It’s a long way from P!nk to Joni Mitchell—and if you’re Andrew Cohen and Anna Kuman, the journey is not only long, but decidedly circuitous. Cohen began re-imagining popular music with a wildly popular and absurdly ambitious lip dub video of the acrobatic singer’s “Raise Your Glass”, which he made in 2011, during his final semester in UBC’s theatre program. Two-and-a-half-million YouTube views later, after having met Kuman and worked with her on the opening ceremonies of the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, he’s returning to the small stage with the revue Circle Game: Reimagining the Music of Joni Mitchell.

This time around, the codirectors have a cast of six, rather than thousands, and their budget is in keeping with what it takes to get a show up at the Firehall Arts Centre rather than at a purpose-built stadium. Still, their goal remains the same.

“The question is ‘What can we make to surprise and delight the audience with six people?’,” Kuman says in a speaker-phone conversation from the couple’s East Van home. “We’re coming at it from a different perspective, but the aim is to create something magical and exciting.”

The two have an intense but happy creative relationship: they finish each other’s sentences comfortably, and laugh a lot during the course of our conversation. They’re also both laser-focused when it comes to their work, considering not only the logistics of how to build their Circle Game production, but also where it fits in the bigger picture of a society split by environmental, economic, and political issues. And, perhaps surprisingly, their view is that the generation gap might not be as wide as it can sometimes seem.

“We both kind of came to know Joni Mitchell primarily through the lens of our parents playing her music,” Kuman explains. “But for us this journey really started in 2013. It was the year of Joni’s 70th birthday, and we started hearing her music everywhere we went. It was kind of an earworm that we both acknowledged, so we started researching her music and her lyrics more—and what we found was that they really spoke to us and what we were going through in our lives at the time and also generationally.”

“Considering that they had been written four and five decades ago, it was a little bit baffling to us just how modern they seemed,” Cohen adds. “So we did this experiment and tried to figure out what these messages would sound like if they were coming out today.”

One of the reasons why Mitchell hasn’t quite won the iconic status accorded her peers Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Neil Young is that her music is not easily performed by bedroom guitarists. Working with a bank of altered tunings and a jazz-inflected harmonic sensibility, she devised a style that’s so deeply personal that her songs—especially those that came after folk hits like the titular “Circle Game”—are inseparable from her performance of them. Rather than aim for faithful cover versions, Cohen and Kuman have wisely opted to recast Mitchell’s observations as a kind of choreographed concert, starring six singers who also, between them, play 18 different instruments. There’s no Joni figure or biographical intent, and this, they say, lets Mitchell’s message come through without the distraction of her well-publicized personal life.

“We wanted to make it a little bit more accessible for our generation,” Kuman says.

Many of Mitchell’s songs are characterized by a kind of restlessness: she began her artistic life in a foreign country and in an unhappy marriage, exiled from her family thanks to fallout from an unplanned pregnancy and underappreciated by her peers due to music-industry sexism. An unstable sense of home and the impermanence of love are two constants in her work—and while Cohen and Kuman are committed enough as a couple that they’ve just bought a house in Strathcona, they note that millennials also struggle with that need to belong.

“The generation that Joni was part of was really politically active,” Kuman says. “They were really searching for community. They were searching for connection between the Earth, between each other…”

“Between governments, and other societies, and religions,” Cohen chimes in, before Kuman completes her thought: “And I feel that our generation has taken that torch. There definitely is a renaissance in that way.”

Some things, both note, haven’t changed: the recent marches against the Trump administration share the spirit of the women’s liberation and antiwar protests of the 1960s. Other factors, however, combine to give Kuman and Cohen a little more optimism than their artistic forebears.

“We feel that we are able to search for what it is that truly brings us happiness nowadays,” Kuman says. “Not to say that people weren’t able to do that in previous generations, but I feel that millennials really value that as a priority—and Joni definitely speaks to that in her lyrics.”

“And maybe we can see a better future because we’ve seen this cycle before,” Cohen adds. “Just based on the fact that we’re here now, we know that we didn’t implode the world and kill everybody. So there is this glimmer of hope. Even though it might be rusty and tarnished, it’s still there.”

Circle Game: Reimagining the Music of Joni Mitchell runs at the Firehall Arts Centre from Saturday (April 29) to May 20.