Performing Arts Lodges provides affordable housing to theatre artists.

Step into the foyer of Performing Arts Lodges (PAL) Vancouver on Coal Harbour’s Cardero Street, and, in under a minute, you’re likely to be swept up in animated conversation with one of the building’s 119 residents about film, theatre, visual arts, or music. A place to age quietly, this is not.

Opened in 2006, PAL Vancouver was created to provide affordable housing for creative professionals who have worked—or still work—in the performing arts, with priority given to seniors over 55 and people with disabilities. (Of the 99 one-bedroom suites in the building, 80 percent are subsidized, and the remaining 20 percent are rented at 13 percent below market rate.) It’s not your average retirement home.

“It’s the funniest place in the world to live,” says actor and codirector Sean Allan, chuckling, in conversation with the Straight in the building’s cozy library. Allan, whose recent acting credits include the role of Beverly Weston in the Arts Club Theatre Company’s August: Osage County, has lived at PAL for four years. “It’s just like you’d imagine it is,” he continues, enthusiastically. “It’s like being on a national tour in a huge bus.”

It’s a bus that never stops rolling: the fully equipped 120-seat studio theatre on the building’s eighth floor regularly hosts performances by residents and supporters, with the annual Christmas benefit show—produced by Allan with PAL resident and former Arts Club administrative director Camilla Ross—being the greatest draw. This year, they’re putting on a new concert version of Dylan Thomas’s classic A Child’s Christmas in Wales, using an adaptation created by the Irish Repertory Theatre company in New York City.

“It’s usually done as a solo performance by someone with a very lovely speaking voice,” explains Allan, who will appear in the production. “What the Irish Rep did with it, wonderfully, is totally deconstruct it: take it apart and shuffle the pieces and add Christmas carols in amongst it. So it’s like a musical, but it’s like a concert.”

There will be actors up to age 85 in this show, notes actor and PAL board member Deanne Henry, who insists they are “solid, solid performers at 85. The thing is, you don’t lose it,” she continues. “These people carry within them this body of work. It just makes me want to weep when I think that people pass them on the street and have no idea that they’re walking by someone who starred at Stratford, someone who was very big in England, in the West End—someone that you went to see, that you paid big money to go and see and be thrilled by. And now, they’re here. But that talent is still there. It still lives and it wants and needs to get out.”

It’s no exaggeration, says Allan, to say that PAL has saved lives. “People have come here off the streets,” he relates. “We have had a couple of people that were in very dangerous situations living in cars, living in very precarious situations. Because what happens in the performing arts is you work a lot on contract, so there’s very little opportunity to have, like, pension plans and that kind of stuff. Some people, when they reach the golden age, find themselves in real trouble. So this is an incredible safe haven.”

Henry, not one to mince words, calls it, simply, “a bloody miracle”.

A Child’s Christmas in Wales in Concert runs from next Thursday (December 8) to December 18 at the PAL Vancouver Studio Theatre.