Cowgirls get their closeup in Alberta Theatre Projects world premiere

The curtain call was perfect.

I’ve never started at the end, but when the six person cast of Cowgirl Up, a compelling new play by Anna Chatterton about an aspiring female barrel racer with a dream named Cassidy (Cara Rebecca), assembles on stage to line dance to Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman”, something ignited between the cast onstage and the sparse snow-night Saturday night crowd at the Martha Cohen Theatre.

Twain’s anthem of female empowerment was the perfect note to end the night that featured a story about one woman struggling to feel her own power as she chases her dream alongside her faithful horse Starlight (Darcy Gerhart), and having the cast line dance created a perfect Calgary theatre moment - the kind of moment I was craving for the first two hours of a story that almost, kind of delivers, but not really.

Then, walking to the City Hall parking lot, crossing the Plus 15, where Calgary theatre audiences always speak their truth, I overheard the guy behind me go, “The Shania Twain song was the best part.”

Well, don’t take it from two guys.

The fact is, part of the payoff provided by the curtain call was due to all the theatrical goodwill Chatterton, in a female-powered collaboration with director Christine Brubaker, dramaturge Meg Braem and choreographer Tania Alvarado, built throughout  Cowgirl Up, which was originally scheduled to premiere at Alberta Theatre Projects in 2020, before it got tossed off its horse by the pandemic.

There’s a trio of cowgirl goddesses (Karen Johnson-Diamond, Rebbekah Ogden and Katelyn Morishita) who pioneered the early days of women in rodeo but are now long gone and quite forgotten, until they decide to return to earth to help mould Cassidy into a champion barrel racer.

Cast members of Cowgirl Up at Alberta Theatre Projects. Photo by Benjamin Laird. Set & Lighting Design by Narda McCarroll, Costume Design by Cathleen Sbrizzi

The trio offer to coach Cassidy, who is broke, down on her luck and just about ready to chuck in her saddle and go back to the farm where she used to train at daybreak with her Gram, but the goddesses dispense enough encouragement to convince her to take it on the road through the southern Alberta rodeo circuit, with the hope of qualifying for the Canadian Rodeo Championships.

The biggest theatrical conceit of Cowgirl Up is having Gerhart as a horse playing a major part in all of this. Alvarado’s choreography of a rodeo horse is pure theatre - and delightful. (And hilarious, later in the show, when Richard Lee Hsi, who mainly plays the play-by-play announcer, takes a turn as a horse who appears to be hopped up on a barrel full of Red Bull).

Every athlete who dreams of becoming a champion has a white whale they’ve got to overcome, and Cassidy’s is Lisa Lockhart, a perpetual winner she can’t imagine ever getting the best of.

The storytelling choice Chatterton and her talented team of collaborators make - to the story's detriment - is to leave Lisa Lockhart offstage, where we just hear about her from time to time.

Cowgirl Up playwright Anna Chatterton (Photo courtesy Alberta Theatre Projects)

As every Stampede Wrestling fan knows only too well, how can you become a hero without a heel on hand to hit over the head with a folded chair?

Instead of having a flesh-and-bones antagonist to root against, playwright Chatterton opts for Cassidy’s obstacle being her own sense of herself - which turns Cowgirl Up into a western-flavoured self-help story that struggles at times to find its theatrical mojo.

All of that self-introspection is compounded by the presence of the three goddesses, all of whom are pretty charming - Karen Johnson-Diamond is a hoot as usual -  but are basically on leave from the afterlife, wandering around the living like a trio of inflation-indexed pensioners trying to find a constructive way to fill their day. There's nothing at stake at all for them - in the fuzzily defined world of Cowgirl Up, they're free to return to their Skybox in the Sky with no consequences whatsover,  whether Cassidy becomes a champion barrel racer or not.

Despite its sometimes flagging dramatic stakes, Cowgirl Up still draws you in.  Rebecca's Cassidy feels real and homegrown and worth rooting for. When she hits the cabaret and trades shots with a cowboy played by Tsi, who is terrific here, there's tons of mojo and moxy.

And Starlight deserves her own solo show!

Cowgirl Up feels a little like a bookend to Glory, the 2018 musical ATP presented about a woman’s hockey team, and why not? It feels as if the stories of the women of the rodeo world could be a cool place to visit and it feels like Calgary theatre is the right place to take the lead on it.

It’s still finding its feet, but there was something satisfying about a story that has pit stops at all the small town Alberta rodeos and where ‘Calgary Stampede’ is the holy grail every rodeo rider dreams of competing at.

Just put the curtain call first.