Onegin at the Arts Club

Amiel Gladstone and Veda Hille clearly work well together. First, there was the smash hit Do You Want What I Have Got? A Craigslist Cantata (written with Bill Richardson), which played the PuSh Festival in 2012 and may soon be heading to New York. Then there have been a string of East Van Pantos (written with Charlie Demers), which after three years have already become a York Theatre Christmas institution. Now comes their latest collaboration, Onegin, a "passionate new musical" currently playing at the Arts Club's new BMO Theatre in Olympic Village that Richard and I fittingly saw on Good Friday.

The work is adapted from both the Pushkin poem and the Tchaikovsky opera, and all the basic plot points are retained. Evgeni Onegin (Alessandro Juliani, making an assured Arts Club acting debut), a self-involved cad, arrives in sleepy St. Petersburg to preside impatiently over the death of his uncle. Soon he hooks up with his old friend, the poet Vladimir Lensky (Josh Epstein), who introduces Onegin to his fiancee, Olga (Lauren Jackson), and Olga's older sister, Tatyana (a stand-out Meg Roe). Tatyana, who up until this point has lived her life largely through books (as referenced in the piles of them that constitute a key feature of Drew Facey's set design), is instantly smitten with the dashing but reprobate Onegin--a man who refers to himself, in the hilarious song that heralds his arrival in town, as a "rock star."

Tatyana pours out her heart to Onegin in a letter, a scene which gives rise to one of Tchaikovsky's most famous arias, and which here, in "The Letter Song," Hille subtly references musically, while Gladstone cleverly enlists the front rows of the audience in the missive's delivery. (The thrust stage is configured in the round and Gladstone choreographs several moments of direct interaction between performers and audience members, including a drinking game involving shots of vodka. All of this feels organic to the production's overall storytelling frame rather than unnecessarily ingratiating and gimmicky.) Needless to say, Tatyana's feelings are not reciprocated by Onegin, who tells her he is not made for love, or at least the version that comes with marriage and domesticity. Tatyana is heartbroken, but unlike most tragic heroines from nineteenth-century opera the news doesn't kill her, and Gladstone and Hille give her a Heart-like power ballad to emphasize her strength and resilience--which Roe absolutely nails, complete with her own rock star guitar licks. (Another conceit of the production is that all of the actors are enlisted at different points to pick up instruments and supplement the house orchestra--Hille on piano and keyboards, Barry Mirochnick on percussion and guitar, and Marina Hasselberg on cello. This includes various turns at guitar and bass, as well as the tubular bells, and a virtuosic Caitriona Murphy--who plays Olga and Tatyana's mother--on violin.)

Onegin, having rebuffed Tatyana, is bored, and so at her name day celebrations (which features a wonderful Justin Timberlake/Bieber-esque falsetto tribute from Andrew McNee as the French tutor Monsieur Triquet) decides to flirt with her sister. Needless to say, this doesn't sit well with Lensky, who of course challenges Onegin to a duel. Neither man wants to go through with the gunfight, but their pride also prevents them from backing down. Inevitably, Lensky is killed, which sends Onegin into self-imposed exile traveling throughout Europe. Returning to St. Petersburg six years later, Onegin reencounters Tatyana at a ball thrown by Prince Gremin (Andrew Wheeler), the much older man to whom Tatyana is married. It's now Onegin's turn to be smitten, and so cue a repeat of the earlier letter scene. But while Tatyana's feelings for Onegin are undeniably rekindled, she tells him "no." Their tragedy, it would seem, boils down to a case of missed timing--something less grand and operatic than consumption, perhaps, but also something to which audience members tapping into their own "only if's" can potentially better relate. And it is to Hille and Gladstone's credit that in a musical filled with its share of belly laughs they mostly eschew their natural impulse towards irony, opting instead for plainness of meaning and unadorned sincerity. Indeed, one might say that Onegin is to Craigslist what Stephen Sondheim's Passion is to Into the Woods.

At the same time, the emotional tone of the work never feels manipulative or heavy-handed. And I think that has a lot to do with the scale of this staging. From the compactness of the company and orchestra to the subtle brocaded and damasked references to White Russian society contained in Jacqueline Firkins' costumes and Facey's drapey backdrop, and from simple dramaturgical effects (a cup of red wine on a white sheet to evoke Lensky's spilled blood on the snowy forest floor) to the intimate size of the house: nothing here feels overproduced, and so consequently every choice registers as at once inevitable and absolutely authentic.

This is a Broadway-worthy musical that, mercifully, forgoes Broadway-style spectacle. And for that there is only one word: Nostrovia!

P.

Jack and the Beanstalk at the York Theatre

Last night Richard and I had the privilege to be among the first audiences to see a production in the restored York Theatre, on Commercial Drive at East Georgia. Theatre Replacement's Jack and the Beanstalk: An East Van Panto officially inaugurated the newly renovated space last night, just over a century after it first opened in 1912, and more than 30 years after Tom Durrie founded the Save the York Theatre Society in 1981 following the Vancouver Little Theatre Association's vacating of the building and its conversion to a cinema.

Durrie was in attendance last night, as were a host of civic and provincial dignitaries, prominent local arts producers and administrators, the generally excited public, and a gaggle of even more excited kids. As with the equally important renovation of the Stanley Theatre on South Granville, the architectural challenge for the York was clearly to fit a fully functioning 400-seat theatre (complete with flies and wings) within the existing footprint while also creating a visually interesting street facade. From what I was able to see and explore last night (which didn't include the stage, as Richard and opted not to stay for the after-party), this has been accomplished--the sole expense being, as again with the Stanley, significant lobby space. Indeed, the York's downstairs and upstairs lobbies are even smaller than the Stanley's, just a long thin wedge between the box office and the bar in the case of the former, and into which several hundred bodies were crammed last night to listen to Vancouver East Cultural Centre Executive Director Heather Redfern's opening remarks at a pre-reception. The Cultch, now a thriving arts juggernaut on the east side, will oversee the York Theatre, mostly renting it out to outside presenters, but also, as in this case, partnering with local companies and organizations to premiere new work or host important touring productions (as will be the case during the PuSh Festival, when Tanya Tagak's take on Nanook of the North opens there).

Richard and I had tickets for the last row of the balcony (GG), but there was nothing wrong with our seats. The sight lines were perfect, the acoustics impeccable, and the show itself a total gas. Charlie Demers' script, in adapting the venerable fairy tale to its local setting, does not spare the satire (even when directed at several members of the audience) and also doesn't talk down to its pint-sized viewers, whose wonder and energy must inevitably sustain the piece. Veda Hille's score is another marvel of offbeat syncopation and humour, and I was thrilled to see she'd incorporated into it another version of Loverboy's "Working for the Weekend" (complete with trademark headband). Amiel Gladstone's direction was snappy in tempo and filled with wonderfully visual bits of stage magic. The actors, all except for lead Maiko Bae Yamamoto (who should perform--and sing--more often) in multiple roles, filled their outsized panto peronas (quite literally in the case of Allan Zinyk, who played both the Giant and Jack's mom) with charismatic aplomb.

In short, it was a wonderful way to open an important new cultural space in the city. Congratulations to all involved in getting us to this moment.

P.

Three Sisters at The Cultch

Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters is a play I adore, and one I've taught many times (in various translations/adaptations by contemporary playwrights, for whom the task is almost a career rite of passage). But until last night I had not seen a live professional production. Mercifully, that gap in my theatre-going experience has been filled by director Jane Heyman and The Only Child Collective's moving staging of the play, on at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre's Vancity Culture Lab through this Saturday.

Full disclosure: Jane is a former PuSh Board colleague; her daughter, Jessie Johnston, who produced the show, is a current PuSh Board colleague; and I donated money to the wildly successful indiegogo campaign that Jessie has used to underwrite much of the production's costs. Not that mother or daughter would expect anything less than a full and honest critique.

One of the most amazing things about Three Sisters, written at the turn of the twentieth-century, is how contemporary it continues to feel. And I'm not just referring to the feelings of ennui, melancholia, and frustrated ambition afflicting Olga, Masha, and Irina, three beautiful, intelligent women suffocating in the provinces, forced into soulless marriages and mind-numbing jobs while the men around them--their brother Andrei included--continue to enjoy the entitlements of their gender. What over-educated female millennial facing the current job market--and perhaps the prospect of moving back in with her parents in the suburbs as a result--wouldn't be affected by this? But the freshness of the play has as much to do with Chekhov's structural and dramaturgical genius as with the universality of his themes. So, for example, the twin themes of love and work that remain dialectically entwined in the Prozorov sisters' minds as sources of aspirational longing and hopeless despair are consistently played out in scenes that juxtapose public "philosophizing" (to use Vershinin's term) about their possible and/or anticipated rewards with private self-recrimination about the much more pedestrian realities such fantasies belie.

Key in this regard is Act 3, set in the enclosed and cramped interior space of Olga and Irina's bedroom, following the fire that ravages much of the town. The entire cast tramps through the room at one point or another, symbolically trampling what remains of the sisters' dream to return to Moscow. In Heyman's staging, we witness all of this in quietly and affectively physical ways: in Irina's (Rachel Aberle) disgust at the grit and grime Dr. Chebutykin (Richard Newman) has left on the washcloth used to dry his hands; in an exhausted Olga's (Manami Hara) cradling of the aged servant Anfisa (Rosy Frier-Dryden); in Masha (Emma Slipp) greedily stealing kisses with Vershinin (Bob Frazer) while her husband Kulygin (David Bloom) dozes in the corner; and in Irina and Olga burying themselves under their bedclothes as Andrei (Alex Rose) tells them he has mortgaged the house to pay his gambling debts and that they need to be nicer to his interloping wife, Natasha (Adele Noronha).

My only complaint is that the exclusively stage left blocking of these scenes, combined with an awkwardly placed upstage screen, made it difficult to see much of the action. I get that Heyman was emphasizing how impossibly small the sisters' world has become, and that this serves as a visual contrast to the final act, set in the Prozorovs' garden, which ironically does not open out onto new vistas for any of the sisters. But sightlines in the tiny Culture Lab are already difficult enough. If you add a full house (a tough problem to have, I know), then for those sitting audience left as I was, for much of Act 3 you'll be craning your neck.

Oh yeah, one other thing: the actor playing Tuzenbach (Brahm Taylor) was far too handsome. Otherwise, this is a warm and wise production, with a skillfully updated text by Amiel Gladstone that sounds at once idiomatically contemporary to a 21st-century ear and faithful to Heyman's period staging. I am grateful for having been given the opportunity to spend such quality time with two of my favourite theatrical families: the Prozorovs and the Heyman-Johnstons.

P.

PuSh 2012 Review #5: Do You Want What I Have Got? at Arts Club Revue Stage

I've only ever used Craigslist once: to sell a sofa. But I have friends and family members and colleagues and students who swear by it: to buy or trade all sorts of items; to find apartments or roommates; and, yes, to hook up. The concomitant (maybe consequent?) loss or proof of selfhood within our consumer culture is a major theme in Bill Richardson and Veda Hille's Do You Want What I Have Got? A Craigslist Cantata, on at the Arts Club Revue Stage until February 11th. Or, as one of their songs puts it, "acquisition and attrition." That could also easily describe my experience last night watching this hilarious and surprisingly moving show. For every moment of laugh-out-loud mirth I greedily lapped up over the course of its intermissionless 90 minutes, I was also emotionally undone by the vulnerability and desperation that clearly underscored so many of the lyrics.

That those lyrics come almost wholly from actual want ads culled by Richardson from the online classifieds site Craigslist is the central conceit of this sung-through musical, first developed as part of Theatre Replacement's 20 Minute Musicals offering at Club PuSh in 2009. With additional lyrics and original music provided by collaborator and co-writer Veda Hille, those ads are here shaped into a rich and deeply affecting portrait of the virtual marketplace, filled with longed for exchanges and missed connections. Indeed, for every song cataloguing something to buy or sell (headless dolls, a collection of stuffed penguins, a dead moose, a bathtub full of noodles) there is another opining a fleeting encounter at a coffee shop, a wordless look exchanged on a street corner, a stolen glance on a bus. The wistful "Did you see me?" becomes the counterpoint to the more assertive hawk of the title refrain.

All of this is perfectly captured by a ridiculously talented cast. J. Cameron Barnett is hilarious and heartbreaking in a number about offloading old dance trophies, which also allows him to show off a mean plié; later he also rocks out, including on the saxophone, in a unique take on male bonding. Dmitry Chepovetsky (the best thing about last year's This, at the Playhouse) brings down the house in a gypsy-inspired tune soliciting the attention of a pretty lady to whom he briefly said "Hi, hi, hi." Bree Greig is a standout from beginning to end, her powerful soprano and expressive face and body able to convey both pure innocence (in that song about the penguins, or the opening number about the guy she smelled on the bus) and down and dirty raunch (as in a Liza Minnelli-like bit about the roommate she doesn't want). And Selina Martin brings layers of hidden depth and subtle pathos to her mostly deadpan delivery in a variety of roles, including a woman mourning the death of her cat and another who edits Craigslist ads for grammar and spelling.

Joining these four on stage are Hille on piano and Barry Mirochnick on percussion (and a variety of other instruments). Hille also harmonizes throughout, and gets her own occasional solos (including a nice homage to Steve Jobs). Even Mirochnick sings an ode to a toupé. As with everything Hille composes and arranges, the score is just the right mix of catchy and quirky, and true to the cantata form is made up of a mix of recitative (as when different ads are sung through verbatim) and more lyrical songs repeated throughout at different intervals. It makes so much sense to apply this traditionally sacred musical form to a topic that is so profane, and I hope a cast album is recorded soon.

A shout out, as well, to director Amiel Gladstone for building a recognizable dramatic arc out of the material, for making great use of the Revue Stage space, and for keeping things moving at breakneck speed. Set designer Ted Roberts works magic with a bunch of strung-up lamps, the analogue technology by which we compose our digital dreams--which lighting designer John Webber in turn shines successive spots on with precise aplomb.

Everything about this show has the makings of a hit, and--despite the various local references in the lyrics (which, of course, can be easily adapted)--one that will definitely travel well. Could an extended run and then a tour follow, maybe even to New York? Although a chamber piece ideally suited to an intimate space like the one in which it is currently playing, I can also see this easily filling, whether in the same or expanded form, a much larger house. Drowsy Chaperone anyone? Get tickets now so that you can say you saw it when.

P.

That

Megan Follows stars in This, at the Vancouver Playhouse until January 29.

I had been looking forward to seeing the Vancouver Playhouse production of Melissa James Gibson's This for two main reasons. First, Charles Isherwood gave the play a rave review in the New York Times when it opened Off-Broadway in 2009. I very much admire Isherwood's critical judgment, and his tastes and sensibilities mirror my own much more closely than those of his colleague, Ben Brantley (who, for example, absolutely loved Brief Encounter). Second, the Vancouver production of This was to star Megan Follows, who had impressed me to no end in Toronto last February in a revival of Cloud 9. Having seen the play last night, I can now say that on the first count--Isherwood's lauding of the playscript--I have some major caveats. However, on the second--the lead performance in this production--I was thoroughly impressed. Follows is a knock-out as Jane.

James Gibson, daughter of former BC Liberal Party leader Gordon Gibson, is a local girl who has made good in New York, racking up impressive playwriting credits ([sic]; Suitcase or, those that resemble flies from a distance; Current Nobody) and even more impressive reviews. And This is very much a New York play, focused as it is on four intelligent, witty, arty, and navel-gazing upper middle-class thirtysomething friends struggling to name the exact source of their middle-aged malaise and malcontent. To be sure, in Jane's case there is a fairly clear cause: the premature death of her husband a year before. She just won't own up to the full immensity of her grief, and her increasing difficulties communicating with her daughter and stoic refusal to remove her dead husband's ashes from the top of her fridge are symptoms of her stasis (and rather textbook Freudian) melancholia. Tom (Todd Thomson) and Marrell (Karen Holness) are exhausted new parents whose difficulty adjusting to their altered lifestyle mask deeper faultlines in their relationship. And, finally, Alan (a wonderfully wry Dmitry Chepovetsky), is the requisite self-deprecating, borderline alchoholic gay sidekick in this self-obsessed quartet, no one's "dear friend" as he likes to point out, but everyone's default confessor, if only by virtue of his burdensome talent for remembering everything he hears or is told. Indeed, he is a professional mnemonist by trade. Who knew there was such a thing? Kudos, however, to James Gibson for not just making this a schtick and reducing Alan to complete caricature; Alan's powers of recall do in fact form a key component of the plot's climax.

Into this menage comes Jean-Pierre (Fabrice Grover), a globe-trotting physician with Doctors Without Borders whom Marrell meets at the jazz club where she performs and invites to the play's opening dinner party as a possible match for Jane. Jean-Pierre is clearly meant to show up the triteness and pettiness--the "dinkiness," to borrow and adapt a phrase from Alan--of these four friends' personal burdens of angst and betrayal in light of the urgent life and death concerns he daily deals with. And yet, as a character, Jean-Pierre largely remains a cipher; we never learn what exactly he does with DWB (nor what the "pre-conference" he has to rush off to is all about) and only overhear one telephone conversation he has in French with an apparent colleague, whom he repeatedly tells to "parler à Bob." It is hard for us to condemn the shallowness of these New Yorkers' lives through Jean-Pierre when he himself remains so shallowly drawn and, as such, he remains mostly a mute (albeit exotically so) screen on and through which the other characters project their own anxieties and desires. And, it would seem, the bisexual Jean-Pierre is willing to accommodate all takers.

Indeed, the real drama of the play has nothing to do with Jean-Pierre at all; instead, it centers on Tom and Jane's fateful one-night stand after the opening dinner party, and the consequent guilt Jane feels towards Marrell and, latterly, the memory of her dead husband. This question of Jane's double betrayal is really at the heart of the play, and leads to its high-stakes climax, in which Jane both reveals to her best friend that she has slept with Tom and to herself that she still misses her own husband. Interestingly, she can only do the latter after she disabuses the assembled audience about her marriage being perfect; it just seemed that way because her husband had the misfortune to die young. Which in turn accounts for her fortune (if it can be called that) in hereafter being granted some sort of nobility she didn't in fact earn. It's a powerful scene, full of some of James Gibson's best (because most honest) writing, and allowing Follows a bravura moment of primal acting, going back to drama's ritual beginnings in her smearing of her face with her dead husband's ashes.

In the pre-show publicity on the Playhouse production, James Gibson has said in various press interviews that with This she started out wanting to write a play about adultery, but that she ended up writing something else. She doesn't exactly say what that something else is, but I would suggest it's the process of grief and mourning (for a dead lover and the death of love in equal measure). Certainly these are the elements that provide the most heft for me in this play, and the most satisfying moments of performance. I just wish that James Gibson had been better able to connect her residual focus on the betrayal that accompanies adultery with her nascent exploration of the different kind of betrayal that's also involved in doing the work of mourning. That connection is certainly there, not least in the opening party game that Jane doesn't want to play and that ends up going fantastically wrong. (As an aside, the party game, combined with other elements in the play, not least Alan's role as snide commentator, put me in mind of Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band. Perhaps not the first play others would think of in connection with this one, but there are, I think, striking similarities, and it's perhaps no coincidence that a revival of Crowley's play opened in New York around the same time as James Gibson's play.) However, too often for me James Gibson's innate cleverness as a writer gets in the way of what she clearly wants us to see is the real weight of her words. Nowhere was this more in evidence, for me, than in the opening scene, when the familiar conceit of the misunderstood referent in overlapping dialogue was very much in danger of wearing out its welcome.

There were similar moments elsewhere in the play, when what I suspect is James Gibson's sheer love of language, and her immense talent for constructing witty exchanges around words and the different syntactical possibilities for their delivery sends mixed messages not just about the substance, but also the tone, of a given scene. See, in this regard, Jane and Alan late in the play talking about her use of the Yiddish word "schwitzy"--clearly James Gibson wants this light banter about linguistic appropriation to do double duty re race relations in 21st-century America, but it ends up sounding forced and certainly tangential to the main concerns of the play. Though Marrell is black and Tom is white, and while Jane was also married to a black man, the topic of biracial couples is left largely unexplored in the play. Which is fine--why make it an issue? Except that this late exchange does just that by drawing attention to this topic's lack of exploration elsewhere in the play. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the love of language in the theatre. So long as that love is in service of the dramatic action. And so long as it's clear the characters love language as much as the playwright.

As a play, This, it seems to me, is not sure if it wants to be a drawing-room comedy or a Greek tragedy. Mostly it comes off as the former rather than the latter. But that certainly doesn't make it uninteresting. James Gibson is an very talented writer, and I will continue to follow her work.

Of that you can be sure.

P.