“One man’s junk is another man’s gold,” sing Andrew Cohen and Alex Nicoll, both vocalists in Paul Snider’s, Junk!, showing at the Vancouver Fringe Festival. Performed exclusively using instruments made of discarded objects, this 60 min musical tells the story of Melissa, a young girl who stumbles upon a junkyard and its ten oddball inhabitants. Together with the gang, Melissa begins a musical exploration of climate change and consumerist themes, all centred around the idea that “junk is in the eye of the beholder.”

Despite its creative approach, however, Junk! failed to provide the gold it promised…at least in this humble “beholder’s” opinion.

Of course, the instruments themselves were fascinating. Among the most notable were a saxophone made out of a rubber glove, a stand up bass built inside a wheelbarrow, and a Glockenspiel constructed using old PVC tubing. Both aesthetically and conceptually interesting, these dumpster creations grabbed my attention immediately. Although these instruments were functional, however, many could not be hooked up to amps, and so their musical contributions were barely audible. The resulting sound scape predominantly featured guitar, percussion and vocals, losing the truly unique sounds to the blare of these more familiar ones.

The score, an original composition by Snider himself, was equally disappointing. Both instrumentally and lyrically repetitive, the only thing about the music I liked was the old hubcaps and empty bottles it was played upon. Likewise, Snider’s messages about consumerist culture and global warming were generic, and failed to convince me to start cutting up my old shoes to make bongo drums.

To top it all off, Junk! had little or no plot to speak of. Instead, performers moved from one mediocre song to the next, seemingly without cause. The musical, much like the instruments themselves, appeared to be held together with little more than shoestrings and duct tape.

With multiple technical malfunctions and generally subpar acting, Junk! certainly lives up to its name. The medium, is, indeed, the message, and in this case, I’m afraid they’re both “junk”.