Two girls spreading rose petals lead the annual Women’s Memorial March this year. A group of elders proceeded behind them with their drums sounding. The march began with the intersection of East Hastings and Main Streets as the epicenter—overtaken with a women-led drum circle. Cable buses halted and marchers continued to gather. With the girls leading the march and the drum’s songs, a sense of togetherness and empowerment weaved through the hundreds of marchers. Something of this moment came back to me later that weekend, at Lauri Lyster’s The Drummer Girl.

Comprised of both live music and personal stories, The Drummer Girl showed at the Firehall Arts Center from February 12 to 22. It begins with Lyster starting percussion lessons as a tween and moves through her career as a female percussionist—from her music degree and to dive bars, to symphonies, abroad, and more. “Being a woman, that has informed everything about my career,” she told Burnaby Now about the show. “But it’s more generic than that. It’s about being a musician.”

While the show handles the issue of being a female musician and just being a musician in forthright and intelligent ways, it also has a propulsive sense of humour. In one of the storytelling interludes, she describes being a percussionist in an orchestra. She sits on a chair with a music stand before her and has the audience imagine that she is in the orchestra pit. She then reaches into her bag to retrieve a water bottle with a rope attached (as she fastens it to the music stand, she tells the audience this is a precaution since one got away from her on stage at symphony), several issues of People Magazine (for her forty-minute rests, she confesses), and her triangle.

The last thing an audience wants to do is make a sound during a symphony, but the audience laughed through Lyster’s entire reenactment of a percussionist’s role in an orchestra. It included about four triangle hits, two naps, a little celebrity gossip, and a deadpan conclusion from the percussionist after she silenced the triangle: “Yeah, I’m classically trained.”

Later in the show she reenacts another performance in which she forgot her cymbals and drumsticks and had to improvise with a wooden frame broken in two and a beer bucket. She literally brings out a beer bucket, snaps a stick in half on stage, and plays the song with her band as she had to that night.

She tells these stories—both the successful and the not so successful—with a combination of dignity and humour that is a pleasure to watch. As this was the third year she ran the show, we can hope that it will return to the stage again soon.

Check out other great shows coming up at Firehall Arts Centre.