Elbow Room Café: The Musical at the York Theatre

Two years ago Zee Zee Theatre presented a workshop version of Elbow Room Café: The Musical at Studio 58. Written by Zee Zee playwright-in-residence Dave Deveau, who also serves as co-lyricist with composer Anton Lipovetsky, the workshop was directed by Zee Zee’s Managing Artistic Director, Cameron Mackenzie. It was such a hit that the creative team decided to move towards a full production, which is of course never a sure thing given the expense and risk of any musical without a proven pedigree or the imprimatur of Disney. That Elbow Room honours the owners of a quirky local landmark in Vancouver’s gay village would only seem to further segment its potential audience. However, none of this deterred the Vancouver East Cultural Centre’s Executive Director, Heather Redfern, who came on board as a co-presenter, and who together with Deveau and Mackenzie presided over last night’s world premiere of the full musical at The Cultch’s York Theatre, where the work runs until March 12. Get your tickets now, as this baby is going to be a hit (and I’m not just saying that because I’m on Zee Zee’s board).

For anyone not in the know (and, honey, that really is a pity), The Elbow Room Café is a legendary breakfast spot opened by life and business partners Patrice (Patrick) Savoie and Bryan Searle in its original cramped quarters on Jervis Street in 1983. It moved to its current location on Davie Street in 1996. The Elbow Room is renowned for the caustic verbal abuse served up by Savoie, Searle and their employees alongside orders of pancakes, eggs and toast. Savoie, in particular, treats all customers with equal disdain, and many Hollywood stars have lined up for a chance to be on the receiving end of his rebarbative wit. But the Elbow Room has also long been a driving charitable force in the community, with a strictly enforced donation policy for every plate upon which food remains—monies that are passed on to A Loving Spoonful, the volunteer-driven, non-profit society that has provided free meals to people living with HIV/AIDS in Greater Vancouver since 1989. More quietly, Savoie and Searle worked behind the scenes in the early days of the pandemic to ease the burden of those living with the disease, which included retaining on staff several employees who were HIV-positive.

All of this is referenced in the musical, a contemporary day in the life of the café that coalesces around several parallel storylines. Tim (Steven Greenfield) and Tabby (a terrifically brassy Emma Slipp) are married tourists from Tennessee who stop into the café on their way to Stanley Park, and whose initially wide-eyed and then increasingly participatory observations of staff and patrons’ camp antics mimics the fish-out-water scenario of Brad and Janet in The Rocky Horror Show. Jackie (the immensely talented Christine Quintana) is a regular waiting to meet her former girlfriend, Jill (Olivia Hutt, also a stand-out), who arrives late, as expected, but also carrying (quite literally) some very unexpected news. Finally, Stephen (a queerly acerbic Nathan Kay), Beth (Stephanie Wong) and Amanda (Stephanie Yusuf) are part of a bachelorette party that’s gone off the rails; the trio comes into the Elbow Room ostensibly to sober Amanda up before she hops a plane to Mexico to marry her fiancé, but Stephen and Beth seem to have very different ideas about how best to go about this, or whether this is even what their friend really wants. All of this is set against the central drama of the musical, with the habitual bickering of Patrick and Bryan (an expertly matched Allan Zinyk and Bryan D. Adams) threatening to lead to a breaking point as a result of Patrick’s desire to get married and retire, leaving the café in the hands of their capable and long-suffering employee, Nelson (the hard-working Justin Lapeña, who also doubles as Chiffon, a drag fairy only Tim can see, and a Mountie stripper who gives the uptight Beth a much-needed lap dance late in the musical).

Amanda’s ambivalence about marriage and Patrick’s belief in the institution is just one of the queer/straight binaries that Deveau and Lipovetsky play with. There’s also the queerness within straight marriage that we gradually discover through the unfolding relationship between Tim and Tabby, with the former eventually embracing his glittery inner drag diva, and with the latter showing who in fact wears the pants in this family via the show-stopping number “A Girl’s Gotta Eat!” Indeed, part of the immense charm of Elbow Room Café: The Musical is that it knowingly traffics in the stereotypes and sentimentality of the musical genre at the same time as it exuberantly subverts and deconstructs them. Some of the jokes and one-liners in the book are groan-inducingly obvious and hammy (especially as delivered by Zinyk’s chief buffon, Patrick, who at one point wades into the audience looking for his next mark); but in every collective laugh or sigh of recognition we also experience a community in formation. That’s what we see in the camp aesthetic onstage in this work, and also in the legendary social gathering place upon which it is based. Like Tim and Tabby, if you’re not initially in on the joke then it’s up to you to find out why—and to find your own way in.

Not everything about Elbow Room Café: The Musical is perfect. In its current state it actually feels a bit book-heavy, with the exposition especially weighty in the overly long first act. One consequence of this is that before they come together, the structural shifts between each storyline sometimes mean that the bulk of the performers on stage are for long stretches left with very little to do except mime some bits of business at their respective tables. Overall, however, this is clearly a labour of love on everyone’s part, a musical that despite the relative intimacy of its scale (including a crackerjack all-female band of Sally Zori, Clare Wyatt and Molly MacKinnon) is so very big in its heart.

P

My Funny Valentine at the Firehall

Dave Deaveau's My Funny Valentine, on at the Firehall Arts Centre through March 2 in a Zee Zee Theatre production directed by Cameron Mackenzie, is based on the 2008 murder of Lawrence King, a gay 15-year-old murdered by the male classmate to whom he had given a Valentine's Day card. Coming exactly 10 years after the murder of Matthew Shepard, and with a similar gay panic defense being mounted in the subsequent trial, the case drew international attention.

Just as the Shepard case inspired Tectonic Theater Project to interview residents of Laramie, Wyoming affected by the killing, and to stage their voices in the much produced and multi-award-winning The Laramie Project, so has Deveau done extensive research into the press and interview responses of different members of King's hometown of Oxnard, California. However, eschewing TTP's route of producing a large ensemble work of documentary theatre, Deveau has chosen to craft a series of fictional monologues based on what I'm assuming are composite characters developed out of his research, and all delivered by a single actor, in this case the hyper-talented Anton Lipovetsky.

Lipovetsky, identified as The Collector in the program, is already on stage when we enter the theatre, unshaven and scruffily dressed, busy sifting through papers and clippings and photographs that form a circle around a small shrine of objects and artifacts (the set and costume designer is Marina Szijarto). Snatches of media reports about the shooting are broadcast as audience members settle into their seats, appropriate given that the first voice we hear from Lipovetsky once the performance begins is that of the small potatoes local reporter who first broke the story. Among other things, we learn that he interrupts some romantic canoodling with his wife in a rented motel room because, in turning on the TV to drown out the sounds of their lovemaking, he nevertheless still has enough hard news instincts to know a scoop when he sees one. Details like this reveal Deveau's own sharp instincts as a playwright: not just that one can tell King's story in this circumlocutionary way without sacrificing any of its drama, but also that our identification with each character whose voice we hear over the course of the next 90 minutes will in part stem from what about each goes on in spite or despite or even as a result of King's loss.

Those characters include an 11-year-old girl dreaming of a career in the glamourous world of high fashion; a homophobic salesman whose son went to the same school as King; and two teachers--one male, the other female--differently affected by King's murdered. The voice of the female teacher, Helen, is the only one that recurs in the play, and it is also where Deveau's writing, Lipovetsky's acting, and Mackenzie's directorial choices combine to produce the most affecting results. Helen, who is always searching in her purse for something she cannot find, or spilling coffee or wine down the front of her blouse, has been completely undone by King's death, even as she rouses herself--and others--to action, losing her feckless husband in the process. And in the course of revealing how--as a teacher, a woman, a person--her heart has been broken as a result of these events, Helen also reminds us what is so unfunny about them: that tolerance is not enough; that gun control is not enough; that even hate crime legislation, in paradoxically memorializing the crime and its victim(s), fails to interrogate adequately the violence that produced that crime in the first place.

As I have written elsewhere, also in connection with Matthew Shepard, part of this interrogation involves acknowledging that Shepard and King and Aaron Webster and Brandon Teena and Sakia Gunn and Reeva Steenkamp and the women at the École Polytéchnique and from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, died not because they were queer or feminist or prostitutes, but because their killers were all straight men. This play, in making its "gay protagonist" an absent presence, forces us to confront this issue. Like Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, it deserves to be seen every February around the world.

P.

Plugging The Unplugging

Just a brief note to say that The Unplugging, a new play by Yvette Nolan, began preview performances at Arts Club Theatre's Revue Stage on Granville Island last night. Richard and I, along with our good friend Cathy, visiting from the UK, were in the audience.

In the play, Nolan (former Artistic Director at Native Earth Performing Arts in Toronto), has adapted an Athabaskan legend, as recorded by Velma Wallis, called Two Old Women, in which the complaining protagonists of the title are cast out into the wilderness during a time of hardship after they have become too much of a burden on the rest of the community. Forced to rely on each other, and their storehouse of strength, stamina, and skills, the two women thrive against the odds, to the point where the community that has cast them out comes calling for their aid.

In Nolan's version, set in the very near future, she has tapped into the current cultural zeitgeist re our anxiously wired, digital culture (see TV's Revolution), imagining a post-apocalyptic world without electricity. Bern and Elena must re-discover the lost ways of their Aboriginal foremothers, "becoming," in the words of Nolan's script, something new. But the arrival of a mysterious stranger, Seamus, threatens their fragile new community of two. Jenn Griffin (as Bern) and Margo Kane (as Elena) are powerful stage presences, and they are ably supported by Anton Lipovetsky as Seamus. Lois Anderson is the director, with dramaturgical assistance having been provided by Rachel Ditor and my buddy DD Kugler.

I'll have more to say about the play after it officially opens next Wednesday, October 17th, and I get a chance to return for an additional viewing. But I did want to acknowledge how generous Yvette has already been in sharing the script with me--and the students of my Introduction to Drama class at SFU, who will be studying it and the production over the next two weeks.

I also wanted to say that I think the tag line and poster design for the show are among the most savvy that I have encountered in a long time. See below.

P.