Go for a spin with SPIN : not dizzying and very clever

The spin on SPIN playing through Saturday at the Cultch Historical room is this : creator Evalyn Parry spins a nice factoidal yarn about when bike spins were all the rage 120 years back before Model A Fords drove them off the road. More than that : the subject is women and how bikes and bloomers and suffragettes and temperance and advertising all met at the intersection of late 19th century America.

Parry does so primarily in song, but also through free verse poetry, black-&-white psychedelia screen projections and a bike -- her muse -- that’s hung on a mechanic’s rack and ingeniously mic’d up for Brad Hart to thrum and strum and percuss with fervor.

Parry likes double entendre and homonyms a lot for their wordplay, starting right off with a number that says what's about to come is “Two-Wheeled Words To Wield Words”. A bit arch, that. Still, the history lesson to daughter and me last night was clearly a case of  “Who knew…?”

Entering the theatre, we were drawn to a backlit screen that features a Sarah Bernhardt quote which did some quick turns in our heads : “The bicycle is on the way to transforming our way of life more deeply than you might think. All these girls and women who are devouring space are refusing domestic family life,” she said in 1896. Women "refusing domestic family life" in 1896...?!

From there the story pedals forward quickly to the primary subject of the evening’s drama, one “Annie Londonderry”, who famously circumnavigated the earth in 1894-1895 in 15 months. This she did reportedly in response to a wager between two Bostonian rakes whether a (“mere”) woman could do this. The prize was to be $10,000, a swack of dough back in the day.

And how did Annie fund her around-the-world slog on a one-speed ? Selling advertising she pinned to her cycling outfit – word-spins to finance the bike-spins. Even her name morphed from Anne Cohen Kopcovsky to Annie Londonderry because she got $100 from the Massachusetts-based Londonderry Lithia Spring Water Company to sport their advert on her bike and change her name to promote their product.

The tale Parry tells is a case of Around The World In 80 Days meets Annie Get Your Gun and its signature song, Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better. Decades later when he caught wind of this unusual branch in the family tree, grandnephew Peter Zheutlin did the research on Annie and reported thus in the Christian Science Monitor in August, 2006 :

“…[T]he bicycle was Annie’s means of escape from a life constrained by 19^th-century expectations of women. By age 18 she was married and had one child; when she left to cycle the world in 1894, she had three young children and a job selling ads for several Boston newspapers. Her husband, Max, was a devout Jew who made a modest living as a peddler. The bicycle, she hoped, would also be her ticket to fame and fortune. For a woman of that era to leave her husband and young children was unimaginable; to do so to bicycle the world was utterly radical…A consummate self-promoter, and a skillful creator of her own myth, Annie became a global celebrity, her adventures reported by newspapers from San Francisco to Saigon and Chicago to Shanghai. Her genius was to seize on the major social phenomenon of her day. The 1890’s was the height of a bicycle craze in the US and Europe [BLR note: 2 million bikes were sold in USA in 1897, one in 30 Americans owned one.]. The women’s movement was in full force, and the bicycle, said Susan B. Anthony, ‘has done more to emancipate women than anything else in history.’”

To tell this story on stage, Parry and Hart worked assiduously to morph Hart’s 1972 CCM Galaxie that he years before had retired to Parry’s basement into a musical instrument to accompany Parry on her electric guitars. Enter the world of piezos thanks to sound designer Anna Friz -- electronic gizmos to generate vibrations that kick to a mixer and make the CCM’s spokes, pedals, saddle and frame a one-man band of intriguing electro-sound even stranger but as clever as anything one might hear on Laurie Brown’s CBC show The Signal.

Over the course of the 80 minute performance Parry’s yarn links a history of women’s clothing and the expression ‘bloomers’ from one Amelia Bloomer, a publisher, in 1850;  how suffragette and temperance advocate Frances Willard came to write a book on cycling techniques for women wannabes;  how cycling allowed women back then “to be free to move their political legs”;  how "Sex sells! " was jumped at : e.g. in 1896 via the new printing artform of lithographs the Gladiator Cycle company of Montmartre, Paris featured nude women with racy red hair flying with their bikes -- 90% of which were bought by men of course. (A celebrant of her own and others' "queer" orientation as she calls it, Parry wonders aloud whether Willard was a "pre-outed gay".)

Because life imitates art, just as art imitates life, Parry shills her CD’s and T-shirts shamelessly about 2/3 the way through the show. But no matter, to this ear : so did Annie, and the fact is artists always have to market their creativity to live. “We are the merchandizing overlords of our own merchandizing world in a phantasy of freedom,” Parry monologues. She then closes the show and links these various musings by quoting a letter written to her by Annie’s granddaughter Mary.  

Mary states that Annie’s leaving her three young children with their dad Max all due to the reported “wager” was not championed by the family. Parry surmises more likely the wager angle to justify her jaunt was simply “the first story Annie told just to get out of the house”.  Mary relates that the emotional impact of Annie's round-the-world adventure on Max and the kids and later the grandkids was not healthy, even after Annie "re-nested" and moved the family to New York upon returning from her trip. For a short time thereafter she wrote features for the N.Y. World promoting her "new woman" values, but Wiki reports Annie died unheralded and “in obscurity” in 1947. Still, Parry’s closing song asserts her own abiding worldview regardless : “Don’t give up on anything / One might miss the miracle.”

Director Ruth Madoc-Jones orchestrates tight sequencing in the theatrical montage that SPIN is. Projectionist / lighter / production designer Beth Kates pulls terrific technical values together : the 19th century women cycling in full dresses and corsets around pylons was worth more than 1,000 words. Production manager and technical director Charissa Wilcox earned every shekel keeping the production moving along apace. Brad Hart had thrilling riffs playing the Galaxie. Parry's voice and lyrics and spoken poetry bounce well off the Cultch walls to engaged ears.

This show will appeal, obviously, to cyclists; to historians interested in the connect between bloomers and bikes and the dream of emancipation a century back; and to folks who relate to clever stories spun out with head and heart and humour. 

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God and the Indian is very timely viewing

How does one parse evil? What the Oxford Compact Thesaurus differentiates as villainy, degeneracy, and immorality -vs- barbarity, atrocity, monstrosity.  The Canadian residential schools nightmare -vs- Eichmann’s death camps. One “may”, but one “can’t” win that debate. Without saying so expressly, that is one subtext of Drew Hayden Taylor’s play that had its international premiere last night at the Firehall Arts Centre. Evil is as evil does. It does not parse.

The plot is simple. Rev. George King, an Anglican priest, has been promoted to Assistant Bishop in an urban diocese. The morning after the party celebrating his annunciation he stops at a downtown Tim Horton’s for a cup of  coffee. There he is spotted by “Johnny Indian”, a native panhandler who follows him back to his offices. Johnny confronts King and accuses him of being the teacher from St. Mark’s Residential School who sexually abused and raped her, repeatedly, when she was just 12.

The play proceeds in the manner of an intervention : Johnny (Tantoo Cardinal) attempts to get King (Michael Kopsa) to confess to his 40-year-old crimes, which for 120 minutes he denies, then confesses, obliquely, sort of – always as a churchy fellow, not a person. Married, teen kids, loving wife, this is an ugly and visceral confrontation. George hasn't faced anything like it in his life. That he perhaps is guilty of causing equal or worse pain to another years back he refuses to face. 

The dialogue flips back-&-forth between the two with Assistant Bishop King rhyming off institutional cant and stock denials of any personal complicity or guilt. Johnny, by contrast, wants to optimize this chance meeting, have it lead to her healing. When ABK asks her who she is in the opening moments, she responds : “Who I am today, that is quite a question…!”  The depth of her meaning is lost on the man of the cloth.

Indian is directed by Renae Morriseau, herself of aboriginal stock, who says the play “…takes us on a journey of layered meaning where compassion, reconciliation and the boundaries placed upon forgiveness are explored and developed.” Taylor’s script certainly does just that for the viewers, and the result as a play is very successful, rewarding and relevant. The meta-play between Johnny and King doesn’t achieve resolution, however, because words cannot band-aid experiences. Abuse is not a boo-boo.

King : “I know it’s in vogue to sue the Church for all sorts of wrongful actions, but there has to be some basis of truth and evidence involved. We’re not handing out blank cheques or apologies to whoever walks in the door.”  Johnny : I don’t want any money. Or an apology. No, acknowledgement…that I’m me. Me! I’m Sammy’s sister. I am my parent’s child. I don’t want to be a ghost anymore. I want to exist. To be seen. To be noticed. To be acknowledged. By you and what you’ve done.”  King :  I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

At this point, Johnny pulls a gun out of her bag and aims it at King. Obviously frightened he tells her to put the gun down : “If you do that, I will erase this whole thing from my memory, and you can go on your way. No harm done.”  Johnny : “’No harm done.’ You have a bad habit of picking the wrong phrases. Actually you had a lot of bad habits. Oh I know you tried to ‘save the child by killing the Indian’, but I think some of it managed to hide out somewhere, behind my brown eyes, under my black hair, or beneath my thick skin. Killing an entire people can take a lot of time. I guess 10 years wasn’t long enough.”  Some might argue the “no harm done” line a bit convenient and ham-handed, but in the context of a completely failed communication between "patriarch" and "supplicant", I say it works.

For the balance of the play we see Johnny agonize whether to commit suicide with the pistol and its one bullet she claims it has, or to kill King. In the end, King disarms Johnny by abusing her anew with a direct sensory memory of oranges, oranges that were used at St. Mark’s as Christmas gifts or bribes for sexual favours. Johnny relinquishes the gun and sighs heavily, despondently. She grasps once more what has been her lifelong intuitive wisdom : “There’s nothing for me here.” As for the lost chance to end either King’s life or her own, she adds, resignedly : “Wanting and having are two different things.”

No, how to reconcile Jesus’s challenge of “Suffer the little children to come unto me” with the church’s history of harming and abusing children in the name of Christ will never happen between Johnny and Assistant Bishop King. It can’t. Because words will never deconstruct acts. The diktat of the Christian religion has always debased what the Jew carpenter stood for and meant spiritually, symbolically and existentially, Taylor suggests forcefully.

This play works. It is convincing and compelling on many levels. With the First Nation Truth and Reconciliation Commission winding up its mandate to hear from abused former school residents and their elders, children and children’s children, God and the Indian is a poignant reminder of the reality of residential schools’ 140 year run in Canada at the hands of organized religion (Catholic, Anglican, United and its predecessors) as well as at the hands of parliament through The Gradual Civilization Act [sic] of 1857 and subsequently the Indian Act and amendments thereto.

Doubly compelling a play for Vancouver because of the recently released findings of the Oppal Commission into the slaughter of dozens of missing DTES women, many aboriginal, at the hands of Robert Picton and the role, or lack thereof, of the various suburban police bureaucracies to end the killing spree years earlier. That Firehall Arts Centre is situated right in the heart of DTES at Gore and Cordova where sex trade workers continue to ply the streets makes the juxtaposition all the more poignant. 

The set and lighting design by Lauchlin Johnson are very effective for the diminutive Firehall stage : Assistant Bishop King’s office with backlit projections of a stark residential school bed all amuss; wooden snow shoes; large first-growth birch trees; crates of oranges. Costumes designed by Alex Danard capture well the disconnect between the “man of God” from the church and the “woman of spirit” who lives off the street. The soundscape by Morriseau and Marcos Amaya-Torres is a clever blend of Anglican hymn, Indian drumbeats, and innocent children playing.

As Johnny, Tantoo Cardinal – a Cree/Metis and veteran of some 80 credits from “Dancing With Wolves” to “Black Robe” to “North of 60” to “Moccasin Flats” – turns in a nuanced and idiosyncratic portrayal of a 50-something street person wracked by physical and spiritual torment with just the right shakiness of voice and hand and awkward limp one would expect from a woman suffering her traumas. Assistant Bishop King by Michael Kopsa is nearly 100% objectionable in his unctuous persona – which demonstrates his complete grasp of the role including both its physical and spiritual arthritis.

This is a trenchant, timely, and terrific take on the gulf between members of alienated aboriginal communities and the contemporary commercial world of all us "others". You will come away satisfied that Artistic Director Donna Spencer's challenge to viewers in the program notes has been achieved : "Enjoy, question, and consider !"

Background note #1 :  From University of Manitoba précis highlighting its Leah Carritt Collection on the Brandon Indian Residential School (1936) :

The Canadian parliament administrated the enculturation of Indigenous peoples across Canada with compulsory attendance for children aged 6 to 15 and Christian based curriculum which forbade traditional knowledge and languages. This process of enculturation has been largely referred to as “Killing the Indian, saving the child”. Due to major under-funding from churches and the federal government, the upkeep and subsistence of the residential school depended on the forced labor of students. The compulsory residential school system lasted until 1948 and official closings of residential schools occurred into the 1990s. Residential schools varied in their corporal treatment towards the students, which has culminated in mixed emotions about individual experiences, though overwhelmingly the residential school program has been condemned by Indigenous people and regretted by portions of the Canadian government. The first official state apology to Indigenous peoples over the abuses incurred at residential schools was made in 1998, followed by an open inquiry into individual and community experience through a Truth and Reconciliation program beginning in 2006.

Background note #2 :  From the University of British Columbia’s Indigenous Foundations website :

The residential school system is viewed by much of the Canadian public as part of a distant past, disassociated from today’s events. In many ways, this is a misconception. The last residential school [in BC] did not close its doors until 1986. Many of the leaders, teachers, parents, and grandparents of today’s Aboriginal communities are residential school survivors. There is, in addition, an intergenerational effect: many descendents of residential school survivors share the same burdens as their ancestors even if they did not attend the schools themselves. These include transmitted personal trauma and compromised family systems, as well as the loss in Aboriginal communities of language, culture, and the teaching of tradition from one generation to another.

According to the Manitoba Justice Institute, residential schools laid the foundation for the epidemic we see today of domestic abuse and violence against Aboriginal women and children. Generations of children have grown up without a nurturing family life. As adults, many of them lack adequate parenting skills and, have only experienced abuse, in turn abuse their children and family members. This high incidence of domestic violence among Aboriginal families results in many broken homes, perpetuation the cycle of abuse and dysfunction over generations.

Many observers have argued that the sense of worthlessness that was instilled in students by the residential school system contributed to extremely low self-esteem. This has manifested itself in self-abuse, resulting in high rates of alcoholism, substance abuse, and suicide. Among First Nations people aged 10 to 44, suicide and self-inflicted injury is the number one cause of death, responsible for almost 40 percent of mortalities. First Nations women attempt suicide eight times more often than other Canadian women, and First Nations men attempt suicide five times more often than other Canadian men. Some communities experience what have been called suicide epidemics.

Note on the playwright : Drew Hayden Taylor billboards himself as "the blue-eyed Ojibway". Originally from Curve Lake First Nations in central Ontario decades back, Taylor considers humour his primary metier as playwright, essayist and speaker promoting aboriginal issues and causes. Asked at Opening Night by this reviewer why he deviated from his usual humour to write God and the Indian, he replied : "As a challenge. A friend asked whether I had it in me to write something serious, so I decided to tackle the most serious subject involving Canadian aboriginal people that I could think of. Residential schools. That's it." 

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2 Pianos, 4 Hands should amuse even R&B fans

Vertical integration is not just a business thing. It can work in theatre, too, given the right circumstances. As it is in ACT's latest Stanley Theatre production that was written by, directed by and stars Ted Dykstra and Richard Greenblatt. 

2P4H was conceived some 17 years ago as a fictionalized diary about each man's classical piano teachers during their fetched-up years. Albeit in real life some eight years apart in age, on stage their characters spend a decade together competing with and against one another. First as daydreaming flummoxes, but ultimately as highly-skilled though not-pro-level performers, just "best in the neighbourhood". How many suburban hockey kids fit that description, too? More than not. Dreamers of all description -- whether astronaut or movie star or rock god wannabes -- will relate to this tale.

We watch these two nascent hotshots of Chopin, Bach, and Mozart from their early bristles and squawks and cacophony through grammar school. That takes up most of Act 1. Gradually each becomes a bit o.c. and nerdy as hours-&-hours of practice consume them during the pimple years. Right through high school they act out a sequence of semi-autobiographical skits as both their teachers and the music get tougher and tougher on them, not to mention the parents. This is the stuff of Act 2.

In the end their dreams of stardom, like spring flowers in June, droop and drop altogether: Dykstra is rejected for Conservatory training to become the next Glenn Gould because he's "undisciplined" while Greenblatt mistakes a trilly Ferrante & Teicher version of My Funny Valentine he wrote as jazz. The man waran't impressed. No brudda. No Harlem jazz school for him. 

So Greenblatt tries his hand at cocktail lounge entertainer -- one of the funniest and truest bits doing Billy Joel's Piano Man under the shouts of a bellicose drunk. For Dykstra, he tries his hand at teaching piano basics to suburban moms at the ABC Piano School. They simply use him and their weekly lesson time to confess their life's misery.

This somewhat melancholy fall from grace for both of them as overachieving Kiwanis competition prodigies has, however, been punctuated throughout by great guffaws. Indeed it's the comedy acting that almost upstages their exceptional skills on the twin Yamaha grand pianos -- particularly Dykstra's facial contortions, timing and wonderfully wimpy groans. 

In stage argot this is a "two-hander" as Dykstra and Greenblatt are the only two performers. But they each toggle back-&-forth as imagined student and teacher for one another. Touchingly they capture the foibles of the kids who are forced to take these bloody piano lessons in the first place, particularly the daily grind of practices they hate. But equally well their personna capture the peccadilloes of their long-suffering teachers. Dykstra's rendition of poor old Sister Loyola and her perpetual migraine at Greenblatt's childish keyboard excruciations is priceless comic stuff. 

And Greenblatt playing Dykstra's belligerent old man is cleverly wrought. He orates a note-perfect "not while you live in my house" speech to Teddy whose grades are slipping. Slipping simply because by age 16 Teddy's tumescent only about the piano -- not about girls or sports or anything else -- piano is all he does or thinks or breathes or phantasizes. It's a speech nearly every one of us has both heard and given in our lifetimes when a teen seems headed astray in some way or other.  

Script meets life by virtue of Dykstra and Greenblatt having done the 2 Pianos, 4 Hands schtick so long -- 900 performances in the past decade-&-a-half. They are symbiotic, like piano-man twins in their comic and personal turns on stage. Being in each other's skin, almost literally, is what lends the performance its poignance.

The 20 or so mostly classical pieces are played in snippets as an extension of the running dialogue occurring on stage. One needn't be a classical music fan to enjoy them, though having some familiarity with the genre doesn't hurt. 

Production designer Steve Lucas creates a set just right for the music and dialogue : only outsize picture frames adorn the stage behind the nose-to-nose pianos. Within them are shot various home-style windows -- to represent the different teachers and venues as well as chiaroscuro screens behind which Greenblatt and Dykstra mimic mom and dad nattering and scolding the boys to practice harder. All worked adequately well until the final scene when the sunset-red and puffy clouds in the closing J.S. Bach Concerto in D minor sequence seemed meh -- a bit casual and indifferent and unfocused in purpose. 

Background notes :  The Dykstra-Greenblatt collaboration has been performed literally thousands of times, both by these two and nearly 100 others in local companies. ACT tots up some 5,000 performances of the script at 200 theatres in eight countries on five continents to nearly 2,000,000 viewers. The current production is part of a farewell tour of the show playing Ottawa, Vancouver, and Edmonton before Dykstra and Greenblatt, at least, retire the work for themselves as performers. If numbers count, this is a Don't miss it ! event.

Helpfully, the New York Times  describes the musical format of "two hands" piano-playing thus : 

"In the 19th century orchestral and chamber works were often transcribed for piano duet so that those who couldn't attend concerts might still hear the latest symphony or opera. These duets were considered more suitable for the parlor than the concert hall, where two virtuoso egos would be uncomfortably squashed together on one piano bench [Ed : the two-butt, one-bench scene by Dykstra/Greenblatt was great slapstick]. Four-hand two-piano works had more appeal for the reigning superstars, even allowing them to indulge in some lively onstage one-up-manship [Ed : which D/G do repeatedly and deliciously throughout the ACT production]."  (NYT description by Vivien Schweitzer, Feb. 16, 2010.)

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How Has My Love Affected You certainly affected me

HHMLAY is at once brave, clever, challenging and insightful. It also strikes me as an unethical and offensive intrusion into the life and spirit of the playwright's mother.

According to its pre-performance publicity, it's a "memoir". Playwright (and son) Marcus Yousef plays himself and tots up 90 minutes of monologue providing countless memories. His perspectives -- now, as a middle-aged man, about life with mother ever since the day mom and dad divorced when he was a teenager some 30 years back because dad was a serial adulterer -- are poignant and compelling.

No, the primary problem with HHMLAY is not its production or scriptural values per se. Not even the uneasy Freudian gestalt created by playwright/actor/son Marcus having his own teen-age son Zak on stage. Zak is there mostly to sing catchy Veda Hille original songs about his Grandma's idiosyncracies taken from pounds of note scraps found in her former lodgings over an eight month stay in the 2400 Motel on Kingsway in EastVan.  But Zak also has a role-within-a-role to act as sounding board and confidante for Dad playing out his memory schtick for all to see.

Here's the problem. Mom is still alive. This crucial central fact is not revealed in any of the play's advance publicity nor in the playwright/actor/son's interviews nor director/dramaturge Rachel Ditor's interview nor even revealed in the dialogue until the closing moments of the play.

What struck this viewer dumb was the real-time video of Mom in her 2013 Vancouver nursing home special care unit that was shot up onto the bedsheet projection screen. What we see is a woman in her 70's breathing and blinking in her nightclothes in her bed but utterly ravaged and consumed by Alzheimer's. A video made of a woman who could never have known her son would exploit his relationship with her -- without her knowledge and consent -- while she is still alive. Who in her right mind would agree to have her son air an index of all her neuroses and the ones she allegedly induced in him for commercial purposes?

No, had the play opened with that video clip, many in the audience would have exited the theatre in a heartbeat out of empathy for her, though surely not the ones giving the performance a standing-o and shouting Bravo! robustly as Vancouverites are wont to do too often by rote. (BLR I daresay has never ranted quite like this before : but this production generated a nagging ethical itch I can find no honest way to scratch simply by calling it "drama".)

Still. I did commence the piece arguing HHMLAY is "at once brave, clever, challenging and insightful". If one were able to imagine the play as historical fiction about a deceased parent, the values of it as drama would emerge. Here's a peek.

In the 1870's Count Leo Tolstoy said it best when he opened Anna Karenina so brilliantly : "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Scroll forward 100 years. Yousef's Mom lived her life until her cognitive collapse in a seemingly endless internal monologue through writing -- journals; dream diaries; memos; sketches; scraps of these words, volumes of those. Mostly filled with self-absorption as such media inherently do. A 70's Berkeley product, she marries a dashing and brilliant Egyptian immigrant. They have a daughter early on in their romance whom they adopt out. Inconvenient, Yousef strongly suggests, to hippie college zoomers agitating for the Free Speech Movement in Sproul Plaza.

When they settle and marry, they have Marcus. The ensuing decade brings on the dalliances and the inevitable divorce -- bitter, costly, devastating to a woman sick to death of the male patriarchy values that have nearly consumed her. Any man's vehement protests that he is the victim when his spouse refuses to just let him be who he is pretty well sums up all that hypocrisy. Though made fun of over centuries by stage drama, it's always corrupt and demeaning to all who are touched by it.

Not surprisingly, therapy lives large in HHMLAY, both hers and her son's, the latter of which Yousef advises is ongoing. He tries to make a joke it will end -- at least with his mother as primary subject matter -- once the 16 remaining public performances of his self-analysis at the Revue Stage come to an end. But then sniggers to Zak : "Unless we take this on the road...!"

Naomi Sider's cardboard box set balloons to fill the entire Revue stage north / south / east / west and thus cleverly documents the matriarch's insatiable hoarding tendencies. Reminiscent of Eugene Ionesco's The Chairs. Projection designer Jamie Nesbitt's screen work of age-old family photos on all these boxes is cleverly wrought, aided by Marsha Sibthorpe's signature lighting prowess.

So, if one could see this work imagining it as truly "memoir", filled with "truthiness" and "factoids" and the usual f 1.4 personal perspective of memory, it would carry itself successfully. Yousef's late-stage riffs summing up all the myriad positive character traits and noteworthy paradoxes that comprise the unique, complex woman who raised him gripped me fast. Nice nice work.

But I can't forget the program note. Yousef proclaims he is "interested in the ways...to recognize the irresolvable contradictions that are at least part of any human being's time on this earth". This play is just that. A contradiction that is irresolvable. Unsettling. Disquieting. Not right. Out of respect for the living it should just close. Immediately. And perhaps be re-mounted years down the road when it truly might warrant the designation "memoir".

Fact is the ACT Silver Commissions Project to feature new works and experimental drama at the Revue Stage is laudable and arguably my favourite component of ACT's yearly productions. Let us hope this questionable aberration in ethos and judgment does not jeopardize the Project's good name and reputation in future.

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Quirky soft-shoe on teen-age angst amuses

Try to imagine 90 minutes of campy stage play on the subject of six dead teenagers killed off in a traveling carny roller coaster crash. Wait! Don't be put off. Ride The Cyclone is an original and quirky and tuneful dramedy that will intrigue.

Fact is teen-age angst has always been mined for both its shallows and its depths, and RTC shows six kids' longings and hopes in a song-&-dance milieu. Originally a cabaret concept a couple years back on the Revue stage across the alley (I missed it !), it's now dressed up as the full-meal-deal at the larger G.I. mainstage. E.g. pre-recorded backtracks at the Revue have been shunted aside in favour of a live 4-piece band. The G.I. venue is perfect for a play of medium size that boasts a big ticket idea: in mass tragedy, the stories of individual victims get lost almost instantly. Playwright Jacob Richmond of Victoria's Atomic Vaudeville Theatre Company took it upon himself to imagine the "what" about six such "who's" who might otherwise blend into anonymity.

Asked by Richard Ouzounian in the Toronto Star why he chose to kill off six teenagers, Richmond replied: "The thing I like about adolescence is it's a very emotionally open kind of age. They don't have professions yet. They can only describe themselves in terms of their dreams...We all share a confusion as to what our purpose is. Do we even have a purpose at all? Would anyone notice if we just vanished? That's why I had them all killed off. I like the idea of a generation that just disappears."

RTC launches viewers onto an unlikely platform: the Catholic notion of purgatory -- that way-station people go to after death where it's decided whether one proceeds up to St. Peter or down to Beelzebub. Teen viewers, I reckon, will likely not even have heard of the p-word or know its origin. Or care much. No matter.

The storyline, amplified: the six teen victims are from Uranium, Saskatchewan from the St. Cassian Catholic School. A traveling carny show shambles through town. At the urging of Karnack the carny's automaton fortuneteller, the giddy kids pile into the roller coaster known as Cyclone. The coaster crashes at the apex of its upside-down rotation. But the kids don't quite die just yet. Because Vatican rules have them vault to purgatory first.

Enter Karnack (the name swiped from Johnny Carson's eponymous soothsayer). Karnack (via Carey Wass's live voice off-stage) offers each of the six kids a chance to compete to get flesh-&-blood life back instead of eternity: only one of them will win, to be selected by "unanimous consensus" [which this ex-bureaucrat knows is an oxymoron -- group decisions are either "unanimous" or by "consensus"].

So the conceit of RTC is for each of the actors to have to argue their case why they should be the one saved and not the others. This they do through autobiographic monologue followed by a song-&-dance number that trills their story while the other choir members act as their back-up troupe. Completely typical of dream sequences, each performer's gig embraces a legion of emotions -- the fears and passions and dashed hopes that death steals from youngsters.

First off is Ocean (Rielle Braid), half-Catholic half-Jewish uberstudent with a Reaganite energy lobbyist for a mom and a Marxist-Leninist for a dad. Please. This is a stretch, even in a musical. But Braid demonstrates Ocean's schizy ideas nicely, backed by some great face masques.

Next up is Uranium's only homosexual Noel (Kholby Wardell). Somewhat stereotypically, he's a gay who champions existentialist thought [life has no inherent meaning or purpose]. Meanwhile he dreams of being someone he calls Monique Chevaux, a cross-dressing hooker obsessed with kissing men in pre-WWII Paris -- as he says, a "hooker with a heart of black charcoal". His dance sequence with the Ukrainian rapper Misha is arguably the best choreography and the best drama in the show. "I want to be that fucked-up girl!" is Noel's eternal plea. Misha (Jameson Matthew Parker) responds when the women do a big "Uggh!" to his kissing Noel : "Just because I'm a gangsta don't make me into a homophobe, you bitches!" 

As proof, Misha longs for his Facebook lover in Ukraine whom he kids himself into believing resembles the elegant, jailed ex-prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Misha claims he has two emotions only : rage and passion. Rage is rage. But the passion sequence by choreographer Treena Stubel projects video dance shots onto the choir's costumes. More video of Misha's lover on a silk screen and then Misha fades off-stage to blend into the video himself. No doubt the visual highlight of the night.

Constance (Kelly Hudson) is fat, knows it, lives with it okay, hates the fact she has the reputation as "the nicest girl in the school" and destroys yearbook sentiments saying such. She has a love/hate jones for Ocean and her favourite expression is "Sorry!" She's the only one who can't imagine leaving Uranium where her parents own the Fatman Cafe (don't bludgeon us with over-obvious metaphor, JR). Unlike Noel who never lost his virginity and breathes heavy over that fact, Constance reveals that she did just before she launches off Cyclone. With a tattooed carny gofer -- in a porta-potty of all sexy places. Her joyous revelation of this is the play's best laugh.

Ricky Potts (Elliott Loran) is pure oddball schtick with an inner life from a sinister sci-fi comic book world, mute and lame sometimes, animated and chatty others, a mix at moments. Not unlike Squire Barnes.

Then there's Number Six, RTC's weirdest but arguably cleverest creation, Jane Doe (Sarah Jane Pelzer). So-named JD by the coroner because she was decapitated in the Cyclone accident and none of the other St. Cassian Chamber Choir singers can seem to recall who she was. But her body was found sporting a choir uniform, sans head. So she *must* be one of them, just not quite. In whiteface with eyes behind black scleral contact lenses, Jane disquiets the other five. She's a spook, a zombie, straight out of horror flix. But her voice is the most powerful and lyrical of all : her refrain of "Just tell me who I am!" is poignant capital-p.

Message or mirthful muse, RTC ? Yes. Richmond (son of director Brian Richmond and actor/director Janet Wright) offers up an Eckhart Tollean "Now" sub-text -- life is what it is in each precious moment, and even when cut short at 17 years it will have had meaning and purpose, more than what Karnack jokes at the start of the reincarnation contest : "The point is to purge yourself of this world." Richmond's script and co-director Britt Small's handprint demonstrate considerable dramatic insight into teen angst with wit and humour and profanity and naivete and flippant cynicism that are all charming in their mix.

Brook Maxwell's pastiche of musical genres in the cast's production numbers runs the gamut from swing to R-&-B to gospel to music-rap to Kurt Weill and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Capable showcasing and songsterism by all, but while Wardell and Braid ace it, Pelzer deuces everyone.

Ingrid Hansen's costumes are best in Ricky's sequence with his silverflash priapic leotards-&-cape when surrounded by the gaggle of space-galaxy kittens.

Treena Stubel's choreography was, in most of its bits, superb. But to this eye some of the blocking appeared a bit "rehearsed" and rote -- surely better than but vaguely reminiscent of my fumbling how to do a step-ball-change the last time I was on the boards in a Lerner-&-Lowe review in White Rock in 1980.  Still, mere quibble, that.  

This is youthful exuberance worth a look. New York is casting an eye on mounting RTC there, likely off- or off-off-Broadway if at all. The pending cross-Canada tour of this ensemble will help determine whether RTC will play in Peoria or places east or not.

Until February 16 only, then on to Edmonchuk.

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Boeing-Boeing will bing-bong your funny bone

"Cute!" was my wife's enthusiastic chirp at the end of Act I of ACT's Boeing-Boeing that opened Wednesday night and runs through February 24th at the Stanley. And *cute* is what renders a 50-year-old French script translation built on rabid gender and cultural stereotyping something to laugh at robustly in 2013 without apology.

The conceit of the play a simple. Playboy architect Bernard (Jonathon Young) lives and lusts in Paris in a lavish glass-walled apartment in the 60's. Thanks to his dour and ironic Gallic housekeeper Berthe (Nicola Lipman), he is able to shuttle three stewardess "fiances" in and out of his elegant trysting pad unaware of each other. One is Gloria, an American (Kimberley Sustad), the second is Gabriella, an Italian (Moya O'Connell), and the third is Gretchen, a German (Colleen Wheeler). Meanwhile Bernard has a firm grip on an international flight schedule catalogue. Aided and abetted by Berthe's ethnic meal preps and bedroom prop changes, the stews each pop back "home" for nuzzles and snuggery for a day or two at a time.

Soon, however, come faster planes that giddy-up the women's trips, and the comic possibilities for mischance and hilarity at Bernard's polygamous love nest increase exponentially. And do. Particularly when a surprise visit from Bernard's aw-shucksy Wisconsin pal from university daze, Robert (Andrew McNee), becomes an *intervention*.

Why the ACT production of Boeing-Boeing soars into the ether with laughter in 2013 despite it being 100% politically incorrect is a function of two ace decisions by Director David Mackay : (1) excellent actors hand-picked for their roles, and (2) the stage direction, blocking, and funny business he guided them to create.

In every case the performers take the interpretation of script and role to evermore risible heights of overstatement, exaggeration and raw stereotype -- cultural as well as gender -- through endless schticks of physical comedy. The result is as much satire and parody of 60's life as it is the just plain fun of farce and slapstick. You see Chaplin, Three Stooges, Keystone Kops, and John Cleese at every trip and flop on the Stanley stage. And while the panic attack sequences were a bit on the much-ness side of the ledger, in all the madcap nonsense was rumbustious chaos tightly mapped.

Dialogue? No, more like bursts of shouts, screams and hyperbole almost always at high decibel values, except for Berthe's witty but low-key jibes and japes. The chemistry between the actors is less verbal than kinetic, in no way visceral and cerebral the way Oscar Wilde's scripts are. The fun-filled suspense in the play stems from its dramatic irony : the audience knows who's behind which door, but when the door will suddenly burst open or slam shut keeps everyone gleefully edgy. As Mackay notes : "Part of the audience-character relationship in a farce is that there should be a general feeling of panic and hysteria building towards a grand and accelerated climax. No one is particularly real or believable, but it is ultimately very funny." Said he, done he.

Amir Ofek's set design is a full-stage 3-tier living room with eggshell walls, wainscoting and crown moldings featuring 7 doors and an archway that are exploited to the hilt.  E.g. Berthe's sneek-a-peek look through the round cook-kitchen glass at randy ol' Robert was a perfect live theatre bit. 

In the end I would say Andrew McNee stole the show. As Bernard's foil and traffic cop, his efforts to keep the stews from stumbling across one another exceeded what the script called for I have no doubt. His facial contortions, eye-pops and squeaky laugh had me sniggering throughout -- from his oafish arrival to his tongue-dancing with Gloria to his final cheek-to-cheek with Bernard right at play's end. (The fake sodomy bit Mackay decided on between Robert and Bernard grabbed laughs, okay, but maybe was a bit too cute and superfluous.)

As long-suffering Berthe (pronounced "Bairt"), Nicola Lipman was simply superb. When she exclaimed to Robert "A beast is even less than a maid, that's why it's good I'm an optimist!" I could barely see through the tears to write the line down. N.B. I would happily see the play again just for that extended scene between them, but quite frankly for each of their individual and joint scenes, one by one, throughout. 

Jonathon Young had the best and most consistent gesticulations : his hand action constantly buttoning and unbuttoning his suit jacket as he collapsed on the chesterfield or flew into the room was stuff directors can't teach, actors have to have it, as well as his incessant waving and shooing of the "fiances" into one room or another or out the front door trying to save his sorry butt.

From the straight film of '65 starring Tony Curtis and Jerry Lewis, this ACT production takes that low-brow nudge-nudge-wink-wink version to a high comedy stratosphere of idiocy today that is spot on. Stop fretting the economy, climate change, and the Dix/Clark pre-election charade underway. Go see this. Laugh, laugh, laugh and then go have a pee.

Boeing-Boeing was written by the late comic French playwright Marc Camoletti and is the most performed French play in the world. Translated from the French by Beverley Cross and Francis Evans. Directed by David Mackay. Set by Amir Ofek. Costumes -- perfect pastels for the stews and perfectly boring suits for the guys, as it should be -- by Nancy Bryant. Lighting by Gerald King.

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Santaland Diaries : 75 minutes of goofy SNL  

Just when you think you might commit homicide after one too many Christmas carols -- Bob Seeger doing "Little Drummer Boy" comes to mind -- go see Santaland Diaries. It's a deliciously ironic romp through Macy's annual Santa display in New York City : all about clots of kids with runny noses and poopy diapers who line up for hours, sure. But mostly it's about their stressed-out overachieving parents who fuel the seasonal mania just for a chance for little Dagwood or their princess Priscilla to sit on Santa's knee for a photo-op.

American humour diva David Sedaris first penned Santaland Diaries based on his experiences as a 30-something working at Macy's as an elf rather than stay on pogey. On any shift he was one of 17 (e.g. Cash Register Elf, Santa Elf, Photo Elf, Vomit Corner Elf &c.) . Sedaris chose elf-name Crumpet, noting "We were allowed to choose our own names and given permission to change them according to our outlook on the snowy world." [One day, feeling "trollish", he re-branded himself as Blisters.] Performed first as a radio monologue by Sedaris at Christmas '92 on radio NPR, in 1996 New York dramatist Joe Mantello morphed it into a one-act one-man play. By 2008 it was one of the ten most popular plays performed annually, Stateside, and is now on view at the Revue Stage of ACT starring Ryan Biel in a brilliant, note-perfect performance.

Directed by John Murphy, Biel captures the madcap antics of SantaLand with an exceptional balance of irony and empathy. Sure, often the script disses stupid human tricks with withering commentary. But even though Crumpet admits "I spend the day lying to people", to truly succeed the performer of Crumpet's role must grasp how Sedaris's heart was pumping with empathy beneath his rapier-fast tongue. Take these lines by way of example : "I was told that it is an elf's lot to remain merry in the face of torment and adversity... it won't be quite as sad as standing on some street corner dressed as a french fry (passing out fast-food coupons)."

Designer Ted Roberts aids and abets Biel in his triumph with a simple set : cream coloured trapezoidal panels on wheels that are manoeuvred about to represent different viewpoints in SantaLand. A couple of outsize boxes that scoot on and off stage and are lit up to reflect kids or coffee shop furniture or other stage paraphernalia. The backlit rear screen to feature hand-drawn maps and word sequences by projectionist designer Candelario Andrade -- particularly the typewriter drop-screens clacking off the days until Christmas -- these work well on the spare Revue stage.  

This is Will Ferrell's angry dog screed meeting Monty Python's dead parrot schtick. The dialogue toggles between quotes from Macy's visitors with reflections from our wise elf. As in this bit : "Tonight I saw a woman slap and shake her sobbing daughter, yelling 'Goddamn it, Rachel, get on that man's lap and smile or I'll give you something to cry about.' / I often take photographs of crying children. Even more grotesque is taking a picture of a crying child with a false grimace. It's not a smile so much as the forced shape of a smile. Oddly, it pleases the parents. / 'Good girl, Rachel. Now let's get the hell out of here. Your mother has a headache that won't quit until you're twenty-one.' "  [Curiously -- wrongly ! -- Murphy and Biel deleted the second quote, a true comic punchline if ever were one.]

Although only 20 years old, SD seems wrested from the late 70's, after a decade of hippiedom and eco-consciousness exited stage right and the neurosis of greed infected the Boomer generation. More ! Better ! Now ! Grasp ! Acquire ! Flaunt ! all became watchwords, and North America prided itself on spoiling its kids and itself but remained awkward and unsure of its ethos. Santas needed to be black for blacks, white for whites. Gays were still in the closet, known only by their monikers such as Snowball or Crumpet. Mentally challenged were called "retarded", as in "...for a few minutes I could not begin to guess where the retarded people ended and the regular New Yorkers began. Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it."  So politically correct SD certainly is not. [But just maybe by projecting the word "retarded" over and over, larger and larger on the backlit screen, the offence the word inspires was neutered.]

No, it's the stage business and blocking and masterful voice manipulation for Biel, coupled with his nudge-nudge-wink-wink byplay with the audience, also the clever pin-spot effect whenever the monologue switched from Crumpet's observations to quotes from Macy's visitors -- these are what make SD work well.  Images and ideas stick : that 1/3 of SantaLand's visitors are single and middle-aged; the 40-something with his "cracked and puny voice" who visited Santa three times one day and peed on him the final visit; the woman-child in pixie clothes who visits Santa with her aging Mom and blithely skips off afterward.  

Crumpet dismisses many of the folks he meets as phonies, sounding all the world like Holden Caulfield of Catcher in the Rye fame. But by doing so the poignancy emerges -- in the sequence of the "love festival", this particular Santa drives home the point that we need to drop our facades and slow our watches and ditch the maddening devices that virtualize our precious minutes on earth. 

 Best bits : The Santa as anagram for Satan piece. The just-cited Santa who doesn't even ask the kids what they want for Christmas but gives everyone a wee sermonette instead : "Remember that the most important thing is to try and love other people as much as they love you." And the final explosive scene on Christmas Eve when the manager loses it with a bitchy customer -- priceless ! 

Word coach gripe : The word "fucking" doesn't have to be emphasized each time it's used. The line should not be rendered "You look so fucking stupid !" rather "You look so fucking stupid!"  An early reference to Crumpet's outfit, delightfully spun together by Sydney Cavanagh.

Go see advice : Not for kids younger than 12. For "lapsed idealists" who still cleave to values and dreams they want to believe in, no cynics allowed. For drama fans who want to see their favourite A & W burger ad guy turn in just an ace performance of wit and nuance and breathless play.  

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