Gail McCance

Gail McCance was born on December 18, 1924 in North Vancouver A set designer on Broadway, a production designer for the movies, a veteran of 90 Theatre Under The Stars (TUTS) productions and an original founder of the Vancouver Opera Association, the Edgemont Village resident has a lifetime of memories behind him. He was 12 when he assisted his father, Jack McCance, in building a set for the 1936 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the cricket pitch at Stanley Park’s Brockton Point. The production was a Silver Jubilee celebration. To create a forest from a playing field, McCance and his father chopped 50- and 60-foot cedar trees from a vacant lot in North Van and planted them in the turf. “We made huge screens covered with chicken wire and stuffed them with cedar bows to create the look of formal English hedges.” Father and son trucked the timber across the old Second Narrows crossing. To transport them across a hitch in the road, the logs had to be lowered over the side of the bridge and carried across quite aways. “Now you’d get six months for that,” recalled McCance with a chuckle. Needless to say, their reforestation venture would not be repeated today. McCance had many such stories of his years behind the scenes, from his early days at New York’s Metropolitan Opera where he toiled in his 20s, to his years with TUTS and the Vancouver Festival and, later, with the Vancouver Opera Association. “I founded the VOA for the simple reason that friends I knew were going to start an opera. They were really nice but they had no business acumen and they didn’t sing very well,” he says simply. But his contributions to the city’s performing community can’t be underestimated. He passed away June 16, 2009