Jennifer Villaverde and the creators of Stillwater School of Mosquitos bring music and whimsy to the Dream in High Park

Dinnn the mosquito is the most unexpected hero you could build a brand new all-ages musical around. And his adventures take centre stage in Stillwater School of Mosquitos, a concert for young audiences and their families, presented on August 10 – 13, 2021 at 11 am ET by The Musical Stage Company’s residency as part of Dream in High Park by Canadian Stage. This new musical-in-progress is being created by Peter Fernandes, Hailey Gillis, Qasim Khan, Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster, and Jennifer Villaverde – collectively known as The Mulligans. 

Based on the book The Mosquito Brothers by Griffin Ondaatje, the story centres on Dinnn, a little mosquito born in a big puddle in the parking lot of a movie theatre. Dinnn is the youngest of 401 siblings. The other 400 take flight immediately, but Dinnn is unable to fly. When he tries, he starts falling, and in the words of Villaverde, “the falling scares the daylights out of our little tiny hero. He doesn’t want to try it again because he is flightless. And the other mosquitoes make fun of him because he’s not ‘normal’. This, she explains, is how The Mulligans connect with this unlikely hero: “We’ve all been made to feel at times like we weren’t ‘normal’ for different, various reasons. Some of us are not tall enough, or some of us are too tall. We’ve all been there, so we really related to this little mosquito.” Add to this the universal human view of mosquitoes: “They are generally hated, right? Everyone hates them. No one wants mosquitoes at their backyard barbecue. They’re a commonly detested creature!” Given these two disadvantageous dynamics, the creators believe they can count on “instant empathy for this little creature”. 

Stillwater School for Mosquitos is a co-creation by five familiar names in Canadian theatre who are all graduates of the Soulpepper Academy (albeit in different years). In 2016, they worked together on a revival of Soulpepper’s Alligator Pie, a highly successful musical adaptation of Dennis Lee’s famed poetry collection of the same name: “After a few years, the original performers (Ins Choi, Raquel Duffy, Ken Mackenzie, Gregory Prest and Mike Ross) felt comfortable enough to hand it off to other people, and so that was the five of us.” The ensemble performed Alligator Pie at Soulpepper, before touring it to the Persephone Theatre in Saskatoon, the Vertigo Theatre in Calgary, and the Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg. They “had a blast”, despite the fact that it was a really quick tour with very little downtime – which could have been tricky. After all, “if you’re tired and overworked, and you’re traveling and flying, there is that danger or the possibility of not getting along.”

As it turned out, the group not only got along – they loved and supported one another effortlessly. So strong and immediate was their bond that right away, they were thinking, “We need to do this again; we need to find something so we can work together again… create something of our own instead of remounting someone else’s piece.” After this, the disparate pieces clicked one-by-one into place. Hailey Gillis happens to be friends with Griffin Ondaatje, who happened to see Alligator Pie. Ondaatje was inspired by its playfulness and gave the group permission to adapt his work. While teaching at Soulpepper a couple of years ago, Villaverde and Gillis thought, “Well, let’s just do it. Let’s get the gang back together and do it.” With one quick email, “everyone was game right away because it’s just so fun to play and create together.” 

From its earliest inception, the idea fired imaginations within organizations beyond the group itself. For instance, they applied to Young People’s Theatre (YPT) for funding. They didn’t get what they applied for, but YPT provided other funding to help the creators to develop their idea: “The people at YPT were so curious about our process – because our process is about playing and messing around, and making mistakes and falling on our faces, then getting back up and trying new things. Their process is more playwright-driven: someone will take the reins and just go that way.” This support was very gratifying to the group. In Villaverde’s words, “I think it’s cool that they were open to try us out. They supported us in the very first, early development of The Mosquito Brothers, which we’re now calling Stillwater School for Mosquitos. They were so generous!” 

Armed with that funding, the group embarked on what should have been “a really cool year-or-so developmental process. We were intending to mess around, play around, create stuff in person in a studio.” But COVID-19 put a stop to this. In Villaverde’s personifying description, “the pandemic just said, ‘No, that’s not happening!’ So we did everything over Zoom, and we thought, Oh, no, this is gonna be a disaster.” 

But it wasn’t. “Miraculously, it worked out, and we created our first draft of the book and music, and now we’re doing a concert!”  Also gratifying to Villaverde and the team is the backing by additional organizations who have been “really generous” – not just with financial support, but also with production support. For instance, Musical Stage has been so “over-the-top generous with this concert that it’s kind of surprising to receive.” Incredulity meets appreciation in the group’s remembered response: “Oh, wow, they really care! We get a stage manager. We get technical support. Amazing!”

As all five creators gravitate towards musicals, they saw right away that the book held opportunities for songs that would fit their individual sensibilities and collective sense of playfulness. The audience at this week’s concert will see what Villaverde describes as a “window” into their creative process, not the finished output: “We’re still very much in process, given what we have had to think about in taking Griffin’s book and adapting it into a musical”. What have the creators thought about? They have considered questions like, “What’s a musical? What do we need in it? What is a play? We talk about developing characters. We talk about setting. We talk about obstacles. We talk about when a character sings about something he or she really, really wants – but it’s impossible to get – but the desire is so great that you have to sing about it.” The audience at High Park will enjoy a substantial, satisfying taste of the creation to date – including snippets and stories and bits of the synth-pop score – but they should not expect a finished product “because we’re nowhere near that”. 

The creators will use feedback from this week’s audience to inform the next stage of their development: “We’re really curious to take in from the audience what works and what doesn’t – just musically, just with the music that we’ll be presenting.” As for the musical’s final form, there are disparate possibilities, including stage musical, audio musical or even animation. Whatever its final form, VIllaverde hopes that the work will be accessible – perhaps even free of charge – so that “everybody can see it, and there are no barriers to see our show”.

Ultimately, she and the other creators want Stillwater School of Mosquitos to be a source of happiness and wonder “because we’re tired of the other stuff. We just want to just instill a little bit of joy in everyone’s day.” And if the work – and Dinn’s struggles – invite audiences to swat a little less energetically as we reconsider the unliked as necessary parts of our ecosystem, well, all the better. 

Book tickets to Stillwater School for Mosquitos here.

© Arpita Ghosal, SesayArts Magazine, 2021