"BOOM" is made real virtually + genuine fun!
N.B. BLR gives readers a Quicky version that features a few paragraphs that sum up my overall take on the show. Readers who want more back-story & production details can read the expanded review in the Wordy version that follows.
Quicky version
As an original BOOM-er born six short weeks after Hiroshima & Nagasaki, I am of a generation that loves to revisit its youth. Its images, its sounds, its anthropological markers (e.g. macho doctors gaily smoking Camels), its politics, its entire zeitgeist are all there for nostalgic plunder in actor / impressionist Rick Miller's original BOOM : A Multimedia Spectacle to Define a Generation.
"Spectacle" it certainly is : 25 years are crammed into a multimedia docu-drama via one man's impersonations through 115 minutes of news clips, ad snippets, rock anthem covers and home movies that are projected onto a centre tubular scrim in the middle of a raked ring-stage. Primary acting conceit finds Miller impersonating each and every voice from dozens of characters that range from Joni Mitchell to Jawaharlal Nehru to Walter Cronkite to Trudeau pere. To mimic their persona, he dons and doffs costumes and props with blithe abandon.
Notionally the story is told from three perspectives, Miller's mom Maddie from Cobourg, ON; a black Chicago bluesman draft dodger Laurence, and a WWII immigrant Rudi from Vienna. Eventually their separate tales link up as the show ends with the echo-BOOM of the Apollo 11 moon landing and David Bowie's iconic epitaph chart "Space Oddity" rounding out the show.
In media, WYSIWYG Marshall McLuhan presciently told us, and BOOM is just that. Ambitious and courageous writ large, driven by humble honest hubris, it brings to life a generation's many-told tales carried off dizzyingly by Miller and his team whose techie artistry and engineering are simply stunning.
From the footlights : As an original BOOM-er born six short weeks after Hiroshima & Nagasaki, I am of a generation that loves to revisit its youth. Its images, its sounds, its anthropological markers (e.g. macho doctors gaily smoking Camels), its politics, its entire zeitgeist are all there for nostalgic plunder in actor / impressionist Rick Miller's original BOOM : A Multimedia Spectacle to Define a Generation.
"Spectacle" it certainly is : 25 years are crammed into a multimedia docu-drama via one man's impersonations through 115 minutes of news clips, ad snippets, rock anthem covers and home movies that are projected onto a centre tubular scrim in the middle of a raked ring-stage. Primary acting conceit finds Miller impersonating each and every voice from dozens of characters that range from Joni Mitchell to Jawaharlal Nehru to Walter Cronkite to Trudeau pere. To mimic their persona, he dons and doffs costumes and props with blithe abandon.
In media, WYSIWYG McLuhan presciently told us, and BOOM is just that. Ambitious and courageous writ large, driven by humble honest hubris, it brings to life a generation's many-told tales carried off dizzyingly by Miller and his team whose techie artistry and engineering are simply stunning.
What the show brings to the stage : This is my first taste of impersonator / actor / musician / educator Rick Miller whose mash-up of The Simpsons with Shakespeare in a one-hander show called MacHomer ACT staged in 2000. MacHomer ultimately enjoyed a 17-year run that played in 175 cities at home and abroad.
To open the show, Miller, 46 this year, monologues that he set out to understand Mom and her "sheltered, small world where we were not sure what was going on". He does this by conducting extensive interviews with her and the two others. While videos of them roll, Miller impersonates their voices. Or when there's no vid to show, he acts their parts. Mom is always in a 50's woman's casual smoker's pose -- right arm up perched on the left underneath. Laurence is angular laid-back, the better to give voice to his constant ironic belly laughs. Rudi is an upright Euro, a two-legged parlour Steinway. Early on Miller hints at what we'll learn : "By becoming my parents I'll be a living, breathing time capsule," he says.
While the characters' monologues proceed, news footage and family album shots and photo-shopped images are flung fleetingly on the scrim and the ring-stage. Maps, logos, slogans, Wiki facts spelled out from each year 1945-1969 hit the eye like a cross between ticker-tape and Powerpoint. The technical artistic prowess of Projection Designer David Leclerc and Lighting Designer Bruno Matte is astonishing to witness. Their handiwork replicating Peter, Paul and Mary at the August, 1967 MLK "I have a dream!" speech at the Washington monument rally that Miller impersonates was theatric creativity of the highest magnitude so-far witnessed on Vancouver stages during BLR's 3-year blogsite run. Bravo! indeed all three of you.
Acting pin-spot : Rick Miller is a tour de force theatrical event. Covering a host of 50's and 60's singers he does with mixed success. Not so embracing a Perry Como who comes out sounding like Bing Crosby suffering stuffed sinuses. Neither so compelling a Nat King Cole or a Tony Bennett. But his Glenn Gould, Frankie Avalon, Barry McGuire ("Eve of Destruction"), Little Eva ("Locomotion") and Janis Joplin squibs were quite good, all-in-all. And a pretty good Joni, too. But good, bad or indifferent, full marks to Miller for even trying to sound like all those separate folk.
Where Miller truly shines, however, is in his capture of the three principals, Maddie, Laurence and Rudi. Particularly Laurence. That characterization was off-the-charts. For a white Canadian Gen X kid to get inside black Laurence Davis's blues-blowing Chicago heart-&-soul and bring out compellingly Davis's dark ironic wisdom about how life is a continuum -- doubt; anger; pushback; rebellion; co-optation, ultimately -- this is acting of the first order.
Miller's Davis mimicking The Beach Boys and all the values of the surfer crowd while it was blacks mostly doing the dying in Vietnam was absolutely superb.
Who gonna like : Quite frankly, as one of them, I am tired of Boomer re-runs. Our generation has been damn near hopeless in solving world problems. That is my greatest regret, my piece of collective guilt, as I reflect back during these early days of my 8th decade of life. Henceforth I shall heed Mrs. Malaprop : "Our retrospectives shall be all on the future!"
But Rick Miller's theatrical depiction of all the sturm und drang
of my generation's formative years -- the transformation from crooners to rockers, from go-along / get-along types to masses of noisy rebels, then our round-about-back-again traipse to the drum of conformity due to $$-lust -- this truly is a Must see! evening for lovers of live theatre.
BB Gen's will get the most out of it to give context to their upbringings. Gen X's and Gen Y's will learn much about the influences that informed their privileged and enabled parents' lives.
Millennials? Aside from the zippity-do-dah visuals, BOOM's structure of a year-by-year recitation of events -- that the majority of Millennials probably know very little about and couldn't care less -- the show will likely not be grabby enough to sustain them.
But any characters in your realm who show a bit of quizzery at all why we privileged Boomers have the idiosyncrasies and goofy attitudes we do, certainly it is Rick Miller and his team that will dazzle them with lights and tunes and thoughts to take home and wrestle with.
Quicky version
As an original BOOM-er born six short weeks after Hiroshima & Nagasaki, I am of a generation that loves to revisit its youth. Its images, its sounds, its anthropological markers (e.g. macho doctors gaily smoking Camels), its politics, its entire zeitgeist are all there for nostalgic plunder in actor / impressionist Rick Miller's original BOOM : A Multimedia Spectacle to Define a Generation.
"Spectacle" it certainly is : 25 years are crammed into a multimedia docu-drama via one man's impersonations through 115 minutes of news clips, ad snippets, rock anthem covers and home movies that are projected onto a centre tubular scrim in the middle of a raked ring-stage. Primary acting conceit finds Miller impersonating each and every voice from dozens of characters that range from Joni Mitchell to Jawaharlal Nehru to Walter Cronkite to Trudeau pere. To mimic their persona, he dons and doffs costumes and props with blithe abandon.
Notionally the story is told from three perspectives, Miller's mom Maddie from Cobourg, ON; a black Chicago bluesman draft dodger Laurence, and a WWII immigrant Rudi from Vienna. Eventually their separate tales link up as the show ends with the echo-BOOM of the Apollo 11 moon landing and David Bowie's iconic epitaph chart "Space Oddity" rounding out the show.
In media, WYSIWYG Marshall McLuhan presciently told us, and BOOM is just that. Ambitious and courageous writ large, driven by humble honest hubris, it brings to life a generation's many-told tales carried off dizzyingly by Miller and his team whose techie artistry and engineering are simply stunning.
Wordy version
From the footlights : As an original BOOM-er born six short weeks after Hiroshima & Nagasaki, I am of a generation that loves to revisit its youth. Its images, its sounds, its anthropological markers (e.g. macho doctors gaily smoking Camels), its politics, its entire zeitgeist are all there for nostalgic plunder in actor / impressionist Rick Miller's original BOOM : A Multimedia Spectacle to Define a Generation.
"Spectacle" it certainly is : 25 years are crammed into a multimedia docu-drama via one man's impersonations through 115 minutes of news clips, ad snippets, rock anthem covers and home movies that are projected onto a centre tubular scrim in the middle of a raked ring-stage. Primary acting conceit finds Miller impersonating each and every voice from dozens of characters that range from Joni Mitchell to Jawaharlal Nehru to Walter Cronkite to Trudeau pere. To mimic their persona, he dons and doffs costumes and props with blithe abandon.
But the "Define" piece BOOM aims at? Well this stage of Miller's Apollo rocket can't help but fizzle. Because to "define" a generation would imply that Boomers Billary Clinton and George W. Bush come from a common politico-cultural community instead of from distant planets. But I digress.
How it's all put together : Notionally the story is told from three perspectives, Miller's mom Maddie from Cobourg, ON; a black Chicago bluesman draft dodger Laurence, and WWII immigrant Rudi from Vienna. Eventually their separate tales link up as the show ends in Yorkville to the echo-BOOM of the Apollo 11 moon landing on t.v. and David Bowie's iconic epitaph chart "Space Oddity" rounding it all out sublimely.
Screen-dweebs of all generations who are accustomed to the medium's sight-&-sound instantania will be wildly entertained. Also taught the inherent truth of Marshall McLuhan's famous dictum : "The medium is the message."
What the show brings to the stage : This is my first taste of impersonator / actor / musician / educator Rick Miller whose mash-up of The Simpsons with Shakespeare in a one-hander show called MacHomer ACT staged in 2000. MacHomer ultimately enjoyed a 17-year run that played in 175 cities at home and abroad.
To open the show, Miller, 46 this year, monologues that he set out to understand Mom and her "sheltered, small world where we were not sure what was going on". He does this by conducting extensive interviews with her and the two others. While videos of them roll, Miller impersonates their voices. Or when there's no vid to show, he acts their parts. Mom is always in a 50's woman's casual smoker's pose -- right arm up perched on the left underneath. Laurence is angular laid-back, the better to give voice to his constant ironic belly laughs. Rudi is an upright Euro, a two-legged parlour Steinway. Early on Miller hints at what we'll learn : "By becoming my parents I'll be a living, breathing time capsule," he says.
While the characters' monologues proceed, news footage and family album shots and photo-shopped images are flung fleetingly on the scrim and the ring-stage. Maps, logos, slogans, Wiki facts spelled out from each year 1945-1969 hit the eye like a cross between ticker-tape and Powerpoint. The technical artistic prowess of Projection Designer David Leclerc and Lighting Designer Bruno Matte is astonishing to witness. Their handiwork replicating Peter, Paul and Mary at the August, 1967 MLK "I have a dream!" speech at the Washington monument rally that Miller impersonates was theatric creativity of the highest magnitude so-far witnessed on Vancouver stages during BLR's 3-year blogsite run. Bravo! indeed all three of you.
Acting pin-spot : Rick Miller is a tour de force theatrical event. Covering a host of 50's and 60's singers he does with mixed success. Not so embracing a Perry Como who comes out sounding like Bing Crosby suffering stuffed sinuses. Neither so compelling a Nat King Cole or a Tony Bennett. But his Glenn Gould, Frankie Avalon, Barry McGuire ("Eve of Destruction"), Little Eva ("Locomotion") and Janis Joplin squibs were quite good, all-in-all. And a pretty good Joni, too. But good, bad or indifferent, full marks to Miller for even trying to sound like all those separate folk.
Where Miller truly shines, however, is in his capture of the three principals, Maddie, Laurence and Rudi. Particularly Laurence. That characterization was off-the-charts. For a white Canadian Gen X kid to get inside black Laurence Davis's blues-blowing Chicago heart-&-soul and bring out compellingly Davis's dark ironic wisdom about how life is a continuum -- doubt; anger; pushback; rebellion; co-optation, ultimately -- this is acting of the first order.
Miller's Davis mimicking The Beach Boys and all the values of the surfer crowd while it was blacks mostly doing the dying in Vietnam was absolutely superb.
Who gonna like : Quite frankly, as one of them, I am tired of Boomer re-runs. Our generation has been damn near hopeless in solving world problems. That is my greatest regret, my piece of collective guilt, as I reflect back during these early days of my 8th decade of life. Henceforth I shall heed Mrs. Malaprop : "Our retrospectives shall be all on the future!"
But Rick Miller's theatrical depiction of all the sturm und drang
of my generation's formative years -- the transformation from crooners to rockers, from go-along / get-along types to masses of noisy rebels, then our round-about-back-again traipse to the drum of conformity due to $$-lust -- this truly is a Must see! evening for lovers of live theatre.
BB Gen's will get the most out of it to give context to their upbringings. Gen X's and Gen Y's will learn much about the influences that informed their privileged and enabled parents' lives.
Millennials? Aside from the zippity-do-dah visuals, BOOM's structure of a year-by-year recitation of events -- that the majority of Millennials probably know very little about and couldn't care less -- the show will likely not be grabby enough to sustain them.
But any characters in your realm who show a bit of quizzery at all why we privileged Boomers have the idiosyncrasies and goofy attitudes we do, certainly it is Rick Miller and his team that will dazzle them with lights and tunes and thoughts to take home and wrestle with.
Particulars : Produced by Kidoon and WYRD in collaboration with the PUSH International Performing Arts Festival and the Arts Club Theatre. At ACT's Granville Island house. On thru February 13th. Run-time 115 minutes plus intermission. Box office www.ArtsCentre.com or by phoning 604.687.1644.
Production team : Writer / Director / Performer Rick Miller. Executive Producer Jeff Lord. Projection Designer David Leclerc. Lighting Designer Bruno Matte. Composer and Sound Designer Creighton Doane. Set / Costumes / Props Designer Yannik Larivee.
Performer : Rick Miller.
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