Arts & Culture
Broadway-quality evening at bargain prices
Published 12:39 PDT, Wed March 21, 2018
With Richmond’s current Gateway Theatre
production sold out for the run, there is an other option: 12 minutes further
away either by Skytrain or car, is Langara’s Studio 58.
While many Richmond theatre-goers have long
had season tickets to both groups, I’d never been to Studio 58. Richmond has
another connection to the program as Gateway’s artistic director, Jovanni Sy,
coaches in the acting program at Langara, the program that feeds not just
Studio 58 but Gateway and many Metro Vancouver productions with new
professional actors. In its 58 years of educating actors, Langara’s Studio 58
has produced many of the faces you see on both the stages and screens of the
Lower Mainland.
I’ve been to many student productions as my
offspring progressed through the school system. Richmond friends have often
rave about Langara College’s Studio 58 productions. As my theatre-going
companion said, he’d expected something slightly above a high school
production. Boy, were we wrong.
We saw the Evening B of the two night
offerings running in rep at Studio 58, four different plays by new playwrights
over two nights, thus the name of this annual presentation: four play.
While the quality is stellar, Program B is a
night of yin and yang, bitter and sweet. An evening of gut-wrenching pathos and
hearty laughter.
The first play of the evening, Matthias
Falvai’s Freedom '56 introduces us to the reality of the failed 1956 Hungarian
uprising. In school, as part of modern European history, we learned the
generalities, the consequences for a population. Falvai shows us the personal,
the realities lived in one small apartment, in one family, of a popular
uprising gone wrong and brutally quashed. The theoretical and historical
becomes personal and present.
I have few notes from Freedom '56 because it
is so gripping. The viewer is quickly sucked into the action, the emotion. It
takes a moment to understand the layout of the set, but then with a set that
has to be flexible enough to work for four different plays, some flexibility in
one’s imagination is required.
The play opens in Hungary, 1956, with two
young adults, cousins raised together. Andras, played by Evan Rein, and Mira,
played by Caitlin Volkert love each other as only close siblings can. Each
represents another side of the conflict.
Michelle Morris, as Andras’s middle-aged
mother, suprised me because she is older than most university drama students.
The mother’s devotion to her ordinary husband turned revolutionary and love for
her son and the niece she’d raised were obvious in every word and action. Given
the few lines of comic relief, and they do come as a relief, Morris’s timing is
flawless.
It was only much later in the night, at the
reception and awards ceremony, that I discovered that middle-aged woman is in
her early twenties. It’s called acting, folks.
William Edward as the father, demonstrates
clearly through his dialogue why a comfortable parent and husband would risk it
all to change the system. Something that’s always been hard to understand from
our comfortable viewpoint.
Aiden Drummond plays the opportunistic
entrepreneur with big visions, willing to trade names to the authorities for a
building permit, saying he will change Hungary for the better by rebuilding it.
His fianceé, Andras’s cousin Mira, is conflicted.
The last character, Halsz played by Isaac
Mazur, represents those who eradicated the rebels and crushed the soul of
Hungary’s intelligentsia. He represents the Soviet-back regime, in every sense.
Freedom '56 is so utterly relevant today
because we feel the split second decisions that must be made; whether to stay
or flee on a moment’s notice, with nothing. We learn the consequences of a
moment’s hesitation, hesitation out of love, that can have brutal consequences.
In a time when the world is populated by
refugees who had just such a life-altering decision to make in a moment, this
play offers insight into their lives in the moment just before the bombs drop,
the enemy forces invade, or the knock on the door comes—the heart-wrenching
decisions that have to be made in a moment because no decision, or even a slow
decision, can mean death and loss.
All the actors are utterly believable. We are
enveloped by their reality.
My most visceral reaction in a play ever,
happens in the aftermath of the knock on the door, when Halsz comes for the
father.
After this first play of the evening ends, we
are left staring off into the distance, recognizing that some characters did go
on to better, or at least safer, lives.
In fact, the playwright’s grandfather, John
Falvai, did escape Hungary in 1956, making his way to Nanaimo where he taught
music for the rest of his life but the price he paid was leaving his wife and
infant son behind.
It wasn’t until the son grew up, married and
immigrated to Canada in 1998 that he saw his child, now fully adult, again.
Before John died, he taught saxophone to Matthias, his young grandson, the
playwright.
The surprises continue. When going out to
theatre or movies, the price of snacks and beverages can be eye-watering. Not
so at Studio 58. With tickets at $15, even adding treats at intermission means
you can go out for an evening for less than $20.
After intermission, Ain't the Musical didn’t
look too promising; the story of the Third Edition of the Merriam-Webster
dictionary, in musical form. My tired companion warned me that he might not
stay awake. It wasn’t a problem, or a possibility, with this production. It is
invigorating fun.
While the audience, full of theatre people,
people who appreciate the decorum expected in a performance, the belly laughs
come fast and furious as the struggle between a proscriptive dictionary and a
descriptive one played out on the stage. Should a dictionary tell people how to
talk or describe the words that are really used in a language? France has come
down firmly on the side of the former while English evolves and our
dictionaries reflect that. This is the story, in words, song, dance and
hilarity, of that struggle.
Philip the boss, played by Jarred Stephen
Meek, was suitably stuffy and worried about making deadline to please his
unseen boss who punctuates the play, rattling the scribe’s cage by phone. Later
in Ain't: the Musical when Meek, as Philip, sings I Can’t Find the Words I am
blown away by his fine singing voice. This man has a future.
Working away, in the basement, sight unseen
is the junior dictionary editor, Anne, who really does a lot of the work.
Played by Mallory James, Anne longs to be a senior editor so her contributions
will be acknowledged on the opening pages of the dictionary.
Her assistant, with even less power than
Anne, Betty played by Emily Jane King, longs to find an intelligent man through
this job so she can marry for love and quit said job. (Spoiler alert…changes in
attitude ensue.)
One absolutely stand-out performance of the
evening comes from Marguerite Hanna, who from the moment she appears on stage
as the cleaning woman, until the curtain falls, is utterly convincing as the
uneducated, oppressed Deedee looking for dignity. Never overplayed, her
colourful turns of phrase, rooted in her Cajun upbringing, prompt the crisis at
the heart of the play: is ain’t a word or not? If so, what about all the other
highly descriptive words in use but not in the dictionary?
I came to anticipate great things every time
Deedee appeared on the stage. Hanna doesn’t disappoint, ever. What a treat. Her
comedic delivery is flawless. She is always in character even as she sings and
dances her way through Ain't: The Musical.
The actor who steals the show is Aidan
Drummond. From the moment he steps on the stage, it is like seeing a young
Mathew Broderick in The Producers. His character, Charlie, tries to suavely woo
the young assistant, with obviously clumsy wordplay. The audience’s laughter
resounds.
Both Drummond and Hannah’s performances would
fit on the New York or London stage, such are their quality.
Drummond also offered a surprise. When he
deservedly won The Sidney Risk prize for his acting, we discovered it was he
who had been the opportunistic Hungarian property developer in the first play
of the evening, Freedom '56. So different are those two roles and his
interpretations of them that, even without disguises save for a pair of glasses
in the second play, it never crosses one’s mind that these two utterly
dissimilar roles are played by the same actor.
The pianist, Lindsay Warnock, opens the show
when she comes out, licks her pencil then commences to play and play she does,
for the entire evening. She is the entire orchestra, sitting at the piano in
the back of the typing room. Her flawless work is the foundation of all the
musical numbers.
The word play in Ain't: The Musical is witty
throughout, as you might hope from a play about words. It is unerringly clever,
hitting every verbal mark.
The music sounds assured and whisks the play
along. The belly laughs come spontaneously throughout the play. Creators David
Johnston and Erik Gow have a winner on their hands.
The choreography is spot on as is the
dancing, with none of the visible counting you might expect in a student
production. In fact, from the moment the lights dip at the start Freedom '56
until the curtain falls, figuratively speaking, at the end of the night, all
thoughts of the word “student” evaporate, never to return.
These two plays run at Studio 58 only until
Sunday afternoon, March 25. They are absolutely not to be missed.
Tickets for Studio 58’s four play Program B
can be purchased through ticketstonight.
One bonus, if you want to see Program A as
well, you receive a $5 refund if you bring in your program from the other
night. Two nights of fine theatre for $25 sounds like a stellar bargain to me.
This is some of the finest theatre we have on offer. It’s worth the extra 12
minutes to get there, especially when Gateway is sold out.