Eat, [redacted] and be merry: Prohibition the focus of dinner and music show
CBC News | Posted: July 12, 2017 3:00 PM | Last Updated: July 12, 2017
Run for the Hills playing twice a week at Clinton Hills rustic barn venue
The dinner and music show Run for the Hills, set in the prohibition era, promises a foot-stomping, hand-clapping evening of Maritime music propelled by the fiddle and lubricated with overflowing mugfuls of, er, cold tea.
Wink, wink.
"If you want anything to drink, if you want a spirit, you have to ask for cold tea," explains Shane Pendergast, one of the four performers putting on the show twice a week at Clinton Hills rustic barn venue in Clinton, P.E.I. "That's the code word."
The show is the brainchild of Shane's father, well-known Island musician Michael Pendergast.
"He kind of came up with the show and the route that we took, going with prohibition and rum-running," Shane Pendergast told CBC Radio's Mainstreet P.E.I.
Audience caught up in the illicit liquor
The Pendergasts are putting on the two-hour show on Sundays and Tuesdays throughout the summer, along with performers Olivia Roberts and Skye MacAusland.
Roberts said that, aside from enjoying the music and the food, the audience will learn a thing or two about rum-running.
"We were the last province in Canada to [continue] with prohibition, so everybody else in Canada kind of stopped prohibition in the 20s and then we didn't stop until the 40s," she said.
Said Pendergast: "Our joke is that on the Island we like to take our time and we don't rush in: we wait for Confederation and we wait for prohibition."
The show includes a variety of East Coast music, with most of the songs written by the Pendergasts.
Asked if he always wanted to play music growing up, Pendergast said: "I don't even know if I had a choice. But I always loved it. You grow up around it and it's really special, playing with your dad. Not a lot of people get to do that."
The show includes lots of crowd interaction, including getting "pulled into the story a little bit with the rum-running," Pendergast said. "In the show we're expecting a shipment of rum so we kind of get everybody involved in that story."
People interested in the show are asked to book online at clintonhills.ca
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