>>REVIEW
HIGH PERFORMANCE RODEO
Runs until January 29
Epcor Centre and Tower Centre
I’ve seen some strange things at the High Performance Rodeo over the years: nude monologues, hermaphrodite dancers, food fights in an art gallery, Jesus playing with toy figurines, a giant vagina on stilts…. But I never expected to one day find myself in a Rodeo audience sprinkled with elementary-school-age children and hear a young boy’s voice behind me whisper, "Cool!"
That all changed on January 10 – the opening night of Théâtre Les Deux Mondes’ Living Memory, the Rodeo’s first official family show and one of three acts I caught in the festival’s second week. Although not for the Dora the Explorer set (of which there were a few at the performance I attended), this gentle paean to the joy and wonder of childhood and play had enough onstage magic to keep kids eight and up – not to mention us adults – fully engaged.
However, it wasn’t kids but Rheostatics fans that were really catered to last week. The band’s six-show residency in the Big Secret Theatre (also a Rodeo first) drew Rheos aficionados from as far away as New York and Belgium. Fans of Bob Dylan, meanwhile, were more modestly (and much less satisfactorily) served by Me & Bob & Bob & Me, Kirk Miles’s sketchy salute to the patron saint of rock poets. Below, my bite-sized reviews:
· Living Memory – If Gilles Duceppe has his way and Quebec separates, I hope they’ll still send theatre our way. La belle province has always had the monopoly on visually imaginative theatre, of which this production by Montreal’s Les Deux Mondes is a shining example. Where, in English-Canada, the term "multimedia performance" often means a lumpy mixture of live action with distracting, poorly integrated audio-visual components, in Living Memory, the blend is as smooth as cream.
Norman Canac-Marquis’s lyrical play gives us Catherine (Véronique Marchand), a 100-year-old woman who faces the end of her life by going back to its innocent beginnings, the dust of mortality becoming the swirling dust motes that capture the fancy of the infant and open the door to imagination. Soon the stage becomes a nursery, with a miniature train, a tricycle, a fantastic, feather-bedecked model ship, not to mention a population of dolls and stuffed animals. And as Catherine plays, director Daniel Meilleur toys with theatre itself, using the video design of Yves Dubé to create gorgeous and illusory backdrops, or to magnify Catherine’s face on an upstage mirror/moon. Michel Robidoux’s dreamy soundscape, meanwhile, evokes the tinny noise of windup mechanical toys. If Canac-Marquis’s writing sometimes flies over the heads of younger audience members, Meilleur’s staging leaves both young and old enthralled.
· The Rheostatics – A Rheofanatics’ wet dream, the band’s week-long gig was a chance to hear them perform five of their albums live. As a bonus, they also gave over one show to a roster of local indie musicians, letting them be guest vocalists on a Rheos song of their choice. It made for a long (2.5 hours) evening, with 18 singers taking a crack at the band’s catalogue, some more successfully than others. The Rheos themselves played accommodating backup, but, perhaps distracted by some technical problems with Dave Bidini’s acoustic guitar, didn’t really kick into high gear until about midway through the set, when the evening’s organizer, Lorrie Matheson, launched into a loose, confident rendition of "We Went West" from Night of the Shooting Stars. By the time Anita Athavale took the spotlight to sing "Stolen Car," the band was cooking. The high points came with singers like Matheson, Athavale, Chantal Vitalis ("Northern Wish") and Kara Keith ("Rain, Rain, Rain"), who dove into their chosen numbers with familiar ease; with Kris Demeanor, who made Martin Tielli’s "Record Body Count" sound like a Kris Demeanor song; and with Lee Shedden’s entertainingly spastic delivery of Bidini’s driving rocker "Horses." At other times, however, you felt like you were watching the nervous winners of a Sing With the Rheostatics contest – and it didn’t help that the band ended the night by coaxing some poor dude from the audience onstage to attempt Stompin’ Tom Connors’s "The Hockey Song."
· Me & Bob & Bob & Me – The Rheos extended their generous spirit to this show, with drummer Michael Phillip-Wojewoda sitting in on a version of "All Along the Watchtower" at the finale of what proved to be a very tepid tribute to Dylan. As his title suggests, poet Miles offered some funny but unfocused thoughts on what Bob meant to him, as well as reciting Pete Hamill’s liner notes for Blood on the Tracks and the lyrics to the Blood-period song "Up to Me." In between the spoken word sections, singer-guitarist Rodney Guitarsplat, bassist Vladimir Sobolewski and singer Tania Sablatash performed dull, metronomic arrangements of a few Dylan classics, showing no evident feeling for the material. They fumbled the dexterous lyrics of "You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go," drained all the vitriol from "Positively Fourth Street" and made the ominous "It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue" sound almost genial. The only bright spot was Guitarsplat’s countrified vocal on "The Wicked Messenger," which sounded like Johnny Cash covering Dylan.
A one-off performance, the 60-minute piece felt half-assed and lame – certainly a disappointment after Miles’s previous Rodeo show a few years back, The Last Six Minutes of Elvis, when he performed his own poetry and used musical segments more effectively. Since then, he’s become associate producer of the Rodeo and I suspect that this time out he spread himself too thin. |
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