From HIVE to Bat Boy, hot stages to swarm

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      Theatre

      Critics' Picks

      Compared to, say, Toronto, our town looks out rather than in, and our cultural life reflects that stance.

      In the spring theatre season, the locally produced HIVE 3 and Streetcar Bungalow, which are both site-specific projects, will reflect our combined obsessions: place, sensuality, and experiment. The Greatest Cities in the World, by Vancouver’s Theatre Replacement, is also concerned with location and identity.

      We’ll welcome some of the best national and international shows too. The eagerly anticipated runs of blood.claat from Toronto and the off-Broadway hit Bat Boy: The Musical demonstrate just how open this town is to excitement, no matter where it comes from.

      The Greatest Cities in the World
      (March 9 to 13 in the Historic Theatre at the Cultch)
      To create this show, the folks from Theatre Replacement visited Tennessee, where they met, interviewed, videotaped, and collected photographs from residents of small towns named for international capitals, including London, Paris, Rome, Athens, Bogota, and Moscow.
      The Draw: The company’s track record. Under the artistic direction of James Long and Maiko Bae Yamamoto, Theatre Replacement has built its stellar rep on shows such as BIOBOXES and Clark and I Somewhere in Connecticut, which both use real stories and found materials to play with notions of cultural identity, narrative reliability, and the delicacy of human connections.
      Target Audience: Eggheads and tripsters. Some people will be into analyzing this show, while others will just go with the flow. Both approaches are totally legit.

      HIVE 3
      (March 11 to 14 and 17 to 20 at the Centre for Digital Media)

      HIVE just might be the coolest cultural event this city has to offer. In this, HIVE’s third incarnation, 15 companies will create theatrical installations in the Centre for Digital Media, a warehouselike space on Great Northern Way. The core troupes are the crème de la crème of Vancouver’s hot experimental-theatre scene: Boca del Lupo, Electric Company, Felix Culpa, Leaky Heaven Circus, Neworld Theatre, the Only Animal, Pi Theatre, Radix, Rumble Productions, Theatre Replacement, Theatre Conspiracy, and Theatre SKAM. Each piece lasts a maximum of 15 minutes, and you never know what to expect from these intimate performances. In past years, audience members have found themselves blindfolded, crawling under a glass floor, and being wheeled along a track like a camera shooting a movie.
      The Draw: The companies give themselves permission to fail, which is exhilarating for all of us.
      Target Audience: As the name suggests, there’s always a huge buzz about this event. Besides the shows, which play continuously in all sorts of unusual spaces, there are live bands in the main hall. There’s always fine entertainment to be had, but sometimes you’ve got to elbow your way through the crowd to get to it. So this event is made for people who are eager to swarm, and then shake their butts in that excited bumblebee dance.

      Bat Boy: The Musical
      (April 9 to 18 at the Norman Rothstein Theatre)
      You’ve got to love a musical that was inspired by a headline in the tabloid Weekly World News: “Bat Child Found in Cave!” It’s all about a creature who’s half boy and half bat—and addicted to drinking blood. According to reviews of previous productions, the show combines the ironic sensibility of The Simpsons with some serious—and surprising—thoughts about racism and religion. Besides winning two Lucille Lortel Awards and the Outer Critics Circle Award for best off-Broadway musical in 2001, Bat Boy has become a cult hit.
      The Draw: Talent. Presented by Patrick Street Productions, this mounting will be directed by Peter Jorgensen and will feature strong performers, including Scott Perrie (Bat Boy), Scott Bellis, Katey Wright, Matt Palmer, and Ian Rozylo.
      Target Audience: The demented, including those driven insane by the many long years it has taken Bat Boy to reach Vancouver.

      Streetcar Bungalow
      (May 19 to 22 in a bungalow off Commercial Drive)
      Is nothing sacred? Thankfully not. Having gleefully deconstructed Antigone, Salome, and King Lear, the anarchic artists of Leaky Heaven have decided to turn their collective focus to Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Their version will be a site-specific work staged in an East Van bungalow, with the audience gazing in through the windows and the action bursting onto the street. Leaky Heaven is known for its dark, bouffon style of clowning, which could be a perfect match for this text about the warring forces of Eros and death.
      The Draw: Williams’s script is sexy and so is this cast, which features Lois Anderson as Blanche Dubois, Sasa Brown as Stella Kowalski, and Billy Marchenski as Stanley Kowalski.
      Target Audience: Voyeurs with artistic aspirations.

      bloodclaat
      (April 7 to 17 at the Firehall Arts Centre)

      In Jamaica, bloodclaat is an obscenity that refers to menstrual cloth. In the play, Toronto writer d’bi young anitafrika, who also performs this solo show, tells the story of 15-year-old Mudgu SanKofa’s coming of age. In the process, she explores sexism, colonialism, and courage with the skill and depth of a novelist.
      The Draw: Vivacity. In this show, which Vancouver first saw as part of the Magnetic North festival in 2008, anitafrika’s physical characterizations are phenomenal: Mudgu dancing, her Rastafarian boyfriend clutching his dick, her aunt shuddering in religious excitement.
      Target Audience: People who think that politics are boring—or bloodless.

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