For a long-lost Port Stanley dance hall’s centennial, Paul Regan and Brett McCaig’s world premiere play will turn St. Thomas’s Princess Avenue Playhouse into the Stork Club – and its sold-out audience into the dancers.
Paul Regan’s father has a couple of stories about the Stork Club and its 13,000 square foot dance floor, back in its heyday.
He regularly rode his bicycle from St. Thomas to Port Stanley to get there because it was the place to be. He met his future wife there — and in a close second, jazz legend Louis Armstrong, who gave him an autograph and a memento that he still cherishes. And when the legendary Port Stanley dance hall was anywhere near capacity, he recalls how a visit to the bathroom required planning and patience: he’d “just start dancing … because you had no choice but to dance your way to the bathroom.”
Brett McCaig’s parents also went to the club. And like almost everyone else in the area who’s of a certain age, they have their own Stork Club stories. And this is the point of the play the two old friends have written to mark the centennial of the club’s creation in 1926. It’s why, Regan notes, the play is called ‘A’ Stork Club Story, not ‘the’ Stork Club Story.”
The Elgin Theatre Guild’s world premiere of the show opens November 6 at St. Thomas’s Princess Avenue Playhouse — and, perhaps not a surprise, demand is so high that every seat is already spoken for. So think of this as one more Stork Club story … told with fondness and respect, the way the regulars tell theirs.
Down the boardwalk
The London and Port Stanley Railway opened its lakeside Pavilion on July 29, 1926, and more than 6,500 people turned up that first night. The L&PS Pavilion was billed as Canada’s largest dance hall, where massive acts like Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Guy Lombardo all played. In the early 1950s, it was re-named the Stork Club, after the legendary New York City venue. After a period of slow decline, fire took it back in January, 1979.
Regan and McCaig met as teenagers on a Port Stanley stage. “We were unicorns,” Regan says: rare boys in theatre, in a town and at a time when, McCaig adds, “You had to pretend you were not artistic.” Decades later (during which they co-created Rob Ford the Musical), they found a little book about the club while lunching at iconic Port Stanley snackbar Mackie’s. The Stork Club’s looming centennial set them writing. “It’s a story that’s almost so close we didn’t see it,” Regan marvels. “And as soon as we started working on it,” McCaig adds, “everyone went, ‘Yes, of course we have to go see it!’”
There were fifty-odd years of club life that they could have mined for their story … so why set the show in 1955? “The answer literally is Elvis Presley,” Regan smiles. “I think of the Stork Club at a certain point as the last great dance hall in North America. It was like the Galapagos Islands: you’ve got these big bands and great talents, with fewer and fewer places to play. You’ve got amplification, so you didn’t need big bands anymore. With rock and roll coming in, you had smaller bands. And you’ve got people driving cars. The L&PS Pavillion, which became the Stork Club, was actually created by the railroad, so that someone travelling the railroad would have a destination. Now people could just drive, so you really don’t need this dance hall anymore.”
This liminal moment – when The Stork Club is fighting the tide of music history, and “you’ve got these characters that are trying to hold onto the past, and are really in love with the Stork Club” – drives the play’s 1955 plot. Bringing things full circle, McCaig notes, “these are the same kind of people who are grown up, who are the show’s audience, remembering with nostalgia how they loved the Stork Club.”
Immediately, a practical question looms. The biggest dance floor in Canada, it was “built in something like 8 weeks, right on the beach” overhanging Lake Erie, with “no real planning in terms of ecological impact,” and with “waves lapping right up against it”. How do you squeeze it into the stage of a converted 1907 church? Director Heather May, who co-directs with Heather Pegg, isn’t trying to. Instead, “we’re treating it like the audience are the attendees” who have come to the Stork Club.
With the front steps of the theatre in disrepair, everyone will enter by the accessibility ramp, “which is actually,” she smiles, “just like the boardwalk!” Once inside, it should feel uncannily familiar to anyone who danced there. “A number of images show the Stork Club ballroom, and there’s all these columns around the perimeter that have these artificial plants on them. It’s a very distinct image and feel —and the theatre happens to have very similar pillars. So we’re going to put plants on them, right? And we’re going to use similar drapery. So when you come into the lobby, you’re going to be in the Stork Club.”
Instead of putting the legendary dance hall onto the theatre stage, A Stork Club Story will put the show’s audience back onto its dance floor.
Check your coat
Onstage, it’s summer 1955. Coat-check girl Sarah Dover (Georgia Fuller) nurses college dreams while her father Francis (Kevin Pegg), who owns the Stork Club, stakes its survival on a talent contest judged by Louis Armstrong. Out of her coat rack tumbles Mitch O’Connell (Reece Rayner), a jazz-mad trumpet kid from Sudbury – to the fury of her boyfriend Rusty Boditch (Mark Currie). Imogen Ballantyne plays Sarah’s mischievous best friend Dotty; Gabe Lazenby is Mitch’s pool-hall buddy Dex.
Meanwhile, in the present day, Old Mitch (Rob Faust) and Old Sarah (Kim Ott) are clearing the attic of the house they’re being pushed to sell, when an old console radio crackles awake and the decades blur. “The idea of an attic – that’s sort of the mind of the house,” Regan says. May thinks of the 2000 film Frequency, in which a son talks to his late father over an old ham radio: “It’s so close, but you just can’t go back in time. But we still have our memories.”
The coat check winks at Betty Hutton’s hat-check girl in the 1945 film The Stork Club. It is also, improbably, something real: “there is a register that was in the coat check at the Stork Club. It survived the fire, and we have it on our set,” notes a pleased May. Lighting designer Joe Sheik even managed to unearth “original recordings of the Johnny Downs Orchestra, the club’s 1950s house band, playing … recorded at the Stork Club.” These sounds will help create the sonic landscape of A Stork Club Story.
Under the chandelier
Regan recalls how “If you had the windows open at night, one of the stories is, if there was a slow band doing an ‘In the Mood’ kind of music, you could hear the waves hitting up against the hall. There was a certain moment when it would all sync up with the music. The waves – and they had a giant chandelier that we kind of turned into a character –”
“Yes, thanks for that! Guess who’s building the chandelier?” interjects May, with a laugh. She’s not complaining – it’s simply another aspect of leading the charge to conjure this kind of magical synchronicity.
Her sense of humour is appropriate because on the page, A Stork Club Story is a very funny play. The 1955 scenes crackle with youthful Happy Days-style comedy that is broad and brisk. The 2026 scenes boast a humour that is more sly and wry, and informed by the wistful ache of a lifetime’s ups and downs. Humming under it all is a potent mixture of nostalgia and failing memory, recollection and loss — which will ring true for many locals, and speaks to the journey of aging that we each undergo.
During the play’s creation, McCaig held onto a maxim he credits to Norman Lear: “the best way to get people to laugh is to get them to cry a little bit.” He is unapologetic that the finished play is “a bit of a Trojan horse. You think it’s fun and silly. And then we just slowly sneak in the birth, the living, sickness, and death.” The show aims to be a big-hearted comedy that creeps up on you with the oldest ache there is: that you can’t go back, only remember.
May is generous in her praise for her collaborators, who created “a really, really beautiful script.” She also proudly notes with pride that she has never before had a play “where there’s no weak link in the cast.“Every single actor knows their lines. They’re coming early, they’re staying late, and they’re helping with building the set. And they’re coming to rehearsals they’re not even called for — just because they want to watch. They’re so invested.”
Many even bring family history: Ott’s father-in-law played clarinet at the Stork Club, and Currie’s grandparents travelled from London for nights out there. And per May’s own ethos, as well as the multi-generational approach of the play itself, “I’m encouraging all the actors – if they’re there to watch – to afterwards give feedback on what they see, what they would do differently, or how they would approach it. To try and maybe train the next generation of up-and-coming directors.”
Last dance
As she began work on the show, May, who admits “I have zero impulse control,” posted for local Facebook groups one simple question: “Do you remember the Stork Club in Port Stanley?”
Replies poured in: couples told stories of how they first met there, and others told stories of guys who were too cool to go in, so they’d sit outside and drink on the boardwalk. One woman, May says, “doesn’t want to come see the show because she said that the men were drunken brutes. That’s what she remembers.” Co-producer Desmond Nanassy is gathering them up to make them part of the evening. “When people come in,” May says, “they’re going to be able to see their own stories. They’re going to be up on the walls”.
That chorus, sweet and sour, is the play’s real subject: how in Regan’s words, “you can’t hold things that you fall in love with too tightly.” For his parents’ generation, A Stork Club Story is an evening of fond remembrance that says firmly: “Your time, your memory, your experience mattered, and it helped shape us.” For the rest of us, it’s a lively peek into a hidden slice of history … and a mirror in which to consider our own passage through this world.
The run closes November 15, but May for one doubts the curtain will stay down: “I don’t think this one two-week run is the end of A Stork Club Story.” Other theatres want the script, says Regan. And McCaig has a fallback: “We might just get a tent out in Port Stanley and do our own thing, you know?”
Fire took the Stork Club in 1979. It spared a coat-check register – and the stories took care of themselves. Consider this one more for the wall.
A Stork Club Story plays November 6–15, 2026 (preview November 5) at the Princess Avenue Playhouse, 40 Princess Ave., St. Thomas. The run is sold out. For more information, or to check on any changes, visit elgintheatreguild.ca.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
