Bohemian Embassy
The Bohemian Embassy was a coffeehouse and cultural venue in Toronto, Canada, that opened in June 1960 and operated continually in different sites and formats until the early 1990s. Comedian and actor Don Cullen was associated with the establishment throughout its existence. Various aspects of culture were showcased, including jazz and folk music, poetry and theatre. The venue hosted performances by artists such as Milton Acorn, Margaret Atwood, sean o huigan, Sylvia Tyson, Gwendolyn MacEwen, David Essig, Martin Bronstein, Michael Boncoeur and Paul K. Willis. The legacy of the venue was examined in Bravo!'s 2010 documentary Behind the Bohemian Embassy. The "Bohemian Embassy" name has been appropriated by a condominium building in the Queen Street West area of Toronto, and a new wave rock group.
Origins and St. Nicholas Street, 1960–1966
The venture began when some junior CBC employees sought an alternative to the Celebrity Club, a gathering place across the street from the broadcaster's production centre on Jarvis Street. Five each put up one hundred dollars: Don Cullen, David Harriman, Ted Morris, Peter Oomen, and Steven Thomas Quance. Another, "Larry," had offered to match any contributions, but pulled out when his ideas for the venue did not match the plans for a cultural salon that Cullen proposed.The partners rented a third-floor loft, in the 1907 William Wilson Livery Storage Building, at 7 St. Nicholas Street, a laneway running north of Wellesley Street and one short block west of Yonge Street. It was near the University of Toronto and on the edge of Toronto's bohemian enclave and art district, the Gerrard Street Village. The name, the Bohemian Embassy, had previously been given a flat that three young writers, Harriman, Warren Wilson, and Michael John Nimchuk, occupied nearby, at 590 Yonge. The venue walls were whitewashed, and the floor painted dark red, and the club was first equipped with two large coffee percolators, later leasing a Gaggia espresso machine, reputedly one of the first in Toronto. Membership cost twenty-five cents, and admission one dollar, and within one year the Bohemian Embassy reported a membership numbering about 3,000.
The Bohemian Embassy opened on June 1, 1960, the performers including folk singers Karen James and Bob Wowk, and a jazz duo, drummer Paul Neary, and reed player Brian Westwood. The two players then led groups in residence that played midnight sets on alternating Saturdays.
In its early years, the club at times attracted controversy. Less than a year after opening, it made headlines when Bell Telephone included the Bohemian Embassy in its Yellow Pages among "Consulates & Other Foreign Government Representatives". Over the first two and a half years, the Toronto police charged proprietors Cullen and Oomen four times with operating a public hall without a license. On the second occasion, in June 1961, poet John Higgins, writing for the organization, appealed to Queen Elizabeth II and Ontario premier Leslie Frost "for support, moral and otherwise... to halt what now appears obvious and unwarranted persecution", and received a letter from the premier promising to "look into this matter and see what your problem is". After three previous acquittals, on November 29, 1962, charges were dismissed when it was determined that the facilities seated fewer than 100—the police said they counted 100–115 chairs; the owners maintained that there were 75, and benches that seated "18 people if they were all fat and 24 people if they were thin"—and thus that the public-hall law did not apply.
The Bohemian Embassy quickly became a key venue for Toronto's younger poets, musicians—principally folk, jazz, and blues—alternative theatre, and satirical revues. Generally, poetry was programmed on Thursday evenings, folk music on Fridays, jazz on Saturdays, including a midnight set, and a hootenanny on Sunday nights.
Poetry readings were frequently punctuated by musical performances. A November 1960 story in the Toronto Daily Star reported, in addition to a reading by Milton Acorn, "There were readings by two other poets, John Higgins and M. E. Atwood, barely out of their teens, and a copious and very Celtic bout of folk singing by Sylvia Fricker", referring to Margaret Atwood, the future sean o huigan, and, after she married her musical collaborator in the duo Ian and Sylvia, Sylvia Tyson. That evening also included poetry from Gwendolyn MacEwen, a talk on commercialism and art by Libby Jones, a stripper then also appearing at the Lux burlesque house.
Gwendolyn MacEwen began reading her poetry at the Bohemian Embassy while she too was still a teenager. Other younger poets associated with the club included George Miller, Dennis Lee, and John Robert Colombo, who organized the poetry reading series. As well, the venue attracted poets of earlier generations, including James Reaney, Phyllis Webb, Margaret Avison, Al Purdy, and Jay Macpherson, and Raymond Souster ran poetry workshops at the club.
Folk music was a mainstay of the Bohemian Embassy, and, as a popular trend of the moment, a money-maker. Mary Jane and Winston Young had a Friday-night residency for several years. In addition to Sylvia Fricker's regular appearances, Ian and Sylvia later performed regularly, once bringing their manager-to-be Albert Grossman to hear them play a set. Gordon Lightfoot appeared when playing in a duo called the Two Tones. While still a student, Amos Garrett accompanied Embassy regular, folk singer Chick Roberts, and they soon joined with Carol Robinson, who appeared in revues at the club, and Jim McCarthy to form a band, the Dirty Shames. The Halifax Three, featuring Denny Doherty, played the club, while in Toronto adding guitarist Zal Yanovsky to the lineup. They later joined forces with Cass Elliot in a group called the Mugwumps, which led Doherty into the Mamas and the Papas and Yanovsky to the Lovin' Spoonful. A few years into the coffeehouse's life on St. Nicholas, responsibility for booking folk music was given to Mitch Podolak, later co-founder of the Winnipeg Folk Festival, and he signed Joni Mitchell to perform at the Embassy.
In addition to burgeoning, homegrown Canadian talent, the Bohemian Embassy was a Toronto venue for higher-profile performers, often booked to play Wednesdays through Sundays, among them, from the United States, the Rev. Gary Davis, Mike Seeger, Len Chandler, as well as Canadian Bonnie Dobson. One night, Bob Dylan dropped in for a poetry evening and offered to perform, but the organizer of the evening declined.
On January 10, 1963, a "happening" took place at the Bohemian Embassy. Reputedly Toronto's first, its novelty attracted CBC television, for a feature broadcast on the local program, Close-Up. A later account reported that the event had been suggested by the CBC producers, who "had heard Happenings were the thing in New York's Village and wanted one to photograph closer to home". A bathtub served as a motif for the performance, which featured "folk singing, poets reading works that were inspired by the bathtub and humorous skits", according to a Toronto Star reviewer. He found the evening "an amateur show" and "not a success", also reporting that co-proprietor Don Cullen, who arranged the program, agreed.
The Bohemian Embassy served as a venue for a wide variety of small-scale, limited-budget theatre. A November 1960 evening included a "world premiere" reading of Charles Sangster's 1856 play, Bertram and Lorenzo, while a March 1961 program included Ionesco's Jack, or the Submission. And a 1964 production of Look Back in Anger staged there cost a reported eight dollars. Other productions, by local writers, included a pair of one-act plays by John Herbert, Private Club and A Household God, scheduled to be staged in autumn 1962, and an early play by David French, A Ring for Florrie, presented in November 1963, on a bill with David, a three-scene piece by, and featuring, comedian Eve Law. About both the latter shows, influential critic Nathan Cohen wrote, "The ideas are interesting, but the plays and their production are disasters". Earlier that year, in May 1963, it had been the venue for an ill-attended chamber opera, Balloon, by composer Henry Papale and librettist and featured tenor Daniel Pociernicki, about which critic John Kraglund judged "there was much to admire". Late in 1963, in December, while also playing across town at the Crest theatre, Jackie Burroughs was scheduled to appear in a program of the Theatre of the Absurd.
A stage production to emerge from the Bohemian Embassy that had a sustained history was the Village Revue, a satirical program originated by Barrie Baldaro and Ralph Hicklin. The first edition opened February 27, 1961. It featured a cast of eleven, including Baldaro and Hicklin, fellow writers Eve Law and Wayne McLaren, and Kathy Greenwood, Eliza Creighton, Gabrielle Thibault, folk singer Klaas Van Graft, Michael Farnell, Embassy regular George Miller, and the club's co-owner Don Cullen, who was asked to join the cast because he could do a Russian accent. Scheduled to run three nights, and with two enthusiastic notices in the Toronto Daily Star, including Cohen's, the first Village Revue was held over, transferring to another coffeehouse, the House of Hambourg, late in March and running until April 8.
A second edition opened September 1, 1961, with many of the same cast members, though now including Carol Robinson and without Ralph Hicklin's participation, and was presented at Centre Stage, a proper theatrical venue, not at the coffeehouse. It met with disappointed critical reception, Wendy Michener stating that the virtues of its original makeshift production and intimate setting had been lost. The Revue returned to St. Nicholas Street for its third edition, in April 1962, with a smaller cast, playing four weeks, and earning positive notices from top-rung critics Cohen and Herbert Whittaker of the Globe and Mail. Except for a summer 1963 edition presented at the Theatre at the Dell, the upstairs lounge of the Dell Tavern, the Village Revue was largely based at the Bohemian Embassy. A 1965 edition, devised and starring only Baldaro and Cullen, opened there, and then transferred to the Colonnade Theatre in October, when the club was in its last year of operation in the St. Nicholas loft.
In 1964, Don Cullen was cast in a revival of the British satirical revue, Beyond the Fringe, and in other ventures that took him away from Toronto. He and Peter Oomen had been left to run the club, the other three original investors having departed within the first year of operation. When Cullen returned in 1965, they attracted eight new investors, who subsequently determined that the Bohemian Embassy should have a manager, and another former CBC editor, Peter Churchill, was given the job. The venue, however, continued to operate for only two more months, a victim of changing times and tastes. According to a contemporary report, "the Bohemian Embassy changed from being off-beat and far out to being square and passé. It was conceived in the Kingston Trio era; it began to fade with the dawning of the Beatles", and the growing hippie subculture supplanted the Beat ethos of the club, which closed at the St. Nicholas Street location in June 1966, six years to the day from its opening.