Holy Spirit Ukrainian Catholic Seminary
Father Edward Danylo Evanko
OTTAWA – True artists spend years, if not their entire lives, finding the right note or hitting the right mark as part of a rigorous process of examination and discovery of themselves and the world around them. Starting out as an actor and singer, Ed Evanko embarked on such a journey, and found that rare combination of professional success and personal fulfillment in a multifaceted career that encompassed stage, screen and recordings, and which culminated in his ultimate role as a member of the clergy.
Born in Winnipeg on October 19, 1938, and ordained a Ukrainian Catholic priest there in 2005, the Rev. Edward Danylo Evanko died in his hometown on November 18 after struggling with the aftereffects of a debilitating stroke he had suffered two years ago.
“He was an extremely likeable man,” recalled the Rev. Michael Winn, rector of the Holy Spirit Ukrainian Catholic Seminary in Edmonton, Alberta. “He tried to portray a joyful spirit. That is my lasting image of him.”
Fathers Winn and Evanko lived in residence at the seminary from 2003 to 2005 when it was located in Ottawa and both men were pursuing master’s degrees in theology at the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute for Eastern Christian Studies, which was also located in Ottawa at the time and has since relocated to Toronto.
While at Holy Spirit, the two grad students would meet for supper on weekdays, watch “Jeopardy” on TV and, when prompted, Father Evanko would entertain his dinner-mates with some of the tricks of the trade from his past as an actor.
Andrew Sikorsky
Ed Evanko on the TV show “Winnipeg Today” in the 1980s.
“He could cry at the drop of a hat,” remembers the Rev. Winn, who previously served as chancellor of the Archeparchy of Winnipeg. “In less than 10 seconds, tears would be running down his face, which would also turn red. We were all flabbergasted by it.”
He said that Father Evanko told his fellow seminarians that he learned to cry on cue by summoning “something in his life which was very sad. I don’t know what it was, but it was something of significance to him.”
A week before the young Edward’s 13th birthday, his Ukrainian-born mother, Justyna Dmytryk, died. His father, Danylo Evanko, who had also immigrated to Canada from western Ukraine, remarried a woman by the name of Doris Tataryn, whose two daughters joined Edward and his two sisters in the newly configured family. But the future priest never quite recovered from the childhood loss of his mother until he began his graduate studies at the Sheptytsky Institute.
He began researching the concept of “lype” (pronounced lee-pay), the Greek word for “excessive sadness” and one of the “eight evil thoughts” or sins identified by the fourth century theologian Evagrios.
“It was kind of a catharsis for me and gave me a new understanding of what death is, as not an ending, but the beginning of eternal life,” Father Evanko said in a 2005 interview with The Ukrainian Weekly.
For his master’s thesis, he chose to write about the Byzantine-Slav funeral liturgy and the “facilitation of therapeutic Christian grieving,” with a not-surprising focus on singing.
“If it’s done well with an eye and ear to aesthetics and true prayerfulness, it can have a galvanic effect where you leave changed and somewhat transformed as a result,” explained the Rev. Evanko, whose thesis built on an earlier paper he wrote titled “Transforming the Toxic Seeds of Excessive Mourning into a Harvest of Peace and Joy.”
His own transformation from secular to clerical life never lost a musical connection. Songs appear in “Holodomor: Murder by Starvation,” a grim account of the Stalin-led genocidal famine against Ukrainians written by the Rev. Evanko.
But without music as the canvas and a powerful tenor voice as the brush, the life portrait of Ed Evanko, as performing artist, would not likely have been framed in as gilded fashion as it was.
Trained at England’s renowned Bristol Old Vic theater school in the early 1960s, he went on to appear in over 200 musicals in Canada, Japan and the United States, most notably on Broadway in several productions, including “The Music Man,” “A Little Night Music” and his Theatre World Award-winning debut in 1969, “The Canterbury Tales” with Sandy Duncan.
In the United Kingdom, Mr. Evanko also belonged to Benjamin Britten’s English Opera Company and the Welsh National Opera, and was a member of the BBC Singers. In Canada, he hosted his own national weekly TV series, “The Ed Evanko Show,” on Canada’s national public broadcasting network, the CBC, in 1967.
Mr. Evanko also recorded Broadway cast albums for the record labels Capitol and RCA, a pop album for Decca and two albums featuring Ukrainian songs.
A handsome, dashing figure, he also did Shakespeare (“Richard II” and “King Lear”) at Canada’s prestigious Stratford Festival, and appeared in popular television series (“Chicago Hope,” “3rd Rock from the Sun”) and movies, such as “Double Jeopardy,” and had a recurring role in the TV soap opera “Ryan’s Hope.”
Among Father Evanko’s friends were Oscar-nominated actress Ann Blyth and Juliette Cavazzi, the Winnipeg-born daughter of Polish-Ukrainian immigrants whose maiden name was Sysak and who hosted her own CBC-TV variety series, “The Juliette Show.”
But from the stars of the entertainment world, he was arguably closest to Joan Karasevich, who, like Father Evanko, was raised in Winnipeg’s multicultural North End.
He was “more than a brother to me,” said Ms. Karasevich, a year Father Evanko’s senior who now lives in Dallas. “We had a good, warm relationship on a personal level and a professional level.”
The two first appeared on stage in a University of Manitoba glee club production of “Wish You Were Here” in 1958. (Mr. Evanko graduated with an undergraduate degree in English literature from the university; Ms. Karasevich obtained bachelor’s degrees in arts and pedagogy.) The pair last collaborated on a stage production of “Love Letters” as a fund-raiser for the Holy Family Home, where Father Evanko would eventually reside, at the Manitoba Theater Center (MTC) in Winnipeg in 1997.
However, they stayed in touch and had frequent visits together over the years in Vancouver, Los Angeles and Salt Spring Island, located off the coast of British Columbia, where artists go for inspiration and to which Father Evanko retreated following his retirement from the priesthood in June 2013.
Holy Spirit Ukrainian Catholic Seminary
Ed Evanko among seminarians at Carol Festival in Holy Spirit Ukrainian Catholic Seminary, Ottawa, 2004.
“He had a lovely five-level condo that was made almost all of wood – and he used to say that he didn’t need to go to the gym because he would always walk up and down the stairs,” recalled Ms. Karasevich. “He seemed very happy there – he looked handsome and healthy.”
She said that in the spring of 2016, Father Evanko moved back to Winnipeg; later that year in July, Ms. Karasevich met him for lunch during her visit to the city. He told her he was busy working on his one-man plays, which in addition to “Holodomor” included “Blessed Nykyta: Bishop and Martyr” to coincide with the centennial of Nykyta Budka’s appointment as the first Ukrainian Catholic bishop in Canada in 1912 and first Eastern Catholic bishop with jurisdiction in North America.
Father Evanko presented the plays around the world, including in Ukraine, while serving as pastor of parishes in Manitoba and later in British Columbia, after he requested a transfer from the Archeparchy of Winnipeg to the Eparchy of New Westminster.
Bishop Ken Nowakowski, the eparch for Ukrainian Catholics in British Columbia and the Yukon northern territory, told The Ukrainian Weekly that one of his happiest memories of “Father Ed” was when the Holy See requested his permission to have the Rev. Evanko travel to the Vatican and stage his performance of “Damien” to coincide with the canonization of Father Damien, the Belgian Roman Catholic priest and missionary to the lepers of Hawaii whose life and work is chronicled in the one-man play written by the late American playwright Aldyth Morris.
However on October 21, 2016, he was scheduled to travel to Los Angeles to perform one of his shows, but never appeared. A friend in Winnipeg checked on Father Evanko that day at his home. He had suffered a massive stroke that left him partially paralyzed.
Ms. Karasevich last saw her friend this past August at Holy Family Home, a long-term care residence owned and operated by the Ukrainian Catholic Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate in Winnipeg, where Father Evanko spent his final months.
“Physically, he looked terrific, and I asked him if he would like me to sing for him, and he said what I thought was ‘wonderful,’ ” she recalled. “He was one of those talented people who came from immigrant stock and accomplished so much in his life – we should all be so lucky.”
Ms. Karasevich, who attended Mr. Evanko’s ordination to the priesthood at Blessed Virgin Mary Ukrainian Catholic Church in Winnipeg, where he was baptized, received his first Holy Communion, served as an altar boy and where his December 1 funeral was held, believes, as she did back then, that he pursued the holy orders as a way to “come home” to the country and Church in which he was raised.
Still, becoming a clergyman at the age of 66 following a more than 40-year career in show business was a dramatic departure from the norm and even left some of his new colleagues in the Church star-struck.
“He’s the closest thing to a superstar someone like me will ever get to know,” said the Rev. Winn. “But he was a humble man. Never once did I hear him boasting about his accomplishments to anybody. He knew his own talent.”
Although Father Evanko’s vocation to the priesthood was “unusual” given his age and his background, “he had a wonderful heart that he allowed others to walk through, and that’s a very good sign of a man who could be a priest,” offered Father Winn.
Bishop Ken, who was seminary rector at Holy Spirit in Ottawa when Mr. Evanko arrived in 2003 after spending a year at St. Josaphat Seminary in Washington, said “he was somewhat older than the average seminarian and, thanks to a rich life and many talents as a professional singer and actor, he enriched our seminary community.”
In 2005, Mr. Evanko told The Ukrainian Weekly that his showbiz past helped prepare him for life as a seminarian.
“As an actor, you’re constantly having to assess yourself because you’re the raw material for the parts you play and you can’t allow some personality trait of yours to go unexamined,” he explained, noting that as a seminarian, he “felt like the rich young man in the Gospel who’s told to get rid of everything.”
It was, as Ms. Karasevich explained, Father Evanko’s “way of returning to his roots.”
It truly was, as Mr. Evanko said in the interview published in The Weekly in 2005, when he recalled appearing at MTC 17 years earlier in the role of a priest in “Tsymbaly,” a story by Vancouver playwright and mathematician Ted Galay (who died in Vancouver on February 28) about a fictional Ukrainian settlement in rural Manitoba.
“When the vestments arrived for the play, I recognized them,” explained Mr. Evanko, his voice lowering to a hush for dramatic effect. “They were from BVM.”