Review
FLYING BLIND
Arts Club Theatre, Axis Theatre Co. and Legs on the Wall
Written and performed by the Flying Blind Collective
Directed by Roy Surette
Runs until May 17
Martha Cohen Theatre (CPA)
Few shows in the theatre offer you acrobatics, balletics, slapstick comedy, vaudeville shtick, blackout sketches, aerial antics and magic tricks, all in one package. So it may be churlish to also ask for some interesting characters and more than a sliver of a plot.
Those are the shortfalls that ground the otherwise airborne Flying Blind, the Canadian-Australian co-production now visiting Alberta Theatre Projects.
Despite being directed by veteran Roy Surette, this collectively written slice of Cirque du Soleil-style whimsy by Oz acrobats and Vancouver clowns is a slight affair. Like a lot of physical theatre (One Yellow Rabbit excepted), it begs for a stronger text to keep it from being merely a series of entertaining feats.
The premise has eight types – cantankerous old lady and her resentful caregiver daughter, sexy young couple, sweet older couple, mellow musician, bumbling nerd – sharing a seedy pension and going about their comic business until a falling meteor bores a bottomless hole in their front yard. Before long they are tumbling into it, one by one, and the second act is taken up with their otherworldly experiences in the abyss.
Since the story is underdeveloped and the dialogue weak (some of it almost sounds ad-libbed), you spend most of your time appreciating the individual skills and routines of the performers. The audience fave on opening night appeared to be the mother-and-daughter clown act of Lois Anderson and Manon Beaudoin, who wage their running battle in and around a rusty bathtub, swinging on its shower curtains like they were jungle vines.
I preferred the sexier combat of quarrelling lovers Alexandra Harrison and Brendan Shelper, whose hybrid of acrobatics and dance is both energetic and erotic. There’s a stirring scene in Act 2 when, strapped into flying harnesses, they keep leaping toward each other as if irresistibly attracted, only to go soaring apart again into the wings.
As their middle-aged counterparts, Debra Iris Batton and Joey Lesperance try for a touch of pathos, their gentler romance imperiled by his faulty ticker. Chris van Hyfte, meanwhile, simply tries too hard, proving strenuously unfunny as the superhero-obsessed nerd. As the musician, Carl Polke can be excused for his limited acting, since he’s mostly busy performing the show’s funky score on electric guitar, sax and flute.
Ian Rye’s two-level boarding house set brims with eye-catching detail, while Melody Anderson’s costumes include a nude bodysuit for Lois Anderson’s old lady that’s grotesquely amusing, but also signals that Flying Blind is not a family show.
What it is, exactly, is another matter. Not even its creators seem to be sure. |
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