The (Post) Mistress

Show Info

Due to COVID-19 and ongoing provincial and national health orders, we have moved to filmed productions for the Spring 2021 Season. We will be broadcasting The (Post) Mistress from May 11 – 16, 2021 through the Belfry ticket site, https://tickets.belfry.bc.ca. 

“The (Post) Mistress is about love, love letters and love of life.” – Tomson Highway

Back when life was simple – if life was ever simple – people wrote letters. In the small town of Lovely, Ontario, every letter passes through the hands of postmistress Marie-Louise Painchaud.

Cheeky and cheerful, Marie-Louise delights in living vicariously through the stories shared in letters mailed from all over the world. 

Featuring piano and saxophone, the musical stylings evoke these faraway places – samba, bossa nova, tango, Dixieland and Berlin Cabaret rap. 

Uplifting, funny and poignant, this one-woman musical by Tomson Highway reminds us that in life, you should never mail it in.

Tomson Highway is a Cree writer and pianist/songwriter from Northern Manitoba. Among many others, his best-known works are the plays The Rez Sisters (Belfry 2014), and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, and the best-selling novel, Kiss of the Fur Queen. 

WHY I CHOSE THIS PLAY

Any piece of writing from the pen of Tomson Highway is of interest. Highway’s The Rez Sisters was a hit of such proportions that it effectively moved Indigenous theatre into the mainstream. When David Mirvish produced Highway’s next play, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, on the stage of Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre, Indigenous writing moved from the mainstream to the mainstage.

Tomson Highway’s writing is so full of exuberance and wicked humour that it cuts across cultural boundaries. The Rez Sisters is always a hit—wherever it is produced—as it was when it opened the Belfry’s 2014-2015 Season. Those same qualities are in ample evidence in his musical The (Post) Mistress.

An accomplished pianist, Highway amazingly wrote the script, the music and the lyrics for this piece.  He has written songs in a wide variety of styles, and filled this musical with enormous heart.  It is a love story about love stories.  It is a portrait of a life, told through tales of other people’s lives.

With Tomson Highway’s writing and Krystle Pederson’s performance, this is a musical tour de force that delights and tugs at our heartstrings.  – Michael Shamata

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