multi-functional set created by Greg MacPherson and the costumes assembled by Cynthia Wardrope. I also took notice of the carefully selected music that set the mood for the show, including songs by Bing Crosby, The Andrew Sisters, and Danny Kaye. These are fantastic touches that add to the overall production of the show.

What I Did Last Summer promotional video

The only thing wrong with What I Did Last Summer is that, when the show was over, I found myself wanting more. I wasn’t finished with these characters. What happened next summer … or the summer after that?

Although you get a sense of what happens to Charlie moving forward, I found myself wanting to know what happens to Bonny and Elsie and Ted and especially Anna. This cast made me fall in love with these characters and I wasn’t ready to let go of them as I left the theatre. Is it too late for A.R. Gurney to write a sequel?

What I Did Last Summer is one of the most endearing shows I’ve seen thus far in 2016. With so many events to go to in The Kawarthas the summer, make this show one of your priorities in July.

What I Did Last Summer runs until Saturday, July 23rd at the Peterborough Theatre Guild (364 Rogers St., Peterborough). Shows start at 8 p.m. with a 2 p.m. matinee on Sunday, July 17th. Tickets are $20 for adults, $18 for seniors, and $11 for students, and can be ordered by calling the box office at 705-745-4211 or online at www.theatreguild.org.