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.

-30-

A Christmas Story is to sing-&-dance from memory

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 : Almost everybody in Western culture despairs over storekeeper cynicism with their "early onset Christmas" that now starts a week or two after Labour Day. Indeed, a cliche for sure is to ask how "Hark, The Herald Angels Sing" in the choir loft can possibly out-ring "Jingle Bells" at the cash register. But. Take nine kids, get them singin' & dancin' & tappin' their toes and their hearts out to the tunes of a dozen-plus clever songs -- do that and even Grumpmeisters like me find their heart softening and trilling a bit at all the fun. Directed and choreographed by Vancouver's unstoppable, incomparable Valerie Easton, this seasonal show is definitely an evening you'll agree meets the "That's entertainment!" test. ACT will doubtless reprise it for years to come.

Acting pin-spots young & old alike : As a former p.r. guy for a public school district decades back I remember threatening to quit, announcing peremptorily to my boss in 1976 : "I have just been to the last elementary school production of The Wizard of Oz I'm ever going to...!" Well this ain't no elementary school production, folks, far from it. This cast of youngsters is a dizzyingly and freakishly talented troupe. In many cases they approach professional levels of skill even at their pre-teen ages. Valin Shinyea as young Ralphie, certainly, possesses a confidence and nuance of gesture that his lengthy stage and screen c.v. attest to. While all of them deserve kudos for their focus and crisp deliveries, I found my eye kept jumping to Jordyn Bennett as Esther Jane -- the class snitch on Flick -- as particularly engaging. And crowd favourite Jakob Phan as Grover, the bully's pet stooge, wowed the house with his stupendous tap footwork and toothy bright-eyed grins.

On the adult side of the program, Matt Palmer as The Old Man grabbed this viewer's eye repeatedly with his antics on "The Genius on Cleveland Street" and "A Major Award" particularly. Playing opposite, his "good wife & helpmeet" Meghan Gardiner gave her stereotypical Mother role a warm and gentle interpretation. Delightful vocal chops as well. For her part, Sara-Jeanne Hosie as Miss Shields the spinster schoolmarm brought out countless smiles over the night.

Who gonna like : The Jean Shepherd original comic essays that drive A Christmas Story are quite frankly designed to tickle the funny bone of War Generation and Boomer cohorts. After all, what do Gen X, Y & Z's know about Tinker Toys, Lionel trains, Red Ryder BB guns, Palmolive soap as mouthwash, or bullies doing Dutch rubs on their victims' heads? But the "That's entertainment!" aspect of A Christmas Story -- where the fast footwork and clever choreography of the young stars in the cast come into play -- will no doubt give them some live theatre buzzes that no YouTube or Instagram or Facebook image could ever do. A touching and embracing snatch of Christmas this is for sure!

-30-

Wordy Version :

A Christmas Story is to sing-&-dance from memory

From the footlights : Almost everybody in Western culture despairs over storekeeper cynicism with their "early onset Christmas" that now starts a week or two after Labour Day. Indeed, a cliche for sure is to ask how "Hark, The Herald Angels Sing" in the choir loft can possibly out-ring "Jingle Bells" at the cash register. But. Take nine kids, get them singin' & dancin' & tappin' their toes and their hearts out to the tunes of a dozen-plus clever songs -- do that and even Grumpmeisters like me find their heart softening and trilling a bit at all the fun. Directed and choreographed by Vancouver's unstoppable, incomparable Valerie Easton, this seasonal show is definitely an evening you'll agree meets the "That's entertainment!" test. ACT will doubtless reprise it for years to come.

The story's genesis : American comic Jerry Seinfeld credits Ohio's Jean Shepherd with providing him his comic inspiration from an early age. Shepherd was one of USA's first radio talk-show hosts on New York's station WOR where he spun tales of comic irony about life in the mid-20th century. Perhaps his most noted collection of published stories was titled "In God We Trust -- All Others Pay Cash", and that book is the source of many of the scenes that Shepherd re-drafted for film in 1983. Some 25 years later, two University of Michigan theatre arts students, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, collaborated on the musical score with veteran Joseph Robinette who did up the show's libretto, a.k.a. its "book". When ACT sussed out a Seattle production five years ago, decision was quickly taken to perform it, eventually, in Vancouver. So now it will twin as a second Christmas biggie opposite the ACT mainstay It's A Wonderful Life that opens November 19th on Granville Island.

How it's all put together :  The show is essentially a flashback on Shepherd's youth in Hammond, Indiana. Specifically for the 24 days of December during which kids phantasized religiously and relentlessly on the One Big Present they hoped to snag on Christmas morning if only they can survive the month without blotting their copybook. And back in the day, what red-blooded American 9-year-old boy didn't dream of getting a BB gun? (I remember being precisely that age and shocking my bedridden Grandma who, when I proudly produced it for her on Boxing Day, immediately scolded me : "You're not going to shoot at squirrels or birds I trust!" I was struck dumb. But you can bet no animal ever expired from BB...) Shepherd's young Ralphie Parker not only aches for an official Red Ryder carbine action BB gun, he positively obsesses over it. But everyone he tells about his Big Wish for Christmas has the same irksome riposte : "You'll shoot your eye out!" his mom, his teacher, even a liquor'd-up Santa at Higbee's Department Store all tell him. 

Shepherd qua adult circulates the stage to narrate the flashbacks and tie the scenes together from memory, but the music and the storyline acted out by the kids pretty well allow the script to bounce along engagingly on its own. Ralphie's dad whom he calls The Old Man has cursing bouts with the aging coal furnace that's constantly on the fritz from clinkers jamming up its works. But he's also a devoted crossword puzzler who dreams of becoming The Genius of Cleveland Street by winning a local contest. He does, and shortly his prize arrives : a lifesize lamp that's a Follies Berger dancer's leg wrapped in fishnet. The Old Man clasps it lovingly. (A less likely prize in Republican Ohio in 1940 is hard to conjure, even if Shepherd did write the occasional piece for Playboy.) The burlesque high-kicks number done by the adults pirouetting with nine look-alike lamps was, as kids would say today, simply "sick" [sic].

The warmth of Mom's enthusiasm for this dubious front window lamp, meanwhile, is considerably less than luke, and its demise is all but certain. Add to this bit of silliness the kids' playground antics of a "triple dog dare", lips on a frozen pipe, the neighbourhood bully on the losing end of a punch-up, put it together and what you've got is a Brownie Hawkeye shot at f1.4 into a mirror. Want some Kodachrome nostalgia for small town life? This is it. A gentler, kinder time and place where there was zero reason to fear a kid's BB gun would ever morph into what we have today : rifles that with a single pull of the trigger can slaughter innocents by the dozens. 

Production, production production !  Never having seen the 1983 movie, I was unaware of this piece either with or without any song-&-dance. Now I am spoiled. Because it is precisely because of the spirited song-&-dance that give Shepherd's stories their creativity and energy in 2015. Thanks not only to the boundless enthusiasm of the 19 cast here, but what direction and choreography Director Easton give them to work with is what will bring me back to see it again. Put another way, one more Boomer trip down memory lane without Easton's trademark song-&-dance excellence would be a stage show I could easily give a miss to.

Sure, the dialogue is fun. Classic Shepherd. Dad is jokingly referred to as "the most feared furnace fighter in northern Indiana". He's also a man given to bouts of potty-mouth : "His tapestry of profanity is still hanging its face over Lake Michigan," narrator Ralphie tells us. Or when Flick gets his tongue stuck to the flagpole, Miss Shields the Grade 4 teacher scolds the class : "I am sure the guilt you feel for this is worse than any punishment you could receive!" These are the kind of whimsical snippets that make the crowd giggle.

But what makes the crowd roar are the choreographed songs and the dances that bring Ralphie's BB gun daydreams alive : in "Ralphie To The Rescue" he imagines himself a hero dispatching baddies be they be-caped vampire villains or cowboy outlaws or gangsters in a Chicago speakeasy (when the kids' lengthy tap-dance with a vampy Miss Shields easily won top production honours on the night). The seven neighbourhood chums do the show's best comic number "When You're a Wimp!", while Mom's "What A Mother Does" and "Just Like That" recall for us that simpler time when routines for "housewives" -- women married to their domestic caregiver role -- were more predictable and less tricky than are today's more egalitarian household arrangements. 

Acting pin-spots young & old alike : As a former p.r. guy for a public school district decades back I remember threatening to quit, announcing peremptorily to my boss in 1976 : "I have just been to the last elementary school production of The Wizard of Oz I'm ever going to...!" Well this ain't no elementary school production, folks, far from it. This cast of youngsters is a dizzyingly and freakishly talented troupe. In many cases they approach professional levels of skill even at their pre-teen ages. Valin Shinyea as young Ralphie, certainly, possesses a confidence and nuance of gesture that his lengthy stage and screen c.v. attest to. While all of them deserve kudos for their focus and crisp deliveries, I found my eye kept jumping to Jordyn Bennett as Esther Jane -- the class snitch on Flick -- as particularly engaging. And crowd favourite Jakob Phan as Grover, the bully's pet stooge, wowed the house with his stupendous tap footwork and toothy bright-eyed grins.

On the adult side of the program, Matt Palmer as The Old Man grabbed this viewer's eye repeatedly with his antics on "The Genius on Cleveland Street" and "A Major Award" particularly. Playing opposite, his "good wife & helpmeet" Meghan Gardiner gave her stereotypical Mother role a warm and gentle interpretation. Delightful vocal chops as well. For her part, Sara-Jeanne Hosie as Miss Shields the spinster schoolmarm brought out countless smiles over the night.

But go for the "show" if nothing else :  Costume designer Sheila White has done masterful work here. The variety of costumes for all the daydream sequences was quite frankly astonishing to behold, rich and sumptuous in every instant. And the quick-change costume changes were slick. Set designer Amir Ofek provides a visually rewarding series of scrims and fly gallery drop downs that please nicely. And then there's the rich sounds of the band headed up by Danny Balkwill. Coupled with mic's for all the actors balanced out by Chris Daniels, the show's tunes blend well indeed.

Who gonna like : The Jean Shepherd original comic essays that drive A Christmas Story are quite frankly designed to tickle the funny bone of War Generation and Boomer cohorts. After all, what do Gen X, Y & Z's know about Tinker Toys, Lionel trains, Red Ryder BB guns, Palmolive soap as mouthwash, or bullies doing Dutch rubs on their victims' heads? But the "That's entertainment!" aspect of A Christmas Story -- where the fast footwork and clever choreography of the young stars in the cast come into play -- will no doubt give them some live theatre buzzes that no YouTube or Instagram or Facebook image could ever do. A touching and embracing snatch of Christmas this is for sure!

Particulars :  Book by Joseph Robinette based on stories by Jean Shepherd. Words and Music by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul.  Production by Arts Club Theatre.  Performances at ACT's Stanley Theatre, 2750 Granville Street, thru December 27th (schedules vary).  Run-time 120 minutes plus intermission.  Tickets & schedule information by phone at 604.687.1644 or via www.artsclub.com.

Production & artistic team :  Director / Choreographer Valerie Easton.  Musical Director Danny Balkwill. Set Designer Amir Ofek.  Costume Designer Sheila White.  Sound Designer Chris Daniels.  Lighting Designer Gerald King.  Stage Manager Pamela Jokobs.  Assistant Stage Manager Anne Taylor.  Assistant to the Director Cory Haas.  Apprentice Stage Manager Tanya Schwaerzle.

The Band :  Danny Balkwill (Keyboards / Trombone).  Graham Boyle (Drums).  Henry Christian (Trumpet).  Ken Cormier (Keyboards / Keyboard Programming).  Craig Salkeld (Trumpet / Keyboard).  Bryan Vance (Reeds).  Anonymous (Chime). 

Performers :  Cameron Andres.  Scott Augustine.  Jordyn Bennett.  Graham Coffeng.  Brennan Cuff.  Meghan Gardiner.  Janet Gigliotti.  Glen Gordon.  Sara-Jeanne Hosie.  Elizabeth Irving.  Avery Johnson.  Duff MacDonald.  Julia MacLean.  Katie Murphy.  Matt Palmer.  Jakob Phan.  Gordon Roberts.  Graham Verchere.  Robyn Wong, & Valin Shinyei as Ralphie.  

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Seeger anything but "An Incompleat Folksinger"

From the footlights :  Incompleat. For starters, no search engine recognizes it as a bona fide English word. Only its antonym, "compleat", meaning "skilled". So in coining the word "incompleat" to describe his talents as a folksinger -- "not skilled" -- Pete Seeger had his tongue buried deeply in his left cheek. Why the left, specifically? Because Seeger who died not quite two years ago at 94 was a life-long lefty. This show is 100 minutes of Victoria songster Mark Hellman performing some 20 of Seeger's signature songs of struggle, protest and hope. All of which are interspersed with snippets of Seeger views on his socially committed life from pre-WWII days through the Vietnam horrenda. His beliefs in non-violent protest; in support for the poor & disenfranchised; in trade unionism; in eco-politics : through social communion and song, he felt, folks can achieve peace, if only momentarily. This is a feel-good show about people living life from the heart, first, the head second, but always striving to keep the two in sync to never let The Powers That Be have the last say. 

The show's genesis : Performer Mark Hellman of Victoria's the Other Guys Theatre company got to chatting with another OGT principal, Ross Desprez, shortly after Seeger's death. Each agreed a tribute to Seeger whose music they both loved would be a great project. They started with Seeger's book of the same name first published in 1972 when Seeger was in his early 50's. Over six enervating months, his 600 pages of memoir got distilled and adapted by the two of them down to 60 pages of script, and then chopped further to a bit over 30. In conjunction with Musical Director Tobin Stokes, Desprez directed Hellman in the one-man show that features 60% of the songs on banjo, the rest on 12-string guitar.

How it's structured : Seeger believed "We can get drunk on music ! ", and thus his shows always involved crowds joining him on the choruses at least, if not all the verses. To raise the song in lyrics simple and direct was his passion. His words from the book say it best : "Once upon a time, wasn't singing a part of everyday life as much as talking, physical exercise, and religion? Our distant ancestors, wherever they were in this world, sang while pounding grain, paddling canoes, or walking long journeys. Can we begin to make our lives once more all of a piece...[for when] a crowd joins in on a chorus as though to raise the ceiling a few feet higher, they they also know there is hope for the world." Seeger believed that "the basic purpose of all art is to enlarge our opinion of other people." Not exactly what devotees of the Western canon might subscribe to, or their detractors, but Seeger lived and breathed and sang his heart out over such a belief. Thus from the get-go the Hellman/Desprez script finds Hellman entreating the crowd to sing along with him. And I did. With more gusto than timbre.

I know Bob Seger, but who's Pete...?  Long before Bob's 1980's anthem "Against The Wind", Pete rolled out three of the most iconic folk/pop/protest songs ever recorded : "If I Had A Hammer", which was popularized by Peter, Paul and Mary. For the Kingston Trio "Where Have All The Flowers Gone" was a signature piece. And then my personal favourite -- adapted from The Bible's book of Ecclesiastes, 3:6  -- "Turn, Turn, Turn" made heroic in the early 70's by The Byrds. He also had a small-ish role in "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" (covered by Jimmie Rodgers) : in that one Seeger focus'd his musical talents on the chorus. And then there's "We Shall Overcome", a hand-me-down Negro spiritual. It was Seeger who changed the original verb "will" to "shall" because he felt it was more "singable" and compelling. (Personal insight : Listening to all the storytelling in Seeger's songs tonight convinced me that my favourite 70's U.S. troubadour, Harry Chapin, not only mimic'd Seeger's style, he almost copied it directly for such ballads as "Midnight Watchman" and "Taxi".) No question, like Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly, Seeger was a player, majorly so, in mid-century U.S. folk music.

Why the show is timely & topical :  Seeger became, Hellman tells us, a "cultural guerilla" in the States in the 60's and 70's. Due to his strong trade union ties; his previous membership in the Communist Party; his calling the McCarthy era Congress and its infamous HUAC committee a "witchhunt" and an "inquisition"; later his describing President Johnson's VietNam adventure a crime against humanity -- for all of these reasons Seeger was, except for two brief appearances on The Smothers Brothers Show, blacklisted from nationwide network television. (And for its part TSBS was canceled unilaterally after two seasons by CBS because it was too "controversial" despite having millions of weekly viewers.) Thereafter, Seeger's preferred audiences became college campuses where hundreds and thousands of eager Boomer kids lapped up his protest songs.

Today? On a typical North American college campus? Acerbic commentator Rex Murphy has called out contemporary colleges as "cocoons of self-indulgence and actual anti-intellectualism" in thrall to what he calls the "anti-thought brigades". These, he says, are people who demand "safe spaces" free of contrary or challenging ideas.  Lectures and speeches must be hi-lited with "trigger warnings" if students might be exposed to a view that could disagree with their own. Places such as these feature countless grievances against alleged "micro-aggressions" by professors or classmates if a viewpoint is put forward with any degree of assertion whatever.* 

Given Seeger's universal embrace of hope and love and faith that he believed would "raise the conscience of the country", on such campuses to-day his songs just might not play all that well. Which is reason enough to go see this show. To remind ourselves that in today's world of ISIL and mass refugee migrations and an Arctic that may have no ice in a decade or two, the "embrace of hope and love and faith" is ever-worthy, ever-necessary, ever a beacon on the horizon that calls out to our better selves to respond, to act.

Who gonna like :  Other than CBC Radio's Deep Roots show with Tom Power, folk music is not particularly au courant any more. It's been eclipsed by the sugary enticements of "country pop rock"
in today's quick-fix hyperactive manic race against boredom. Why? We dwell in a social media-besotted culture. Attention spans are spasmodic, fleeting. It's a culture we're apparently stuck with ad infinitum, ad nauseam. But if the songs I've mentioned and others of similar tone and sentiment that speak about what Seeger refers to as "acts of reaffirmation, like a sunrise or a kiss" -- if a night of such rousing but relatively slo-mo unplugged music appeals to you -- this show, an old-style hootenanny, will get you humming and singing and clapping and tearing-up at just the right times : you'll thank yourself for taking it in.

Particulars : Script Adaptation by Ross Despres and Mark Hellman of the Pete Seeger memoir of the same name. Production by the Other Guys Theatre (Victoria) in collaboration with the Firehall Arts Centre (Vancouver). 120 minutes' duration with a 15-minute intermission. On through November 14th at the Centre on the corner of East Cordova & Gore. Tickets and schedules via firehallartscentre.ca or by phoning 604.689.0926.

Production : Director Ross Desprez.  Musical Director Tobin Stokes.  Lighting Designer Rebekah Johnson.  Rehearsal Coordinator & Dramaturge Sandy Cumberland.  Production Coordinator / Stage Manager Leigh Robinson.  Audio Technician Roger T. Kemble.

Performer :  Mark Hellman.

*Addendum :  Upon reading the original TIF review published early this morning, a faithful reader responded to Rex Murphy's observations about today's universities. He noted that Pete Seeger's cover of the Malvina Reynolds original "Little Boxes" -- that Pete performed as a B-side on his 1963 Columbia 45 r.p.m. of "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?" -- might aptly apply, to wit :

And the children go to school,
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university,
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same

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The Dining Room grabs at mostly fond memories

From the footlights :  In 1982, American playwright A. R. Gurney from Buffalo, NY was 52 years old when off-Broadway produced his 18 overlapping vignettes about the 20th century dining room. When the dining room was special, when it was the centerpiece of the house. Often called a "memoirist of the vanishing WASP", Gurney's world transcends such an artificial limit. E.g. across the years I've known many folks of Jewish, Irish, Italian, South Asian, Central American, Indonesian descent among others -- all of whom have dining rooms that get used robustly as family gathering places. Like ghosts revisiting favourite haunts, the 57 characters played here by just six actors range in age from cheeky grammar school kids to aging fading seniors. They remind us of times past and present, lit.& fig. "Present" we put aside our iPhones and the filters of Facebook or FaceTime : instead we engage one another on a flesh-&-blood footing. Gurney's 18 vignettes are wrought with clever sentiment, and Western Gold executes them lovingly & crisply.

How it's all put together :  Imagine you're the "third eye" viewing 70 years of meals at various peoples' dining rooms (all performed, serially, on the same set). Here's how the back cover of the Dramatists Play Service script describes what you'll see:

"The action is a mosaic of interrelated scenes -- some funny, some touching, some rueful. The actors change roles, personalities and ages as they portray a wide variety of characters from little boys to stern grandfathers and from giggling teenage girls to Irish housemaids. Each vignette introduces a new set of people and events : a father lectures his son on grammar and politics; a boy returns from boarding school to discover his mother's infidelity; a senile grandmother doesn't recognize her own sons at Thanksgiving dinner; a daughter, her marriage a shambles, pleads to return home, etc."

I.e. some 100 minutes of stage-time, 18 scenes, on average just over five minutes each before the next dissolve-&-fade-out into another snapshot. You see dining room moments lived up close and personal over 3/4 of a century -- from roughrider Teddy Roosevelt's fin de siecle America still using horse-drawn carriages to shortly after the fall of Saigon as engineered by Dick Nixon when Toyotas were kicking Chevy butts all across the land.

The gist of the gab :  Carl Jung famously said that in dreams, rooms in a house reflect symbolically various aspects and levels of consciousness. If true for dreams, equally so, why not, for fictional "I Remember Mama" type shows on stage. The dining room : a seat of sentimental recall, your "happy times" place; a site for clashes, when a kid's hyperactive amygdala smacks up against Father's prefrontal cortex that responds sternly; a set-to spot, where cognitive debates descend into affective hissy-fits with family members or guests ginned up on drink or hubris.

Mr. Gurney's script runs through the century in these regards. From references to "instant coffee on Eastern Airlines" [Sc.1] to "But it's just the tour cast -- Katharine Cornell isn't playing Saint Joan" [Sc.4] to "At boarding school he'll just get mixed up with women who wear lipstick and long pants" [Sc.8] to "I'm doing a classroom project for my Amherst anthropology class on the eating habits of a vanishing culture -- a slide-show on the WASPs of the U.S. northeast" [Sc.13] to "Uncle Henry's 'bachelor attachments' were called out by Binky Byers down at the Club", Dad announces, and son responds "Oh, you mean he's a fruit?" [Sc.15]. 

Post-show chat reveals insights : At a talk-back tonight I asked cast member and Western Gold Artistic Director Anna Hagan whether she thought Gurney was being sentimental or wistful or just ironic in writing such a clever but extended schtick around dining room manners, dottering but doting maids, polished silver and Waterford crystal, snippets and sniggers of chit-chat shared at the table. 

She responded : "Eating is such a basic, primitive thing, whenever people love one another they sit and eat together." In a word, all-of-the-above did Gurney intend. 

Fellow actor Adele Noronha, meanwhile -- she raised in her youth in India post-Brit but whose parents still patterned her upbringing thus  -- Noronha said Gurney was addressing "the illusion of culture" : peoples' beliefs that their nano-second on earth and all the social niceties they subscribe to have core importance. 

Naw, she implied, they're just polite & hypocritical but well-meant customs going ka-bump! ka-bump! ka-bump! down the steps of history until new customs supplant them.

Production values abound at PAL : Glenn MacDonald's set and props and the staging arrangements are what grab the viewer instantly. The action occurs in a quasi-theatre-in-the-round mode, with an omnipresent and ever-seeing dining room table at centre. A double-pedestal highly varnished affair with inlaid carvings, it is a piece of furniture quite to die for. Visually and contextually, the whole set is designed to be as if snatched from a museum -- red velvet ropes on brass stanchions encircle the stage at its start and are quite a brilliant visual underscore of the play's themes.

Around the edges of the set, pedestal tables hold goblets and silver serving pieces high-lighted by pin spots. Upstage three rich stained glass transoms harken back to earlier decades and their various accoutrements we admire and pine for in our plastic culture. WGT is particularly indebted to Leslie Madsen of Mount Pleasant Furniture -- prop maven for Hollywood North -- for her eager and sumptuous supplies.

Adding to all this richness is Sound Designer Matthew MacDonald-Bains' varied musical score of classics and more modern cuts that match each scene delightfully.

Acting hi-lites : Part of the fun of the staging set out by playwright Gurney is that the six actors each play roles out-of-age : the younger actors depict hobbled servants while the older ones play birthday party kids in short pants with abandon and glee. 

To single out any one of the six performers as superior to the others would be, I think, unfair to them all, although the "repair the broken table" sequence [Sc.9] was just priceless : Kate Dion-Richard and Keith Martin Gordey writhing and twisting under the table to discern its faulty bits that -- like them -- need some serious t.l.c. 

On a personal note the Thanksgiving scene [Sc.10] with Anna Hagan as Grandma gripped by such senility she doesn't know her own sons was particularly touching. My mother always had failing elders at our multi-leaf'd dining room table that sat some two dozen folks. (To this day while everyone holds hands, I sing "Come Ye Thankful People, Come" a capella by way of pre-dinner grace with guests at our Cariboo cabin each Thanksgiving. Then we tuck into the turkey that was roasted in our ancient word-burning McLary.)

Shortly after there's daughter (Dion-Richard) who bewails her failed-marriage followed by failed-lover followed by failed lesbian liaison [Sc.14].  She entreats Dad "I want to start all over again, I just can't go back!" Dad responds "Neither can I !" A fist of scotch in hand and two under the belt, he begrudges her and her three kids just a week or 10 days max. back "home". Yeah, no question, tears welled up.

Finally, the three women's ultra-slo-mo setting up of the dinner table -- while Pop blueprints for Richard, the eldest son, how he wants his obit written up including his lowest golf score and an Ernest Hemingway fishing moment in Florida [Sc.17]. This scene was simply a delicious! bit of theatre blocking and stage business. Then came the closing snapshot : Gatling gun yakkety-yak & jibber-jabber with all six actors talking at once over one another as they sat down for the last supper. Brilliant! work by Director Chelsea Haberlin in its contrast to the just finished slo-mo table set-up scene.

Who gonna like : Gurney's The Dining Room is not great literature of the calibre of John Updike, Walker Percy or John Cheever who specialized in chronicling the demise of tradition & custom & good breeding, as it was called back in the day, in what many complain is now a callous and crude au courant USA. TDR is a comedy of manners with its various sentiments and wistfulness and ironies as previously noted. TDR is for people who delight in small theatre in an embracing and rewarding venue. There is much to laugh at and relate to. Six actors give flat-out Bonkers! energy during their performances of 57 parts in 18 overlapping scenes that tie together thematically very well indeed. Sound to you like a night's worthy alternative to rom-com Netflix movies or the Canucks or the Kardashians? Just 10 days left !

Particulars :  Playwright A. R. Gurney.  Production by Western Gold Theatre.  Performances at PAL Studio Theatre, 581 Cardero Street, thru November 8th (schedules vary).  Run-time 100 minutes plus intermission.  Ticket & schedule information by phone at 604.363.5734 or over the Internet at URL www.WesternGoldTheatre.org.

Production & artistic team :  Director Chelsea Haberlin.  Set Designer Glenn MacDonald.  Assistant Set Designer R. Todd Parker. Costume Designer Meredith Grantier.  Sound Designer Matthew MacDonald-Bain.  Lighting Designer John Webber.  Stage Manager Anthony Liam Kearns.  Assistant Stage Manager Tanya Mathivanan.  

Performers :  Kate Dion-Richard.  Alen Dominguez.  Keith Martin Gordey.  Anna Hagan.  Adele Noronha.  John Prowse.  

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Redux of Red Rock Diner : this show jives 
& jams & jollies you big time!

What follows is an edited re-issue of the original BLR review of July 8, 2014 for this show that is now on tour by ACT. Due to other theatre obligations, I won't be able to catch up with it. But as many of the actors and production crew are the same, I have little doubt the values that played out in the original directed then, as now, by Valerie Easton, are once again evident on the various boards where it's being re-staged with the current cast [as noted below]. Schedules at the bottom.  \ WBB

Ed. note to readers : For a quick take on the show, read sections Here's what it's about, Cast highlights, & Who gonna like.

Here's what it's about : RRD is not a "play" but a rock-&-roll musical revue that by and large is an excellently-executed song-&-dance jive-jam of 50's rock-&-pop. 

Local R-&-R d.j. giant Red Robinson is the hook in this reprise of the 1997 Dean Regan original creation. Robinson is the only d.j. on earth, we're told, to introduce to live audiences over the course of a decade or more each of Elvis, Buddy Holly and the Beatles. He put Vancouver on the rock map long before the largely-unknown backwater of YVR was discovered and bought out. Now you don't learn much about Red in RRD.*  Mostly he's a bit of a wise-ass radio personality on CKWX linking together some 20 pop hits and another couple dozen song-snippets on the night. 

But boy-oh-boy do you get energy and flashdance and great musical chops from RRD's performers as directed and choreographed by Valerie Easton and music'd by Steven Greenfield.

A bit of background on context : As a late WarGen kid growing up in the 50's USA midwest, I thought the music from that era aimed at us generally sucked. Not Sinatra and the Rat Pack group and their carryover of big band 40's sounds. No. But these, the likes of Bobby Vee. Bobby Vinton. Frankie Avalon. Ricky Nelson. Eddie Fisher. Pat Boone. To a person, to me, they were all Wonder Bread white. Hard to categorize any of their stuff as "rock-&-roll" I sniffed at the time.

There were exceptions. Some sourdough & rye with crust, no question. Elvis. And while "Jailhouse Rock" might have been a bit too raunchy for us northern Republican Baptists, his cover of Carl Perkins' "Blue Suede Shoes" was choice. [I actually owned a pair of b.s.s. in Grade 8 in '58 along with saddle shoes and penny loafers.] Other notables : The Everly Brothers. Buddy Holly. Richie Valens. The Big Bopper. Bobby Darin. (Little Richard? A whack-o orbiting his own planet, we Milwaukee suburbanites thought.) But at least these people rocked and we rolled along joyously with them in the back of Dad's Ford convertible.

Some of the sketchier ballads from that time, i.m.o., included "Little Star" with its obnoxious & maudlin "There you arrrrrrreee,  little starrrrr..."closing line. "Teenager in Love". "Venus" -- "Oh Veeeeenus, make my dreams come true!" [At least to that lyric we gyrated with our girlfriends in their flannel poodle skirts at the sock hop. Hope ever springs up.] But thin, v-e-r-y thin musically, this stuff. 

No, it wasn't until Roy Orbison's iconic "Crying" and another, "Stand By Me" by Ben E. King in the Kennedy 60's that ballads for teen-age ears were at last evolving, we hoped, into a wee bit of nuance and substance, away from AM radio's cotton candy we'd been force-fed for years.

Well, whatever I might have thought about that music back then, I can tell you this : RRD turns those three songs I hated back in the day and makes them a delight to watch and hear as part of pop music's varied history from that time. And it ends, appropriately, with the Roy and Ben numbers to signal the next chapter of rock's emerging identity.

"Action" works in lieu of plot : In its two acts over two hours we first find young DJ Red [Jesse Martyn] spinning discs in the CKWX broadcast booth for his 7-Up sponsored Teen Canteen after-school show while the cast of high schoolers jive it up to the tunes he plays. Second act features Red doing a dance and talent show at King Ed High on Grad Night, 1957. 

There is no fleshed-out story-line or narrative arc -- just 12 wizardly antic souls singing and strumming and tooting and dancing their hearts out. 

RRD amounts to a serial review of songs from those times with verbal and visual Vancouver reference points thrown in casually, almost willy-nilly, such as a note about homes selling for $15,000 in Kitsilano that year or call-ins about a Robinson radio prank over whales allegedly beached at English Bay. Billboard ads flash above the set that feature the Vancouver Mounties and White Spot. '57 Fords and Buicks. Trev Deeley Harleys. Texaco Sky Chief Supreme. Doublemint.

To some, the lack of "what-ness" that stage plays usually provide may detract from the evening's success. Not to the majority, however. There's hollerin' and clappin' and cheerin' and stompin' and laughin' from the cheap seats up top to front row downstage centre and through all the rows between. 

Cast highlights : This was first rate work by the troupe. But there were three primary standouts : as Johnny B, the Red Rock Diner soda jerk, Colin Sheen for me nearly stole the show single-handedly (double-foot-edly...?) with his dance and choreography and stage business moves. Faster more subtler feet in red sneaks I don't believe I have witnessed on a Vancouver stage in years. And the boy can sing, oh can he sing. His cut at Johnny Ray's "Cry" brought down the house. [Played by Sayer Roberts, 2015.]

Vying with Sheen for top dance moves (and an absolutely wild! hula hoop display) is Anna Kuman as Connie. She makes her crinolines bob-&-bounce with breathtaking speed and variety. And she can belt out tunes with gusto as well as croon sweetly with Robyn Wallis as Venus.

Zachary Stevenson is well-known to ACT audiences for his regular redux as Buddy Holly. He transports his signature leg-hop / knee-lift / guitar-banging stretch-out routine to his role here as Val, where he also adds some clever sax riffs to his customary 6-string prowess and big big voice. [Played by Daniel James White, 2015.]

Of the five instrumentalists, clearly Brett Ziegler on sax was the crowd favourite in his hefty but light animation throughout the night. He sings lustily and with good cheer, too. (And does a mean chime.) Overall, leader Steven Greenfield's hand-picked mates earn kudos for being truly a band, not just some accomplished players riffing. 

Production values prominent : Ted Roberts' excellent set of checkerboard flooring, chrome red-stool and diner counter, Ward's Music storefront, and the twin two-storey perches for Red's d.j. booth plus a dress shoppe opposite were clever, as were the warm lighting and timely spots on stage. 

Costume designer Darryl Milot captured to a thread the range of clothes sported back then from over-bright pedal-pushers to Fonzi leathers to Converse canvas. 

Andrew Tugwell's sound design filled every corner of the house with richness and clarity. 

But it is Valerie Easton's blocking, her customary choreographic excellence that captures the zeitgest so perfectly, her stage business such as Johnny B's chrome polishing and counter-cloth routines -- these are what make this revue sparkle in spite of its lite storyline. 

Who gonna like : To be exposed to so many snatches and whole cuts of songs from both the ditzy stuff of the 50's as well as its full-on rock songs serves to remind WarGen's and Boomers how far we've traversed from the carefree kick-the-can Howdy Doody 1950's. When people leave this show they have no doubt why they came to see it. So if "Do the Hucklebuck" and "Chantilly Lace" and "Good Golly Miss Molly" and "Wake Up Little Susie" compel you to shake your booty, this one's definitely for you. 

* In recognition of his early promotion of the emerging phenomenon known as rock-&-roll, Red Robinson was the sole Canadian inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland in 1995 along with a slew of Yanks. 

Regrettably, I think, there's a bit of "brag factor" at work in Dean Regan's scripted lines for Red's character in RRD that detracts from the show just a smidgeon. E.g. to have met and emcee'd the likes of Elvis and Buddy Holly and the Beatles does not make them "friends" except in the most casual or flippant sense of the word possible. Bad descriptor used more than once. But that's a mere quibble aimed at creator Regan more than at the venerable and charming Red Robinson himself who was in the house Monday night. 

As a member of the BC Entertainment Walk of Fame (outside the Orpheum), the Canadian Broadcast Hall of Fame, and -- my favourite -- the Rockabilly Hall of Fame, Red Robinson has a pedigree that is huge and genuine : his contribution to the music and entertainment scene now spans some six decades here in Greater Vancouver. That's a Wow! factor well-earned indeed.

Update : Just yesterday, October 20, 2015, Red on his afternoon show on AM650 made an ironic and self-deprecating comparison between his recall of Billy Joel's "Piano Man" -vs- Harry Chapin's "Taxi". Most listeners would not even be aware of any but two songs of my main man the late great Harry : "WOLD" & "The Cat's In The Cradle". Huzza-buzza Big Red!!


Production : Script by Dean Regan.  Director & Choreographer Valerie Easton.  Musical Director Steven Greenfield.  Set & Lighting Designer Ted Robers.  Costume Designer Darryl Milot.  Sound Designer Andrew Tugwell.  Stage Manager Allison Spearin.  Assistant Stage Manager Ronaye Haynes.

Performers : Tafari Anthony.  Mat Baker.  Todd Biffard.  Steven Greenfield.  Anna Kuman.  Jesse Martyn.  Scott Perrie.  Sayer Robers.  Robyn Wallis.  Daniel James White.  Brett Ziegler. 

Venues, dates & phone ticket office contact numbers :

Surrey Arts Centre,  October 14-24,  604.501.5566

Clarke Theatre,  Mission, October 25,  1.877.299.1644

Evergreen Cultural Centre,  Coquitlam, October 27 - November 1,  604.927.6555

Kay Meek Centre,  West Vancouver,  November 2-3,  604.981.6335

The BlueShore @ Cap,  North Vancouver,  November 4th,  604.990.7810

Chilliwack Cultural Centre,  November 6th,  604.391.7469

The ACTS Art Centre,  Maple Ridge,  November 7th,  604.476.2782

Shadbolt Centre for the Arts,  Burnaby,  November 9-10,  604.205.3000

Kelowna Community Theatre,  November 12th,  1.877.299.1644

Key City Theatre,  Cranbrook,  November 14th,  250.426.7006

Capitol Theatre,  Nelson,  November 17th,  250.352.6363

Cowichan Performing Arts Centre,  Duncan,  November 20th,  250.748.7529

Sid Williams Theatre, Courtenay,  November 21-22,  250.338.2430, ext. 1

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