Digital Extra: The Station Fire

'The show must go on'

10:33 AM EST on Thursday, January 13, 2005

BY BRYAN ROURKE
Journal Staff Writer

WOONSOCKET -- Hold your breath, and your digestion.

Journal photo / Bill Murphy

David Kane plays Cyrus, and Gabby Sherba plays Grace in They Walk Among Us. The play, written by Nick O'Neill, the youngest victim of The Station nightclub fire, is about teenagers who die and become guardian angels.

Christian de Rezendes is about to begin filming. And Chris O'Neill is about to start directing. They're inside The Stadium Theatre.

But first, O'Neill has a word for all of us watching, the six of us: Quiet.

"The camera is really sensitive," O'Neill says. "If you hiccup in the lobby, it will sound like you're winning a belching contest. If you belch, God help us."

Actually, God does have a hand in this; so do guardian angels.

That's what Dave Kane says. He's the father of the late Nick O'Neill, who at 18 was the youngest of the 100 victims of The Station nightclub fire on Feb. 20, 2003. He's also the organizer of this production, turning Nick O'Neill's play, They Walk Among Us, into a film for community access cable TV.

"The show must go on," Kane says. "It goes on for Nicky."

Kane is crying as he speaks.

The North Providence man's pain will probably never go away. Five words always bring it back: the show must go on.

"That's the last thing Nicky said to me," Kane says. "Then he closed the door. That was it."

In Kane's mind, it's the day before the disaster. He's giving his son -- an actor, comedian, playwright, singer and songwriter -- a ride. He's also giving him a hard time.

Shrine, Nick O'Neill's band, is supposed to open at The Station for Great White, the band whose pyrotechnics ignited the fire that burned the club down. Nick and his friends aren't getting paid much.

"I told him it's show business," Kane says. "They should get more money."

Nick nods, acknowledges his father's remark, and leaves him with words that will last his lifetime.

"His whole existence and his passing was so moving," Kane says.

Exactly a year after Nick O'Neill's death, his art brings him back. His family had found a play that Nick wrote when he was 16, They Walk Among Us.

It's about teenagers who die and become guardian angels.

Nick O'Neill wrote the play to comfort a family after the death of their young daughter. Now it comforts his family and friends.

Last year, on the first anniversary of The Station fire, They Walk Among Us premiered at The Stadium Theatre. Nick's brother, Chris O'Neill of Cambridge, Mass., directed the production. His half brother, David Kane, 23, of New York, performed in it, as did his father and his former girlfriend, Gabby Sherba, 16, of Pawtucket.

More than 800 attended.

So everyone's back by popular demand. Schedules conflicted for Feb. 20. But in that show-must-go-on spirit, Kane comes up with an idea: Film it.

"We shot the play last year with one camera in the theater," Kane says. "It looks like someone's bar mitzvah. It doesn't look good."

Kane's the big picture guy. He leaves it to his son Chris O'Neill, who has a master's degree in theater from Emerson College, and de Rezendes, a professional filmmaker with CDR Pictures in Slatersville, to fine tune the image.

"We were thinking of filming the play straight through on stage and making it a PBS kind of thing," O'Neill says. "Now we want to treat it as a film."

Journal photo / Bill Murphy

They Walk Among Us is directed by Chris O'Neill, right, Nick O'Neill's brother. The film will be shown on Feb. 20 at The Stadium Theatre in Woonsocket and on community cable channels.

There will be close-ups, pans and cuts, and eight scenes altogether in this 70-minute production, which took four days to film, last Thursday through Sunday. It will be shown Feb. 20 at The Stadium Theatre and on community cable channels.

"It's a film about actors coming together to put on Nicky's play," O'Neill says. "They are coming together to do this for Nicky."

There will be shots of the actors in their dressing rooms, and the technicians at their light boards.

"It's clear we're in a theater," O'Neill says. "It's not that we're cheap and this is the best scenery we could afford."

The film will follow a short film titled 41. It's a reference to Nick O'Neill's favorite number, and how it surfaced so many times for his family and friends in the year following his death.

"It doesn't ask people to accept the supernatural or angels," de Rezendes says. "But to skeptics it does test the role of coincidence."

They Walk Among Us begins with the song "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." There's a Dorothy-like protagonist, a male. He's lost his direction in life and is looking for guidance. Along come three angels, each with different attributes: one with wisdom; one with empathy; another with strength.

Essentially they're the triumvirate of Oz, the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion, offering brains, heart and courage.

"Nick inserted a lot of references to the Wizard of Oz in his script," O'Neill says. "In a lot of ways the story and the characters are parallel."

One of the first characters Nick O'Neill played in his acting career was the Scarecrow in a production at the Woonsocket Middle School.

"He was obsessed with that character," Chris O'Neill says. "In a sense, he wanted to go back home. For him, it meant a return to a childhood innocence."

They Walk Among Us will be performed at 7 p.m. Feb. 20 in The Stadium Theatre, 28 Monument Square, Woonsocket. Tickets are $10. Proceeds go to the Nick O'Neill -- Encore Repertory Scholarship Fund. For reservations, call (401) 762-4545.

The production can also be seen at 8 p.m. Feb. 20 in Rhode Island on Cox Cable Channel 70, and in the Fall River area on ComCast Channel 95. The airing time on ComCast has not been determined.