PuSh 2014: Sunday Roast

On a night when it would have otherwise been dark, many of us in the extended PuSh family gathered at the Club last night to share in a Sunday roast. This roast, as host Sara Bynoe reminded us, was not the kind that would be accompanied by mashed potatoes and gravy and yorkshire pudding. Rather, it would come with comedic barbs, ego-deflating put-downs, general lewdness, and mild offense in the service of what and whom we love the most. A version, in other words, of the classic Friars Club Roasts of Hollywood celebrities or, more recently, Comedy Central's somewhat more vicious and vulgar revival of the genre for our media-saturated age.

The roasters included playwright, reviewer, and teacher Kathleen Oliver; lawyer and first PuSh Board President Ken Manning; writer, performer, and scholar Alex Ferguson; Theatre Replacement Co-Artistic Director James Long; and singer-songwriter Thom Jones (of Woody Sed rather than hip-swiveling, panty-catching fame). The primary roastee was, inevitably, our beloved Artistic and Executive Director Norman Armour, who sat at a table all his own adjacent the stage and soaked it all in (and also gave a bit back) with warmth and good humour. The jibes ranged from riffs on Norman's challenges with typography (Oliver) to the opacity (Jones) and geographical exclusivity (Long) of some of his programming to his legendary prolixity (everyone). Noting that all roasts seemed to require a preponderance of penis jokes, Ferguson built his contribution around the "staircase" in Norman's pants--a rich and ribald allegory of past PuSh shows that one had to hear to believe.

Of course there were other targets for the satire emanating from the stage. Most prominent in this respect were DK, our Production Manager (who I don't think was even in attendance), and Minna Schendlinger, our dear departing Managing Director, who took to the microphone herself at the end of the festivities to serenade Norman with a song that, in true backhanded fashion, was all about how much she has meant to him over the past eight years. Truer words were never uttered.

Week 2 of the Festival promises to be just as jam-packed with unmissable shows as the first: Tim Etchells' Sight is the Sense that Dying People Tend to Lose First at the newly renovated Fox Cabaret on Main Street tonight; Phil Soltanoff's LA Party/An Evening with William Shatner Asterisk at SFU Woodward's Studio T starting on Tuesday; Port Parole's Seeds at UBC's Freddy Wood starting on Wednesday; amazing acts at the Club. And so much more.

P.

PuSh 2012 Review #2: Woody Sed at Club PuSh

What happens when the artist from New York whom you've invited to open Club PuSh--the cabaret-cum-festival-within-the festival at Performance Works on Granville Island--cancels at the last minute? Why, you phone up Thomas Jones, of course. Jones is a local writer and performer whose one-man show, Woody Sed, played at The Cultch's Culture Lab last October. My loss at having missed it then was my gain last night, as on four days notice Jones got back into character as the legendary American folksinger and political activist, Woody Guthrie, tuned up his guitar, and wowed us all through a combination of story and song.

Actually, Jones got into more than just Guthrie's character, for this solo biographical show (the title is a riff on a column Guthrie wrote for the Communist Party newspaper The Daily Worker in 1939-40) calls for him to incarnate many other roles as well, including Guthrie's three wives, the radio broadcaster Ed Robbin, and the Library of Congress folklorist Alan Lomax, whose conversations and recordings with Guthrie in the 1940s led to his first record, Dust Bowl Ballads. Jones steps in and out of each character deftly, moving into a spot, modulating his voice slightly, and adopting a small gesture or significant pose to distinguish different speakers, as well as to mark for us where we are in the story. For the play, while mostly chronological, does weave back and forth in time, beginning with Guthrie's struggles in New York in 1940 to find the right words for his most famous song, "This Land is Your Land," which was inspired by his distaste for Irving Berlin's "God Bless America." We are then transported to the hospital where Guthrie spent the last 15 years of his life, his body and mind slowly deteriorating as a result of Huntington's disease, and with his second wife, Marjorie Mazia (a dancer with the Martha Graham Company), keeping vigil. Only then do we go back to his childhood in Oklahoma, his early troubadouring between there and California during the Depression, his politicization and radio work, and of course those famous conversations with Lomax.

And everywhere along the way we are treated to music, Jones wisely studding his tale--which, despite Guthrie's undeniable legacy today, is not at all a happy one--with both popular and lesser-known tunes from throughout his subject's career. Jones has a rich and warm singing voice and is also an accomplished guitar-player; combined with the deliberate lack of vocal or instrumental amplification and the intimate Club PuSh setting, it really felt that we were sitting around a campfire swapping stories and songs. Which is, of course, what Woody would have wanted. The self-taught musician who famously thumbed his nose at copywriting his work believed, as Jones tells us in a brief program note, that music was above all something to share. And, to that end, the show ended with all of us in chorus on a version of "This Train is Bound for Glory."

A most fitting tribute to Guthrie in the centenary of his birth, and an inspired choice to open the Club.

P.