As a playwright, it’s never popular to speak the words “I don’t like watching Shakespeare” aloud. So, instead, I’ll just put them in print. It’s not that I don’t like the plays, it’s just that once I’ve read them once, seen them once, I’m happy to retire them.

The Comedy of Errors, itself a rather structurally flawed play, happens to be one of the few Shakespeares of which I’ve seen multiple productions. So boy did these students have to work hard to win this curmudgeonly audience member over. And work they did.

The ever-impressive Studio 58 students, combined with the magic of director Scott Bellis and a dream design team have created the most refreshing, original, engaging, quirky and laugh-out-loud funny piece of theatre I’ve seen all season.

There’s so much to take in: the breathtaking opening movement sequence, Pam Johnson’s grungy Steam Punk set, Naomi Sider’s colourful and ever-surprising costume design, Shawn Sorensen’s Tim Burton-esque underscoring, Ital Erdal’s ever-complimentary lighting, Bellis’ inventive staging and the perfect pace for a show that, in writing, can drag on for an eternity. Never in my life have I urged an audience to run, not walk, to see Shakespeare – until now.

If you’re not familiar with the play, as you can imagine, there are a lot of mistaken identity errors that lead to laughs (see play title), mostly stemming from characters having twins they don’t know about and the surrounding fifth business confusing them for one another over and over and over again.

But there’s real comedy here, certainly in the leads, but more prominently in the strong character actors who make of the periphery of the play: Noah Rosenbaum and Joel Ballard’s work as servants make for some of the evening’s greatest laughs, as do Adele Noronha and Carlos Rodriguez’s villagers.

That characters with very little actual dialogue can steal such focus is a testament that the instructors at Studio are doing something right. It should come as no surprise that the school has been noted as Canada’s foremost acting school time and time again.

Comedy of Errors
Studio 58
Remain­ing Per­for­mances:
January 27 — February 20
8:00 pm Tuesdays – Saturdays, 3:00 pm Saturday – Sunday
Call 604 992?2313 to make reservations

Photographs by David Cooper.

There is magic in the air in the tiny basement theatre that is Studio 58 at Langara College.

It’s a palpable energy in the hallways that leads you to your seat, and it does not stop for the next eighty minutes, so sit back and allow yourself to be transported by their latest venture The Secret in the Wings.

Though there is much that doesn’t add up in Mary Zimmerman’s quirky mashup of fairy tales, director Mike Stack and his design team lead us down ever-shifting eerie paths – from the old curmudgeon next door who wants nothing more than for the young girl he’s babysitting to marry him, to women who blind themselves to save their own lives. Death, sacrifice and the infinite shades between good and evil permeate the piece.

Sure, there are impressive tricks, flashes of light, characters of all shapes and sizes crawling out of every possible corner of Yvan Morissette’s impressive set. But there are also sizeable laughs, notably from Mara Gottler’s overt costume design, which employs codpieces and whimsical crowns, as well as gorgeous simplicity.

The students onstage all deliver impeccable work, and I, for one, am keen to see their names in programs across the city as they near their graduation.

There is danger in here, danger which I wish the playwright would have pushed even further, but this production mines every possible moment the text allows and does it with a professionalism you’d be hard-pressed to match.

The Secret in the Wings
Studio 58
November 18th – December 5th
Tuesdays – Saturdays, 8:00 pm
Saturdays & Sundays, 3:00 pm

Photographs by David Cooper.

The technological age is upon us.

Visionary Australian director Jessica Wilson’s visually sumptuous Dr. Egg and the Man with No Ear, written by Catherine Fargher from a concept they created together, offers a look into the not-too-distant future at a world of genetic mutation and cloning.

The piece offers a heightened, futuristic reality carefully contrasted by a simple story revolving around a man, his perpetual sadness stemming from losing an ear, and his heroic daughter who tries to intervene, for better or for worse.

Tania Bosak’s androgynous, impish Narrator (who also provides much of the sound design) points us toward the piece’s central moral dilemma, where, just as the story starts to take flight it so quickly ends.

Technology and craft are on display in all factions of the show: exquisite use of lighting, brilliant projections that work seamlessly with the action onstage, puppetry so staggeringly simple and impeccably performed you’d swear you’re watching a real being, perspective changes that redirect the way we take the story in.

For those who are familiar with The Cultch’s repertoire take a dash of Ronnie Burkett, a pinch of Catalyst Theatre, some of the humour of Midsummer and just a sprinkle of quality Brecht and you have the recipe for this Australian wonderland.

Dr. Egg and the Man with No Ear
The Cultch
Remaining Performances:
October 28-30 & November 2-6, 8:00 pm
October 30 & November 2, 2:00 pm

If you don’t remember him from his breakthrough film J’ai tué ma mere (I Killed My Mother) that won him more awards internationally than he has room for in his Montreal loft, you certainly will this time around. Quebecois prodigy, and Canada’s cutest hipster, 22-year-old Xavier Dolan back with his sophomore film Heartbeats.

Here we are introduced to forlorn Francis (Dolan) and his best friend Marie (Monia Chokri, Quebec’s Audrey Tautou) and how their dangerously dependent and interwoven friendship gets wrapped up in a love triangle.

Enter Nicolas (the steamy Niels Schneider), the Audrey Hepburn-loving, classic literature-referencing, blond Adonis with a hippy, happy-go-lucky chip on his shoulder whose smouldering, pouty sexiness draws them in. And you can’t blame them. Nico is irresistible and by showing them each equal attention, his overwhelming energy starts eroding the friendship.

Does this sound simplistic and trite? It’s neither. Dolan is an understated screenwriter and director and a real heartthrob onscreen. He is smugly cute and boy does he know it, but his heartbreakingly grounded performance is beautiful. Dolan is inherently watchable.

As Francis and Marie slowly hit rock bottom and their sullen emo selves shine through, Stephanie Anne Weber Biron’s cinematography takes over. Her jerky zooms and continous basking in slow motion makes the film into a twentysomething hipster dream.

Above all else, Heartbeats, which should be translated from its original French to Imaginary Loves, dissects how friendship is affected by competition, and how we create internal lives for people that simply aren’t there. With lines like “a high IQ is a vital counterpoint to brown eyes” and “cigarettes keep me alive until I die,” it will no doubt be added to the DVD collections of any young artist in the city who’s looking for a little love in all the wrong places.

As an out gay man living in Vancouver I’ve got it easy nowadays, more or less.

Compare our contemporary city to the plight of the 1960s New York City homosexual: homosexual acts are illegal (even between consenting adults), queer gathering spaces are shut down by the police , those who are caught there are arrested and their names, addresses and employers are published in the paper, media depictions mark homosexuality as illness, and many are forced into horrifying medical treatments in an attempt to “cure” them.

A lot has changed.

Kate Davis and David Heilbroner’s haunting documentary Stonewall Uprising, based on a book by David Carter, sheds an unsettling eye-opening light on the 1969 Stonewall riots, known as the beginning of the queer rights movement.

In 1969 The Stonewall Inn was the gathering place within the East Village. Though it had seen raids before, one June evening police showed up with a vigour not previously seen and the queers inside decided enough was enough.

They resisted, and then fought back with words, with drag, and with violence, leading to the police being barricaded inside the Inn itself. It lasted hours, and then days and led to the formation of the first Gay Liberation Parade on June 28, 1970, which would usher in the Gay Pride movement.

There is little to no footage of the riots themselves and at the time, there was hardly any media attention from the mainstream press. Most of the footage in Stonewall Uprising is simply footage of the era or reconstructions of certain key events, but they are of little consequence.

The heart and soul of the film is felt through interviews with former Stonewall Inn patrons and uprising starters as well as New York politicians and police workers who offer up incredible the emotion, “There was no going back now. We’d discovered a power we didn’t even know we had”.

Yes, a lot has changed, but not as much as we’d like to think. Look at the massive mainstream media attention that five gay teen suicides have garnered in recent weeks. Look at the homophobic attack that occurred at the Stonewall only last week. In watching films like Stonewall Uprising we see what we, as a queer community, are capable of, and how much fight we still have in us.

Stonewall Uprising screened as part of the Vancouver International Film Festival.

The claustrophobia is palpable in the tiny Little Mountain Studios space off Main Street. One gets the sense that at the inevitably sold-out performances later in the run, the audience itself will experience panic attacks. But this is all part of the show with “Heptademic Redux,” a remount/reworking of one of last year’s Risky Nights showcases from a talented bunch of Studio 58 graduates.

In another “end-of-the-world-epidemic-lock-down” kind of piece, seven people from different walks of life find themselves locked in a nondescript room containing enough sustenance for twelve days, and a tiny bathroom. There is a sense of urgency in all of them, and their layered, interwoven text is beautifully frantic. To help indicate the passage of time, director Anthony E. Ingram (and previous director Rachel Peake) offer some of the most amazingly executed movement sequences you’ll find on a Vancouver stage.

The production is full of surprise gifts. In ensemble work of this nature, the structure can get predictable as we slowly get a glimpse into each character’s fantasy life. And though not all of their internal lives are as curious and intriguing as some, the ensemble itself is expertly used to fully inhabit these alternate worlds: Sean Oliver delivers an endearingly innocent dog, Andrea Yu is a knockout as a bird. Aaron Adams and Gui Fontanezzi also deliver strong work.

As the intensity of their surroundings increases, allegiances start to form among characters, and for this audience member, the stakes were palpable. The performers themselves are so committed (Raes Calvert in particular) and the action is occurring in such proximity to the audience, that there is no choice but to believe wholeheartedly in the danger of the piece. What a gift to an audience.

The writing is not without its expository scenes – mostly surrounding Lisa Goebel’s dog, and the distribution of material could be better balanced – we know that the character Mary has a grandfather somewhere, and that she works as a nurse, but Emily Rowed’s radiant performance makes us crave more story.

But these new writers are still finding their legs. So don’t let the premise fool you, this play sweats out originality and risk, and for anyone considering three years at Studio 58, there is no better showcase for the kind of talent you’ll find there.

Heptademic Redux
Part of the Vancouver International Fringe Festival
Little Mountain Studios
Remaining performances:
Friday Sept 17, 6:00 pm
Friday Sept 17, 8:00 pm
Saturday Sept 18, 6:00 pm
Saturday Sept 18, 8:00 pm
Sunday Sept 19, 6:00 pm
Sunday Sept 19, 8:00 pm

Sarah Ruhl gets off on quirk. The acclaimed American playwright behind “The Clean House” and “Melancholy Play” offers a bizarre and playful look at death and our dependency on cell phones with “Dead Man’s Cell Phone.”

This Equity Coop production is a rare treat at the Fringe -an expert group of professionals having some fun together. Sitting in a charming café, Jean (a note-perfect Eileen Barrett) discovers the man across from her (Stephen Aberle) has died. Furthermore, his cell phone will not stop ringing.

So what does she do? She answers it, thereby cementing a relationship between them. Jean then spends her time visiting various family members and acquaintances of the dead Gordon, creating alternate realities and happy endings for them, and going to tremendous lengths to do so.

The play goes from quirky, to silly, to downright ludicrous and back again, but through it all the production remains level – level and wonderful. The performances are exquisite: Suzanne Ristic soars as the scorned widow with a penchant for divulging sexual secrets, whereas Zena Daruwalla commands the stage with lipstick. Marion Eisman channels Christine Baranski as Gordon’s mother who invites Jean into their lives, for better or for worse. Aberle offers expert delivery of an exceptional monologue about the mundane nature of life. It’s so delicious, that its abrupt end is heartbreaking. If I could, I’d hand him a Jessie during curtain call.

In all its cutting and manic hilarity, the play explores the perceptions and assumptions people make of each other, and how technology can destroy and confuse those things. As the playful underdog Dwight, Ari Solomon asks “People say I love you on cell phones and where does it go?”

Director Kevin McNulty makes great use of what could be a cavernous space at Firehall, and together with set designer Pam Johnson, they’ve made the excessive scene changes and multitude of locations a real treat to watch unfold. In seeing so many professionals in a Fringe production, one can’t help but think of the devastating cuts our arts communities are coping with.

But that’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with producing in the Fringe. More than anything “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” feels like a love letter: to Vancouver theatre, to what the Fringe can be, and to a downright wonderful production.

Dead Man’s Cell Phone
Part of the Vancouver International Fringe Festival
Firehall Arts Centre
Remaining Performances:
Thursday Sep 16, 6:00 pm
Sunday Sep 19, 7:00 pm