Members of Stars, Amy Millan (L), Patty McGee (back row C), Chris McCarron (back row R), Chris Seligman (bottom L), Torquil Campbell (Front C), and Evan Cranley (front R), during rehearsal at the Segal Centre in Montreal, Nov. 8, 2019.Christinne Muschi/Christinne Muschi/The Globe and
Stars singer-songwriter Amy Millan has a favourite anecdote about what the Canadian indie-pop band means to its fans. It happened years ago, not long after the release of the 2001 EP The Comeback, which contained the defiantly happy Krush, one of her first songs with the band.
“I met somebody in Toronto at a bar,” Millan recalls, “and she said, ‘Oh, you play in Stars! I have a friend who really loves your song Krush. I want you to meet her.’ And the friend came over and she said to me, ‘I don’t want to meet you! I’ve had you in my bedroom to myself. I don’t want to put a face to this song – this is mine.’ "
“I loved that,” Millan says warmly, on the phone from the home in Montreal that she shares with husband-bandmate Evan Cranley and their two children. “That song had everything to do with her and nothing to do with me. I just thought that was the best thing I could have heard.”
That is, after all, what Stars is supposed to be about. The band, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this winter with a career-retrospective album and a theatrical production – Stars: Together at Toronto’s Streetcar Crowsnest – is famous for holding up the mirror to its followers, reflecting their biggest emotions and experiences. Meanwhile, the musicians themselves remain behind the mirror, almost anonymous. As Millan puts it, they’re the opposite of rock stars.
“I dunno. I think that we’re rock stars,” responds Torquil Campbell, the band’s other singer-songwriter and its self-professed cranky contrarian. He’s speaking from Vancouver, where he lives with his wife, actress Moya O’Connell, and their 10-year-old daughter, when he isn’t playing with his Montreal-based cohorts. Then, after briefly arguing about the definition of “rock star,” he caves in with a laugh. “I agree with Amy," he says. “We called ourselves Stars as a joke, obviously. We’re not a personality band.”
That may be, but the band, personalities and all, will be in the glare of the spotlight for Stars: Together. It’s an unusual mash-up of concert and play that Stars has created in collaboration with Crow’s Theatre. Apart from the band’s music, it promises a backstage glimpse at the lives of its six members – which, along with Campbell, Cranley and Millan, include Chris McCarron, Patrick McGee and Chris Seligman – and the way they interact as a group. Or, as Campbell puts it, as a family.
The show grew out of Campbell’s previous work with Crow’s artistic director Chris Abraham. After the success of True Crime, the solo play co-created by Abraham that brought Campbell back to his acting roots, the pair were looking for another project to do together.
“I don’t remember saying to Chris, ‘Gee, I’d love to do a meta-narrative about the life of all the people I work with,’ " Campbell says. “It was more like, ‘Hey, what if we wrote a musical?’ or something. But Chris always makes you be in the thing that you’re doing.”
Abraham saw Stars’s longevity as a fascinating subject. “I was interested in long-term creative collaborations – how those work or don’t work, and the merits of toughing it out over the years,” he says during an interview at Streetcar Crowsnest, his company’s east-end Toronto venue.
To write the play, Abraham and playwright-filmmaker Zack Russell took the classic cinéma vérité – or théâtre vérité – approach, hanging around the band’s rehearsal space in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood, eavesdropping and recording conversations. The recordings formed the basis for the script, in which the band members play themselves.
Millan says the first thing Russell recorded, a conversation she had with Seligman about renting out their space to other musicians to make extra money, became a theme of the show. “It’s very much about the fact that the music industry has drastically changed since streaming services came into play,” she says. “It really takes down the curtain on what our current situation is.”
The band’s songs have often dealt with change, loss and death, and Abraham says the show finds the band grappling with its own possible demise.
“But it’s not a ‘Poor us, our industry is screwed’ kind of a show by any means,” Russell hastens to add. It also reveals the band’s shared loopy sense of humour. And they’ll treat the audience to songs that the band has seldom – or never – performed live.
Millan says they’ve avoided a “greatest hits” set list (they’ve left that for the retrospective album, the forthcoming LaGuardia) and instead picked songs that fit the show’s storyline. “They reflect who we have been in the past and who we are now,” she says. The opening number is their most recent release, Are You With Me? “The idea behind it is: Are we going to do this? Are we still together as a band? Are we going to continue?”
Many of the other songs have strong personal associations. They include two that mean a lot to Campbell: He Dreams He’s Awake from the 2010 album The Five Ghosts and the glorious title ballad of 2007’s In Our Bedroom After the War. “That was my dad’s favourite Stars song,” he says of the latter.
Campbell’s father was the classical actor Douglas Campbell, one of the founding company members of the Stratford Festival. Torquil got his acting start as a kid on his dad’s CBC series, The Great Detective, and went on to appear in everything from an Off-Broadway play with Philip Seymour Hoffman to an episode of Sex and the City, before forming Stars with Seligman in 1999.
Millan also has an acting background. An ex-Torontonian like the other Stars members, she studied drama at the Etobicoke School of the Arts and later, at Concordia University. “I was very good,” she assures, a smile in her voice, listing off roles ranging from the Greek tragic heroines Electra and Iphigenia to a pregnant teenager in a Degrassi High episode.
All the same, she admits to feeling “weird” about playing herself onstage. Or a version of herself. There are fictional aspects to the play, including, in director Abraham’s words, “fantastical hallucinatory elements.” The production also employs video and puppets. Millan says, “They are representations of the people who have been listening to the band, and all of us as young people growing up, trying to navigate through the world.”
Stars: Together will be a rare chance to see the band in an intimate setting, Crow’s 200-seat Guloien Theatre. “People are flying in from all over the world to see this show,” says Abraham, who has already extended the play’s original run dates due to demand. He calls the project a bridge-building exercise, part of his efforts to bring the concert-going crowd to the theatre.
For Stars, meanwhile, it’s a dive into the unknown – especially for the band members with no theatrical experience. “They’re jumping into it fearlessly,” Campbell says proudly. “It really makes me in love with my band.”
“This is very new territory for all of us,” Millan adds. “After 20 years, doing something that’s so different and challenging and exciting and scary is giving me the jitters in a way that I haven’t had in a long time. It’s making us all feel young.”
Stars: Together runs Nov. 26 to Dec. 15 at Streetcar Crowsnest in Toronto. (crowstheatre.com) The band’s compilation album, LaGuardia, will be released on Dec. 6.