Over his career, composer David Rhymer, pictured in 2021, wrote cabarets, song cycles and chamber musicals that often sought to uncover hidden corners of history.Sean Dennie/One Yellow Rabbit
Calgary-based writer and composer David Rhymer never met a topic that he couldn’t put a tune to. His musical subjects included unrepentant old Nazis, Holocaust deniers, Bible-thumping eco-terrorists, Regency prostitutes, West Coast nudists, Mata Hari, William S. Burroughs, Freud and Jung.
He naturally gravitated toward the difficult, the dark and the controversial. Either on his own, or in collaboration – most frequently, with the avant-garde One Yellow Rabbit theatre company – Mr. Rhymer wrote cabarets, song cycles and chamber musicals that often sought to uncover hidden corners of history and, on more than one occasion, grabbed news headlines.
Although he began his career as a playwright, Mr. Rhymer, a self-taught pianist and composer, found music was his natural means of expression. “He had an effortless relationship with the construction of melody,” said One Yellow Rabbit’s Blake Brooker, with whom he co-wrote many shows. “They were coming into his head all the time.”
Husky, with a leonine mane of silver hair and a gleam of gentle mischief in his eyes, Mr. Rhymer was a familiar presence onstage, bent over a keyboard, playing his own scores. Offstage, he combined an ever-restless intellect with a childlike sense of wonder that never left him. OYR fondly dubbed him “the Maestro” and younger generations of theatre artists saw him as something of a legend.
“I learned a lot from David,” said singer-songwriter Kris Demeanor, Calgary’s former poet laureate, with whom he co-wrote the 2017 noir thriller Crime Does Not Pay. “Writing with him was such a weird, wonderful process. It was the best musical education I’ve ever had.”
When Mr. Rhymer was diagnosed with terminal cancer in April, a flock of his collaborators, young and old, gathered at his home on B.C.’s Salt Spring Island to play a tribute concert of his work. He died the following evening, April 30, at the age of 71.
Mr. Rhymer’s apropos surname was one he adopted mid-career. He was born David Rimmer on Aug. 4, 1953, in Karachi, Pakistan, the third son of British couple Thomas and Daphne (née Annett) Rimmer. Thomas had served with the RAF in the Second World War and met Daphne while doing a stint in Pakistan helping the newly independent country develop its air force. In 1956, the Rimmer family moved to Canada and settled in Montreal.
In a family of four boys and two girls, David was the black sheep. “He was poetic and artistic and had more of a feminine temperament than his brothers,” said Jessica Yeandle-Hignell, the second of Mr. Rhymer’s three daughters. As an adult, he was estranged from his family for many years, although he claimed his name change was simply pragmatic, to avoid confusion with another experimental artist, the Canadian filmmaker David Rimmer.
In his 20s, Mr. Rhymer began working in local theatre – first with community groups and later professionally – with his girlfriend Susan Savage. He directed and composed music, while she designed sets. The two were married in 1974. Before long, he was making an impact on Montreal’s English-language theatre scene as both a playwright and a director. The high point came in 1979 with his three-actor adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 at the Centaur Theatre, which had critics hailing him as a wunderkind and comparing him to a young Orson Welles.
Mr. Rhymer, a self-taught pianist and composer who began his career as a playwright, found music was his natural means of expression.One Yellow Rabbit
In the 1980s, Mr. Rhymer, Ms. Savage and their little daughter, Marijke, moved to Thunder Bay, lured by Magnus Theatre’s artistic director, Brian Richmond, who invited him to serve as playwright-in-residence. While there, Mr. Rhymer created another bold literary adaptation, Dracula: The Anti-Christ. He also fell in love with Kim Yeandle-Hignell, a young volunteer at the theatre, and his marriage to Ms. Savage broke up.
In his 30s and at a turning point in his life, Mr. Rhymer looked west. He and Ms. Yeandle-Hignell relocated to Calgary, where he worked a day job as a producer of television commercials and began sniffing out theatre gigs.
He arrived in the city at an opportune time. The young One Yellow Rabbit company was creating a buzz with its experimental performances and was about to develop the play that put it on the map. Mr. Rhymer cold-called the OYR office and ended up meeting with its co-artistic director, Mr. Brooker. At the time, James Keegstra, a small-town Alberta school teacher, was in the news for teaching antisemitic conspiracy theories, and an outraged Mr. Brooker was trying to craft a theatrical response.
Although the Rabbits had never done a musical, Mr. Brooker sat down with Mr. Rhymer and began knocking out songs. The result was Ilsa, Queen of the Nazi Love Camp, a wicked satirical fantasy that imagined Mr. Keegstra being schooled by two evil remnants of the Third Reich. The show, with actor-puppeteer Ronnie Burkett in drag in the title role, made its debut in 1987 and was a big hit. It would later tour across Canada, to the U.K. and Australia. It also made headlines of its own when a 1992 revival, now starring actor-dancer Denise Clarke as Ilsa, was shut down by the court during Mr. Keegstra’s hate-speech trial for fear it would prejudice the jury.
To OYR, Mr. Rhymer also brought a pet project first attempted in Montreal – a song cycle about the dancer-spy Margaretha Zelle, alias Mata Hari. It would end up having several iterations over the years. “We renovated it down to its studs about three or four times,” Mr. Brooker recalled, laughing. Its ultimate incarnation, Mata Hari in 8 Bullets, was unveiled to acclaim at the 2013 New York Musical Theatre Festival and went on to tour Europe.
Mr. Brooker said their shared lack of formal training made him and Mr. Rhymer simpatico. “Neither of us knew anything about the tradition of making musicals à la Broadway.” Mr. Rhymer did, however, have an affinity for European art song and cabaret and called his style “salon” – a stripped-down aesthetic well-suited to small theatres with limited budgets.
By the 1990s, Mr. Rhymer had split with Ms. Yeandle-Hignell and moved with a new partner, Veronica Berezansky, to Vancouver. Embracing the city’s lotus-land vibe, the couple became enthusiastic habitués of its famous clothing-optional Wreck Beach. Mr. Rhymer found it an Edenic idyll – one that was shattered when Christina Thompson, a young beer vendor, was brutally murdered there in 1993. Seeking to celebrate her spirit, he wrote the musical Wreck Beach, which, like Ilsa, would stir up trouble when it made its premiere as a Vancouver-Edmonton co-production in 2000.
After Ms. Thompson’s family got wind of the show, they angrily complained that they hadn’t been approached by its creators. The theatres – Axis in Vancouver and Northern Light in Edmonton – apologized but argued that the piece was fictional. Mr. Rhymer, however, was upset that he had caused the family distress. Marijke Rimmer said it reflected a certain naiveté in her father’s nature. “He was confused by it, he felt he’d poured his soul into honouring her.”
It didn’t stop Mr. Rhymer from venturing into dangerous territory again two years later. He was part of the collectively created cabaret An Eye for an Eye, by Calgary’s Ghost River Theatre, which focused on the violent anti-oil activism of Alberta preacher-cum-environmentalist Wiebo Ludwig. This time, things went better – Mr. Ludwig and his clan attended the show at the Edmonton Fringe, didn’t object and invited the cast to a picnic afterward. Ms. Yeandle-Hignell said her father brought her and her younger sister, Alexandra, to the picnic, where they got to meet Mr. Ludwig’s daughters.
By then back in Calgary, Mr. Rhymer became a fixture of the city’s fertile theatre scene in the new millennium, collaborating with the Old Trout and Green Fools puppet troupes as well as the by-then iconic One Yellow Rabbit. His projects ranged from the Trouts’ adaptation of Judd Palmer’s “preposterous fable” The Tooth Fairy to OYR’s hypnotic Beat homage Dream Machine, which conjured the ghosts of Naked Lunch author William S. Burroughs and his inventor pal, Brion Gysin.
With 2003′s Dream Machine, Mr. Rhymer found an ideal bandmate in classically trained violinist Jonathan Lewis, whom the Rabbits christened “the Golden Boy.” Ms. Clarke said performing with the pair was a sublime experience. “You could watch an audience absolutely spellbound as you’d be moving into a song – their music was so truly beautiful.”
Mr. Rhymer’s vast and often esoteric interests would percolate for years and eventually erupt into a musical work. His obsession with the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung led to 2007′s Why Freud Fainted, co-written with Vanessa Porteous – a lighthearted look at their male rivalry seen through a feminist lens. His passion for vintage comic books spilled forth in 2017′s Crime Does Not Pay, a much darker piece in which he and Mr. Demeanor exposed the sordid history behind a true-crime comic of the 1940s.
His last production, at OYR in 2023, was Nightingale Alley, in which he set tunes to a selection of obscure 19th-century lyrics, the so-called “flash songs” of Regency England’s sex-trade workers, and used them as a window into the early impact of the Industrial Revolution. Like many of his works, it centred on the female experience, which was part of Mr. Rhymer’s fascination with hidden histories.
In 2019, Mr. Rhymer returned to B.C., buying a house on Salt Spring Island with his latest partner, Lisa Noesgaard. Despite his chequered personal life, he remained close to his three daughters. “My dad wasn’t the most active on the parenting side,” Ms. Rimmer said, “but he was a magical father to have as a kid.” He was the kind of father who would encourage his girls to converse with the trees, or impart to them the wisdom of ancient Chinese philosophers. And they recall how he loved to take them on hours-long walk-and-talks, along Calgary’s Bow River or Vancouver’s Stanley Park Seawall – any place where he could stretch his legs and stretch his mind.
Ms. Rimmer and Ms. Yeandle-Hignell were there for his tribute concert on Salt Spring, for which he had personally planned the set list. “It was wonderful and surreal,” Ms. Yeandle-Hignell said. “At the very end, after all his songs had been sung, he came out in his silk pyjamas and said, ‘Alright, well that’s that. It’s time to go to sleep now.’”
Mr. Rhymer leaves his wife, Ms. Noesgaard; daughters, Marijke Rimmer, Jessica Yeandle-Hignell and Alexandra Yeandle-Hignell; his grandson, Noah Rimmer Savi de Tové; as well as two brothers and two sisters.
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