Action epic musical — The Astonishing Adventures of Awesome Girl and Radical Boy

The mind-boggling conclusion of the greatest action epic ever staged in Calgary promises a fight to the finish. It’s a tale so powerful, only one man could have written it (and with music to boot): Ethan Cole.
    A Calgary-based playwright, performer and musician, Cole focused on superheroes, music and pop culture for his genre-busting The Astonishing Adventures of Awesome Girl and Radical Boy!, now playing at Lunchbox Theatre. Directed by Lunchbox’s artistic director Rona Waddington, Astonishing Adventures promises to entertain reclusive alter-egos and heroes alike. “I very much wanted it to be something that, even if you don’t love comic books, you can still come and enjoy this show,” Cole says. “If you do love comic books, there will be an added layer for you, but if you just want to see a fun show, this has it.”
    Cole got the idea to write the show from bouncing ideas back and forth with his roommate. “I think that graphic novels and comic books are really of the moment, they’re definitive in our culture right now,” he says, noting recent film successes of The Incredibles and the Spider-Man and X-Men sagas. “What interests me a lot in my work is referencing both pop culture and what’s happening in our culture right now.”
    Cole notes that while Astonishing Adventures is an amalgamation of comics and other aspects of culture, he wanted it rooted in interesting characters. These include Nick and Julia, and the subplot of the mentor-like characters Maxine and Gordon. “Both Awesome Girl and Radical Boy are respectably the creations of Julia and Nick, who both work at a big comic book factory, if you will — I call it a factory because it’s a big company that turns out these mass-produced, not very artistic commercial comics. Nick and Julia both work for this big company. They create two superheroes that bear some of the traits that they themselves have as people. But, in a sense, they are the idealized versions of themselves with a little bit of silliness and a little bit of other-worldly-ness thrown in.”
    Calgary’s Jamie Konchak, a recent Betty Mitchell Theatre Award recipient for her supporting role in Tara Began’s Thy Neighbour’s Wife (presented by Urban Curvz Theatre), is playing the role of Maxine. “It’s a really fun formula to play with, the idea of the comics superhero,” Konchak says.
    “There are parts that are over-the-top, but it’s grounded in a real place, especially for the characters that are existing in the comic-book-writing companies, Mysterious Science and Action Comics,” she adds. “They’re going through their own struggles, trying to live their lives and find their loves and all those lovely things.”