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.

You can’t argue with the premise of 100% Vancouver – turning statistics about our city into performance.

100 typical Vancouverites, chosen carefully to represent the different demographics of Vancouver to create a portrait of the city (drawn 1/6000th to scale), enter a stage set up with signs marking Vancouver neighbourhoods. They introduce themselves to the audience and describe a precious object that they have brought with them before standing in their neighbourhood. The performers range in age by about ninety years and the youngest children bring stuffed animals or iPods. The older performers have family photos and keepsakes. The oldest participant holds a century-old lamp.

I admit that I’m skeptical. After all, I see a mixed cohort of Vancouverites clutching at various objects every day, but it’s not theatre – it’s called riding the bus. And while the concept is clever, the execution is flawed – some performers are visibly fatigued by all the stage crossing, and the youngest children aren’t sure what to do. But it’s impossible not to be genuinely moved while watching your neighbours reveal personal, intimate details.

Performers take turns asking questions to the audience and the performers about their lives and beliefs, asking them to identify or not with the statement. Signs appear on either side of the stage, reading “ME” or “NOT ME,” and the performers flow towards the side that describes them. Sometimes the performers stand together and raise their hands, or sit around the stage. A camera projects an image of the performers from above, creating a human pie chart.

100% Vancouver reveals the strangeness of impersonal, abstract statistics. A question like, “Have you suffered from a mental illness?” or “Have you been a victim of violence?” is divorced from the people it describes when rendered as a percentage. But the individuals on stage are the data, and the audience and performers are connected by transcendent moments of recognition and comfort.

Statistics become the tool for building community, reminding us that we have been a community with a shared and complex history all along. The atmosphere is reverent, respectful, and non-judgmental. If these audience memebers have ever written a hateful comment on a CBC article about addiction or incarceration, you wouldn’t know it from their steady, heartfelt applause.

100% Vancouver
Part of the PuSh Festival
SFU Woodward’s Theatre
Remaining Performances:
January 21st & 22nd, 7:00 pm

Photographs by Theatre Replacement (Vancouver).