Tuesday 29 August 2017

BLR summer furlough -- see you in Septober!

With the end of the major theatre season here in Vancouver -- and 17,300+ hits on the BLR  site since last September -- we are taking advantage to grab a late summer furlough that includes home projects + cycling here-&-there + general gad-abouting until Thanksgiving-ish. 

Thank you! for your support. It is a privilege to be part of the Vancouver professional theatre "family" for sure. Back soon. 


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Tuesday 22 August 2017

A Chorus Line presents apt Millennial messages
All the basic condition theatre requires is that fire last night & those costumes 
& the human voice & people gathered together.  
Sir Trevor Nunn, Director (Cats, 1981 \ Les Miserables, 1985)

From the footlights : Earning a living as a professional chorus line dancer is about as likely a choice as thinking your garage band will crush the hit parade charts. But such is the central conceit of the 1975 song-&-dance show A Chorus Line with its music by Marvin Hamlisch.

Two dozen dancers in rehearsal togs hoof it out in bare stage tryouts while they reveal what nagging muse or life experience led them to this sketchy career choice. These are not superstars or divas trying out here, rather a bevy of supporting-role performers who will dance collectively. They are the chorus, not the soloist -- none of them will be allowed even a moment's pirouette in the limelight. And only eight will be selected. All this is the more pertinent because a dozen of the cast are in their debut FCP production, a swack of them second or third year Cap College theatre students or recent grads.
Colourful warm-ups from the troupe of Roy (Brodie Kyle Klassen), Chelsea (Chelsea Huang), Butch (Conor Brand), Tricia (Alina Quarin) and Frank (Thomas Chan) who rehearse a try-out number.
Allyson Fournier photo

Written in the early 70's while the VietNam war raged on and Nixon secretly rained bombs on Cambodia for a full year before admitting it, the show nevertheless fits analogously into our current age of rising Millennials. They also face difficult career and lifestyle choices in the challenging socioeconomic environment of today : e.g. in Canada some 50% of young adults (20-24) still live at home or are boomerang kids -- double the rate of fifty years back.

How it's all put together : The show's narrative structure is an oddity, particularly in an age where "trigger warnings", "safe spaces" and "identity politics" are the norm at college campuses across North America. Because the director of the show-within-a-show Zach (Christopher D. King) asks each of the performers to reveal some spark or catalyst in their history that brought them to this place. He hopes this will help him choose the "four boys, four girls" he ultimately needs for his chorus line troupe to support the principal dancer in an unnamed upcoming New York show. (Even those gender determinants would likely prove controversial in today's LBGTQ social milieu were these "real" theatrical try-outs instead of a meta-play from back then.)

Connie (Jolene Bernardino), Diana (Vanessa Quartino), Val (Sarah Canuta) & Judy (Hailey Fowler) execute some semaphore kicks trying to impress Zach (C. D. King) who is an Oz-like character on-mike in the wings offering encouragement & a priestly shoulder.
Allyson Fournier photo.
Happily there's a Billy Elliot feel afoot here as the kids' "ballet class liberated me" stories pop up regularly. Loneliness, gender confusion, domestic strife, bodies that quit on their owners early and snap career hopes -- these are the tales shared on-stage in word and song. Original director/choreographer Michael Bennett (d. 1987, age 44) collected some 40-hours of audiotape from real-life dancers telling their life histories. Much of the dialogue put together by James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante who produced the show's book is reportedly taken verbatim from these recordings about the dancers' agonies and ecstacies pursuing journeyman dancer status, not stardom. The "joyous grind" of night-after-night tightly choreograph'd line-dance routines.


The troupe : all shapes, sizes, colourful get-ups & stories.
Allyson Fournier photo.
Production values that shine through :  Fresh off her FCP directorial debut of Cats at the diminutive Jericho Arts Centre 18 months back that had BLR all in a rave, Rachel Carlson is ACL's director and choreographer. And it is precisely in that realm -- the choreography, blocking & stage presence -- that ACL's strength as a work of performing art does its best on the functional Waterfront stage. The delightfully colourful 2017 rehearsal costumes added a level of visual appeal noticeably absent 40 years back, according to reports. In this show, too, Arielle Ballance's musical direction of her band was nothing shy of kick-ass. 

For its part, the full house at Tuesday's final Preview performance revealed an appreciation and enthusiasm for the energetic effort of these young actors. What they tell is a 40-year-old Broadway story that is not a set-piece classic musical like Music Man or Mary Poppins or Fiddler on the Roof. Rather ACL is a mix of Edward Albee meets Albert Camus meets Harold Pinter meets Bob Fosse. It tells a tale of existential angst where wannabe show dancers in the time of Spiro Agnew and J. Edgar Hoover struggle to make a life performing in musical theatre, which even then was decidedly less a moon in wax than in wane.

N.B. That said, fact is ACL is the 6th longest running musical in Broadway history, with 6,137 performances in its 15-year run between 1975 and 1990. Its popularity arose in that post-Viet Nam era when the excesses of political hubris were front-&-centre on display, when a suppression of individual showmanship for the sake of group survival was a more popular notion than it is now as we witness anew a worldwide rise in populist, alt-right tumescence.  

Who gonna like : In 1980 I performed in a Lerner-Loewe remembrance piece called On The Street Where You Live directed by the late Scott Wheeler at the White Rock Players Club. I never did master the bloody step-ball change dance step required of me, though like Mr. King in this show I managed to hide upstage mostly and do a fakesimile sufficient enough under the circumstances. 

But it is that experience that makes me appreciate this Fighting Chance Production of A Chorus Line the more. No doubt the ACL script shows its age : taking 60+ minutes to have more than a dozen dancers try to relate to their abbreviated life stories is a stretch. But of course the Hamlisch music -- just like the Lerner-Loewe pieces I struggled through nearly 40 years back -- Hamlisch helps make up for how in 2017 the Michael Bennett 1975 existential plot-&-characterizations may fail to fully engage today's dramatic imagination. 

Still, ever had a "jones" in dance, in music, in acting, in writing, in social causes that you'd do in a heartbeat because you love it so much -- or simply because you don't just love it, you need the money, too? If you relate to those kinds of life experiences you will find much that entertains you in this re-mount of an old favourite song-&-dance show. No question it is lovingly and energetically and engagingly presented by an eager team.

Particulars :  Produced by Fighting Chance Productions -- Artistic Director Ryan Mooney. At the Waterfront Theatre, 1412 Cartwright Street on Granville Island. Until Saturday, September 2nd. Tickets & schedule information via the internet through FCP's website @ http://www.fightingchanceproductions.ca.  Run-time two hours straight, no intermission. 

Production Crew : Director & Choreographer Rachel Carlson.  Musical Director Arielle Ballance.  Assistant Choreographer Hailey Kragelj.  Set Designer Brian Ball.  Lighting Designer Andie Marie Lloyd.  Sound Designer Peter Young.  Costume Designer Rachel Carlson. Stage Manager Kara McLachlan.  Creative Consultant Ryan Mooney. (N.B. Original production conceived by Michael Bennett, then workshopped in collaboration with authors of the show's book, James Kirkwood & Nicolas Dante. Music by Marvin Hamlisch, lyrics by Edward Kleban. Directed & choreographed by Michael Bennett with assistance from Bob Avian.)

Performers : Haley Allen (Bebe).  Jesse Alvarez (Paul).  Joline Bernardino (Connie).  Kaden Chad (Al).  Thomas Chan (Frank). Justin Daniels (Mark).  Kailua DeLeon (Lois). Lucia Forward (Cassie). Hailey Fowler (Judy).  Chelsea Huang (Vicki). Christopher D. King (Zach).  Brodie Kyle Klassen (Roy).  Greg Liow (Mike).  Amanda Lourenco (Maggie).  Lindsay Marshall (Val).  Ricardo Cunha Pequenino (Richie).  Ben Platten (Greg).  Alina Quarin (Tricia). Vanessa Quarinto (Diana).  Kailley Roesler (Kristine).  Alishia Suitor (Sheila).  Marcel Tremel (Larry).  Eric Vincent (Bobby).  

Kick-ass Band : Arielle Balance (Piano).  Lindsay Goldberg (Trumpet).  Monica Sumulong (Bass).  Murray Cameron Smith (Drums).  Bryan Vance (Reeds).


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Tuesday 1 August 2017

Master Class "spoofs" Stalin's USSR censorship
All the basic condition theatre requires is that fire last night & those costumes 
& the human voice & people gathered together.  
Sir Trevor Nunn, Director (Cats, 1981 \ Les Miserables, 1985)

Backdrop to the script : A Canadian self-described "ex-composer" named Julian Lee was the impetus behind UK's prolific dramatist David Pownall penning Master Class. The show is an imagined midnight vodka-guzzle with the grizzled Georgian bear Joseph Stalin and his culture commissar Andrei Zhdanov. Together they rage against composers Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich and others heading up the Union of Composers for their "anti-Soviet" compositions.

To provoke him, Lee in the mid-70's provided Pownall a slim 103-page volume by BBC correspondent Alexander Werth who reported on the 1948 Conference on Musicians in Moscow. It was less a "conference" than a show trial. From Werth's 1949 book Musical Uproar in Moscow plus the accompanying minutes of the conference, Lee challenged Pownall to "respond" to those events that had occurred some 30 years previously. 

Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Khachaturian stand accused as the chief perpetrators of a musical style dominating the USSR's Union of Composers. The meeting minutes condemn them as guilty of "formalist perversions and many undemocratic tendencies (that) include atonalism, dissonance, contempt for melody and the use of chaotic and neuropathic discords -- all alien to the artistic tastes of the Soviet people." For his part, in his closing remarks to the conference Zhdanov referred to them as "academics" whose works were utterly deficient compared to the "poetic realism" of such as Tchaikovsky, Rimski-Korsakov and Mussorgsky.

Sergei Prokofiev (Chris Robson) offers up a bit of atonality to Zhdanov (James Gill) & Stalin (Tariq Leslie). 
Photo by Javier R. Sotres
What resulted from Pownall's consideration of all this was an attempt to bridge the history of grim repressive Communist censorship with no few bits of whimsical Brit-inspired comic flair not all that far off Monty Python ("I spit in your general direction!") stuff. All in all the script is less a look at the composers than it is a caricature of the Soviet leader Stalin and his consigliari Zhdanov (who, anticipated to be Stalin's successor, would die just seven months after the February, 1948 conference.) 

From the footlights : Reviewing the New York Odyssey Theatre opening in 1987, NYT critic Dan Sullivan told viewers that the show is not "a grim study in totalitarian thought control". He counseled : "Don't think 'Darkness at Noon.' Think 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.'" And, having reviewed the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre production of Master Class that same year for the Now newspaper group, I remember referring to the script back then as "a juicy little potboiler" : thus no question the Sullivan comparison is wholly apt.

The show is a character study that reveals Prokofiev as an ailing 56-year-old man willing to risk trading verbal shots with Stalin, 69. (They would both die on March 5, 1953.) The considerably younger Shostakovich, meanwhile, 41, betrays a diffidence and nervous reticence in the face of the sarcastic onslaught of shame flung his way by these formidable and dangerous leaders, only standing up to their sneering bully-boy antics once or twice.

Dmitri Shostakovich (Chris Lam) reveals the pain and fear that underscore his musical genius.
Javier R. Sotres photo
Act 1 concludes with purposeful violence against Prokofiev and his musical creations and was by far the only climactic scene in the show. (No Spoiler-alert here on purpose). The show concludes after a dithery Act 2 and does so with a whimper, not a bang : Stalin passes out, wearied by his vodka binge in the dim dawn hour. But not before some delicious satire and smart fretwork on the keyboard wrought by Chris Robson portraying Prokofiev.

What the show brings to the stage : Some have dismissed Pownall's script, in effect, as "random rhetoric in search of a clear dramatic purpose". Not so fast, say I. It has, after all, been performed in some 20 countries and translated countless times for staging in ex-Soviet states. And while it is a fool's errand to summon USA's Donald Trump ad nauseam, there are comparisons to be made particularly with the descent, however short-lived, of Anthony Scaramucci into the bowels of the White House inner sanctum. 

Consider anew New Zealand critic John Smythe's cut at Pownall's Zhdanov character ten years back : "...Zhdanov personifies the truism that despots can only wield widespread power when thick-headed sycophants and delusional sociopaths sign on to implement the frontline abuse." So there is relevance in examining how the heavy hand of autocratic power corrupts. Absolutely, just as Lord Acton observed when Stalin was still in short pants at the seminary in Georgia. 

Production values that shine through : There is much to like in the staging of this show, particularly the Lauchlin Johnston set that engages all four corners of the chummy Jericho stage well indeed. Costumes and lighting effects accompanied Johnston's set in harmony, no cacophony anywhere.

What prevents the script from engaging us as compellingly as it did 30 years back, however, is just history. When Pownall wrote it in the early 80's, the Gorbachev expressions glasnost (cultural warming) and perestroika (restructuring) were barely known outside the Soviet Union, the USSR that is no more. And no question the current autocrat in power in Moscow is Russian to the core : no Georgian satellite DNA in his blood nor Mongolian nor Ukrainian nor Uzbek. So the show easily could have been cut, particularly in the second act, by 15-20 minutes and none of its theme would have been sacrificed by as much as a grace note. 

Stalin tries to assist the composers in writing a piece taken from the Georgian medieval poet Shota Rustaveli's classic "The Knight in the Tiger's Skin". Clearly good music is not forthcoming. But some hilarity is.
Javier R. Sotres photo
Acting pin-spots : My recollection of the Playhouse production of '87 was the role of Stalin, played here engagingly and forcefully by Ensemble Theatre Artistic Director Tariq Leslie. What I did not remember was how rich and compelling the role of Andrei Zhdanov is in the play, excellently rendered in this production.by James Gill. It is in the Zhdanov character that Pownall's droll Pythonesque one-liners pop out spontaneously and expressively.

Personally the second act, for this reviewer, comes down to Chris Robson's Prokofiev riffing off a pastiche of musical forms trying to tie together the Rastafeli medieval poem with its lion, tiger the knight Tario together with Jack London, Siberia, and wolf ghosts. Oh what fun a ride that is. Opposite Robson in both personal style and height was Chris Lam playing Dmitri Shostakovich who Zhdanov accuses of writing "miserable, whining, complaining dirges all the time". His response? "Maybe I'm a depressive...". Pownall's understated, tongue-in-cheek Brit smartassery comes through cleverly in such stuff.

Who gonna like : This is a period piece that is incapable of clutching our hearts and minds with the force it did in the mid-80's for the historical reasons noted above. But for people who have a jones for Soviet history and the effects of totalitarian thinking. For people who are alive to the cultural context of why moderns such as Prokofiev and Shostakovich might have been considered so un-Soviet in the post-WW II world. For people interested how a nation faced up to the fact that 20 million lost their lives -- a whole generation of adults, leaving only grandparents and grandkids in their wake -- this is an interesting dramatic snapshot, no question. Proof positive, too, how The State, in whatever iteration it appears on earth, cannot successfully suppress the muse for true artists.

Particulars : Produced by Ensemble Theatre Company.  At Jericho Arts Centre, 1675 Discovery Street.  On until August 18.  Tickets & schedule from the company website www.ensembletheatrecompany.ca.  Run-time 140 minutes, including two intermissions.

Production team : Script by David Pownall. Director Evan Frayne.  Assistant Director Shelby Bushnell.  Set Designer Lauchlin Johnston.  Lighting Designer Patrick Smith.  Costume Designer Julie White.  Sound Designer James Coomber.  Stage Manager Karen Chiang. 

Performers :  James Gill (Zhdanov).  Chris Lam (Shostakovich).  Tariq Leslie (Stalin). Chris Robson (Prokofiev).  

Addendum :  Ensemble Theatre Company, in its fifth Vancouver summer repertory season, describes itself thus : "Vancouver-based Ensemble Theatre Company is dedicated to producing accessible and relevant theatre. The company sees theatre as an essential cultural force in leading and framing dialogue on current issues, and takes artistically innovative approaches to classics as well as mounting challenging modern and contemporary plays. The non-profit arts organization is devoted to nurturing both artists and audiences, creating a place of inclusion and a forum for ideas and dialogue."


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