[img_assist|nid=76|title=The Producers|desc=Photo by David Cooper. Josh Epstein and the cast of the Arts Club Theatre Company’s production of The Producers.|link=none|align=right|width=200|height=153]Directed by Bill Millerd
Book: by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan
Music and Lyrics by Mel Brooks
Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage
Arts Club Theatre Company
May 15 - July 13th, 2008
Photo by David Cooper. Josh Epstein and the cast of the Arts Club Theatre Company’s production of The Producers.
Vancouver, BC: The Arts Club continues its run of crowd pleasing musicals with The Producers. The version of this musical now playing has had an interesting and unusual evolutionary history. The screenplay for the initial 1968 film The Producers, written and directed by Mel Brooks, garnered Brooks an Academy award for screenplay. It starred Zero Mostel as Max Bialystok and Gene Wilder as Leo Bloom. In a reversal of what usually happens, the film was developed into a Broadway musical, which opened in 2001 with Nathan Lane as Bialystok and Matthew Broderick as Bloom. Lane and Broderick recently reprised their stage roles in the 2005 film version of The Producers. This seems to be a new trend with Hairspray following suit.
As a great Producer fan, the misadventures of Bialystok and Bloom, as they search for the worst possible script, a hopeless director and performers who can’t act, sing or dance worth a dime, all the while defrauding little old ladies and lusting after their new Swedish secretary, Ulla, are familiar grounds to me. And my mental images of Bialystok and Bloom morph back and forth between Mostel/Lane and Wilder/Broderick. But Jay Brazeau (Max Bialystok) and especially Josh Epstein (Leopold Bloom) have imprinted their own version of these roles over my hybrid characters with their enthusiastic performances.
The 8th Land by William Maranda
Directed by John Wright
Performance Works, Granville Island
Pi Theatre
May 15 to 31, 2008
Vancouver, BC: Pi Theatre’s world premiere production of The 8th Land, directed by John Wright, is truly stunning. Local playwright, William Maranda, melds Polynesian mythology, and cultural theories on the decline of the early Easter Island population with Aeschylean structural forms to create an eerily poetic sense of “other” place and time. Yet issues in this play will resonate with contemporary audiences: conflict between religious dogma and human needs; use of scarce natural resources; personal glory versus survival of a people.
TE-TE (Parnelli Parnes) is king of the 8th Land. He is the last of the bloodline of the king, HOTU-MATUA (Alvin Sanders), who originally brought his people to this island, many generations before. Once lush with greenery and giant palm trees, the land is now barren as the ground was cleared to plant yams and the palms cut down to feed, house and bury the inhabitants. TE-Te’s people are starving and Northerners and Southerners fight for what little food is left. HIVA (Linda Quibell), the Goddess who guided the ancestors to this land of plenty, is no longer prepared to squander her gifts on this land, no matter how loudly TE-Te shouts.
[img_assist|nid=80|title=No Exit|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=92|height=150]No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre – trans. Paul Bowles
Directed by Kim Collier
The Virtual Stage/Electric Company Theatre
Centre for Digital media
May 1 -10, 2008
Photo by Tim Matheson
Vancouver, BC: It is entirely understandable that a work like No Exit with its anti-life sense of alienation and hopelessness would be written at a time when Europe was mired in the hell of war with no obvious end in sight. Sartre’s three thoroughly unlikable characters, doomed to spend eternity together tormenting each other, have not a redeeming feature among them and a lesser production would make for a thoroughly depressing evening. But director Kim Collier and her strong cast dazzled in a technologically spectacular production that compelled attention.
Vincent Cradeau (Andy Thompson), Inez (Lara Sadiq) and Estelle (Lucia Frangione) arrive one by one in Hell to be greeted by the Valet (Jonathon Young) who leads them to a windowless room; their final “resting place”. Instead of the flames and instruments of torture they expect to find, it is a drawing room, furnished with three chairs and a heavy bronze statue on a mantelpiece. A misleadingly innocuous environment.
The 8th Land by William Maranda
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