Joe Shoctor is a bona-fide member of the Canadian Establishment.
His accomplishments are too numerous to elucidate. The Citadel Theatre is but one of his accomplishments.
No greater chronicle of the man could be given than that written in
Peter Newman's, "The Canadian Establishment" about Joe.
Joseph Shoctor. One of the few members of the Canadian Establishment to entertain the troops in the Second World War (as a youthful variety star), Joe Shoctor has wanted to be in show business since he was a six-year-old chanter participating in the blessing of the Hanukkah candles. After he graduated in law from the University of Alberta, but before he was admitted to the bar, he tested his dreams in Hollywood. "I managed to get an interview with the casting director of 20th Century Fox," he recalls, "and I was given exactly fifteen minutes. I stayed for more than an hour, and when it was all over, he said, "Look, if you were tall, lean, and handsome like Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck, or people like that, okay. But you're short and stocky. You're more of a John Garfield or Jimmy Cagney type, and we just don't have that much room for character actors. But if you like, go to the Pasadena Playhouse, and we'll put you in a showcase production. We'll come out and look at you. If you're okay, we'll give you a shot at it. I stayed there for two months, discussed it with friends, looked around and saw how the young people were doing at the time. I didn't have the guts to lead that kind of life and decided to come back and get admitted to the bar. But I was determined that someday I would go into theatre on my terms."
He eventually opened his own law firm, made a profit of $30 Million in land deals, and started to co-produce a series of Broadway and off-broadway palys, including Nicol Williamson's outstanding staging of Hamlet. In the fall of 1965, he was listening to an open line radio program when a caller demanded why, if Joe Shoctor was so interested in theatre, didn't he start one in Edmonton? "It just so happened that I had been looking at the old Salvation Army Citadel across the street from my office. I used to walk by this thing every day and wonder what would happen to it. It was empty, so I phoned an agent, and we went over and had a look. I saw it had a sloping roof and a platform at one end. I bought it, and that's how the Citadel Theatre got started."
Shoctor had financed his university training by bringing in big bands and other acts to Edmonton and later directed amateur productions of Guys and Dolls, A Streetcar named Desire, and The Music Man. In the original Citadel, he put on a new staging of Ibsen's An Enemey of the People and continues to direct and produce plays in the new Citadel Theatre, opened in 1976, with mixed critical results.
He travels the world with his wife (the former Kayala Wine of Saskatoon), drives
a twelve cyclinder Jaguar, has a living room art gallery that includes two Picasso's, a Chagall, A Renoir, and a Dufy. He has cast hinself in the role of Edmonton's gravel-voiced cultural benefactor with lots of strings to pull. Shoctor can be forgiven for appearing a bit boastful. Only his close friends know it, but the site of the Citadel is where his father, a Russian-born pedlar, had his original chicken stand and sold his salvage. "At night" Joe reminisces, "he used to cut the rubber heeld off the shoes he'd gathered in the daytime, put a hundred together in a sack, and sell them."
Edmontonians appreciate Shoctor's contribution, but no one has ever accused him of being a humble angel of the arts. He runs the Citadel (where the main auditorium is named the Shoctor Theatre) like a branch of his law firm. "To get rid of me, " he says, "they're going to have to hack me out of there."