Elliott hits the mark with Gateway cabaret show

N.B. BLR gives readers a Quicky version that features three sections : From the footlights, Acting pin spots & Who gonna like. Enthusiasts with time who want more back-story & dialogue quotations & production details as well as ticket specifics can read the entire review in the Wordy version that follows.

Quicky Version

From the footlights : One-person shows are a challenge for actors doing someone else's material and making it honest and true, such as Mark Hellman channeling Pete Seeger that BLR recently reviewed. Doubly hard when the monologue is your own. About people you've met in your life and the result is some A-ha! incidents, some of which are karmic payback moments, others more life-changing, even epiphany, moments. Over the past seven years local Vancouver singer / Actor Beverley Elliott stitched together a diary, some 270 minutes of memories, some personal, others from her 30+ years on stage and in film. "Yikes!" said director (and best friend) Kerry Sandomirsky, "we gotta get real here." Together they did two things at Sandomirsky's insistence : cut the stories down to just ten or so, and added 1/2 dozen songs that Elliott wrote to underscore her tales. And then boiled this mulligatawny stew down to just 80 minutes. Did it work? Well, crowds raved and it won Best of the Fringe 2014 when it premiered there. And they're buzzing about it in Richmond all over again. 

Acting pin-spots : As Gateway artistic director Jovanni Sy notes : "I've always thought that cabaret artists (along with stand up comics) are the bravest of performers. There's something so vulnerable about the intimate nature of cabaret." And intimate Elliott is. She jokes both ruefully & mirthfully about her lifelong struggle with extra poundage. A close friend's post-partum suicide in Australia rocks her world for years. She befriends East Hastings hustlers and learns humility from a sex trade worker. Zigging-&-zagging across the stage, bouncing off its floor and bounding up again, Elliott has great flexibility and acrobatics for her age and biggerish size. But it's her voice that commands the most : reminds me of a cross between locals Jane Mortifee and Shari Ulrich. Her stage style, however, is a mirror image of Jann Arden whose live CD with the VSO where she jokes and kibbitzes with the orchestra and the audience seems the exact model Elliott follows here. She's exuberant, funny, engaging, touching and a songstress dead easy to listen to.

Who gonna like : The Saturday matinee crowd was made up mostly of "junior seniors" like myself. Primarily women, but a dozen or so men too. Elliott's stories seem designed for precisely this bunch, though Gen X's who've had career and marriage and identity and body struggles along the way will surely relate, too. As an unabashed fan of live theatre, I, of course, never tire of people who throw heart, body and soul into their stage work. Given its local flavour and focus, meanwhile, ...didn't see that coming might not play all that well in high-tech Seattle, say. But looking for a short break via laughter and song and a single mom's unselfconscious stories with lots of local slant? Beverley Elliott pulls off a performance that's given "lustily and with good cheer" as singer Matty Prior says it should be. G2G for cabaret fans for sure!

Wordy Version

Elliott hits the mark with Gateway cabaret show

From the footlights : One-person shows are a challenge for actors doing someone else's material and making it honest and true, such as Mark Hellman channeling Pete Seeger that BLR recently reviewed. Doubly hard when the monologue is your own. About people you've met in your life and the result is some A-ha! incidents, some of which are karmic "payback" moments, others more life-changing, even epiphany, moments.  Over the past seven years local Vancouver singer / actor Beverley Elliott stitched together a diary, some 270 minutes of memories, some personal, others from her 30+ years on stage and in film. "Yikes!" said director (and best friend) Kerry Sandomirsky, "we gotta get real here." Together they did two things at Sandomirsky's insistence : cut the stories down to just ten or so and added 1/2 dozen songs that Elliott wrote to underscore her tales. And then boiled this mulligatawney stew down to just 80 minutes. Did it work? Well, crowds raved and it won Best of the Fringe 2014 when it premiered there. And they're buzzing about it in Richmond all over again.

What the show brings to the stage : Set in Gateway Theatre's intimate Studio B cabaret theatre -- 15 pub tables + a couple of bleacher rows up top -- this is a cabaret show with no proscenium. Elliott breaks the plane to interact with patrons, even snake-dances through the crowd in one plucky number. She gives us snippets of her life begun on a Perth County farm in ON, but the story really starts when a hippie family takes her to see The Guess Who. The bright lights of the city would attract her evermore : "My Presbyterian alarm bells were going off, I just wanted to go home and watch Carole Burnett, but now I knew that there's a life out there beyond these Bibles and barns!"

From then in the 70's through the past three decades since she moved out to Vancouver for good is the arc of the show. Each story relates a meaningful moment when she learned a life truth, for better or worse, that zinged her psyche. A single mom never married, this is Elliott's memoire, I'm guessing, for her daughter Sally now 20-something. In describing her life, her stories, Elliott wrote in the program : "These events become the stories we share at the kitchen table, around the campfire or late at night with a friend. We tell them over and over as they make us laugh, and they make us cry. They remind us that we are indeed not alone, that there is a connective force that allows us to see ourselves through new eyes."

Lots of reference to her serial coffee-dates via a slew of singles internet sites, some 67 dates in all : "My luck, looking for the lonely and the damaged at the food court at Brentwood Mall," she laments, starting with Gary "who smells like cigarettes and the Salvation Army" and who's been sober, oh, some seven days. In her song "You Ass" she berates a blind date only to learn she's gone to the wrong restaurant, and turns out she's the ass. (After every crummy coffee date she does both retail- and food-therapy to fend off the blues. Until she finally kills her profile from all the sites and hopes Mr. Right will finally just happen.)

Probably the two most hilarious riffs were her rendition of a hot yoga class where she was belittled and bullied by the bitchy prima donna coach, followed by a priceless New Year's Eve singing gig at an early-90's gay bar in Vancouver when she managed to miss the stroke of midnight by a full five minutes. Funniest song of the show is "Mad At Myself" where she pines, tongue in cheek, "I hope to reach that place of bliss some day, but not today, no way...!"

Acting pin-spots : As Gateway artistic director Jovanni Sy notes : "I've always thought that cabaret artists (along with stand up comics) are the bravest of performers. There's something so vulnerable about the intimate nature of cabaret." And intimate Elliott is. She jokes both ruefully & mirthfully about her lifelong struggle with extra poundage. A close friend's post-partum suicide in Australia rocks her world for years. She befriends East Hastings hustlers and learns humility from a sex trade worker. Zigging-&-zagging across the stage, bouncing off its floor and bounding up again, Elliott has great flexibility and acrobatics for her age and biggerish size. But it's her voice that commands the most : reminds me of a cross between locals Jane Mortifee and Shari Ulrich. Her stage style, however, is a mirror image of Jann Arden whose live CD with the VSO where she jokes and kibbitzes with the orchestra and the audience seems the exact model Elliott follows here. She's exuberant, funny, engaging, touching and a songstress dead easy to listen to.

Who gonna like : The Saturday matinee crowd was made up mostly of "junior seniors" like myself. Primarily women, but a dozen or so men too. Elliott's stories seem designed for precisely this bunch, though Gen X's who've had career and marriage and identity and body struggles all along the way will surely relate, too. As an unabashed fan of live theatre, I, of course, never tire of people who throw heart, body and soul into their stage work. Given its local flavour and focus, meanwhile, ...didn't see that coming might not play all that well in high-tech Seattle, say. But looking for a short break via laughter and song and a single mom's unselfconscious stories with lots of local slant? Beverley Elliott pulls off a performance that's given "lustily and with good cheer" as singer Matty Prior says it should be. G2G for cabaret fans for sure!

Particulars : Original songs & stories for the script "...didn't see that coming"  by Beverley Elliott.  Production by HappyGoodThings in collaboration with the Gateway Theatre (Richmond).  80 minutes' duration with no intermission.  On through November 21st at the Gateway Studio B @ 6500 Gilbert Road, Richmond.  Tickets and schedules via gatewaytheatre.com or by phoning 604.270.1812.

Production : Director Kerry Sandomirsky.  Musical Director/Pianist Bill Costin.  Lighting Designer Adrian Muir.  Stage Manager Collette Brown.  Technical Consultant Beverley Siver.

Performer & Writer :  Beverley Elliott.

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