Musical theatre's rage to the stage Atomic Vaudeville creates a show from scratch
ACT I: More than 20 people squeeze into a one-room apartment downtown. They sing, read scripts and rehearse lines. It's hot, crowded, noisy, smells like sweat, and - considering the fast delivery, swearing and subject matter - it's definitely not Shakespeare. Light streams in and reflects off the walls, spackled with posters for the group: Atomic Vaudeville, one of the most ribald and popular troupes in the city. The cast comes in all shapes and sizes, wearing shirts and slacks, sweat pants or polkadotted dresses. They are students, scientists, baristas, programmers and yoga instructors. Seven women, casually dressed, all holding scripts, kneel as if pre-teens at a slumber party. Britt Small, 35, lead director and co-founder, is one of them. The cutting - slicing out dialogue, characters or scenes, is done fast and furious during rehearsal. "So we're just going to do cuts on the fly right now?" says Small. "I'll do cuts at the end - mostly surgical cuts near the end," says Jacob Richmond, 32, the lead writer, a man who smiles a lot but always appears as if he's preoccupied with something. The sketch begins. It's the meeting of the "Barak Obama Jonas Brothers Sleepover Crush Gang." The girls shout "We all got a crush on Obama!" then gossip about "Vitamin Hope," the Jonas Brothers' purity rings and sex. Although it's a first run, the line delivery is fast and funny. There's a pause when Treena Stubel delivers a short monologue and makes herself cry - which, although sad, is entertaining. Richmond moves it along. "Ride the bus, ride the bus," he says, flicking his lighter and pacing. Between the phallic jokes and Obama adoration, Sarah Pelzer's character, aptly named Sarah, delivers a monologue about how she doesn't really have an Obama crush. It includes comments about his Senate voting record, a hyper-real opinion piece. "So as long as a politician kowtows to the million-ton elephant in the room, which is corporate influence over government, no real change will ever occur," Pelzer says. "So if I could vote, I would vote for Ralph Nader." Then the girls talk about Nader. It's a flat spot. Richmond writes some dialogue on the fly. "This is a cut, a big, surgical cut. You say, 'I say we kill her. I say we slice her,' " says Richmond, playing it up with a mean-streets Hispanic accent. "I say we kill her, then we slice her." Everyone laughs. Pencils come out, and they scribble on the scripts. "Get rid of the whole page and the line on top?" says Celine Stubel, lead Obama girl and longtime vaudevillian. "Yeah," says Richmond. The end of the scene is when the crush club jump Pelzer's character and waterboard her. It's a moment so unexpected, so obscene, that it's laugh-out-loud funny. "The neighbours don't mind it when we do lines," says Small, afterwards. "But they hate it when we dance." This is the story of Atomic Vaudeville, about young people with jobs who scrape together a regular cabaret act and spectacle on par with anything in the golden age of stage. ACT II: 'My father went to see the first show," says Richmond. He's the son of Brian Richmond, the head of the University of Victoria's department of theatre and a respected director. "But then he didn't see the second show, because he said he tries to 'distance himself from mediocrity.'" It's a tongue-in-cheek comment, one of many from the fast-talking Richmond, but Small agrees: The first show was a train wreck. But it was a start. The whole thing began as a make-work project in 2004. The duo met while Small was completing her master's degree in directing at the University of Victoria. Richmond had done some cabaret nights when he was going to school in Montreal, and the two got to talking about performance possibilities. Richmond took a vacation, and when he got back Small had found a venue and made posters. There was no turning back.
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Atomic Vaudeville is entering its fifth year performing cabaret shows. The shows are made up of about 20 bits - sketches, big musical numbers, commentary by rotating hosts, occasionally standup comedy. They perform about six shows a year. Episodes have rotating hosts, such as Pop-Bot, a disrespecting robot, Ronald McDonald, or Osama Bin Laden. The early shows had titles like Fear or Liberty or Sci-fi. Now the titles are a mission statement: The Delicious Carnival of the Dead or How I learned to stop worrying and let Johnny touch my gun. Bits like "Samuel the Christian Ninja" and the slow theatre parody "Lord Acton, have you seen my monocle?" have brought the group a cult-like following, but what makes Atomic Vaudeville memorable is the number of people they manage to get on a stage the size of a snooker table. The musical numbers, with at least a dozen people in them, include jumps, hops and pirouettes - at one rehearsal the group tried to find a way to suspend someone from the ceiling, to get more hang-time from a jump. Atomic Vaudeville is successful enough that everyone involved gets paid - true, it amounts to two beers a show - but still, it's something. Each show they put together runs four times, and each regularly entertains crowds of up to 150 people. And they do this with only about 70 hours of writing, rehearsal and prep work. It makes for an interesting and ever-evolving, if occasionally disjointed, show. ACT III: The first step in the creation of a new show is the story pitch meeting. Held at the end of June in Small's apartment, the cast members are in a circle, ready to talk ideas. "First off, we wanted it to be an Internet show, but we're not sure, so it's more of a future show," Richmond says. "The whole idea of the belief in the future. Almost the 1950s. The world of tomorrow - today." "Do you still want to go with the title you were thinking of?" Small says. "Yeah - 'Scientists believe the world will be more futuristic than previously predicted.'" "Whose quote is that, Jacob?" "R. Kelly," Richmond says, to much laughter. "Not the R. Kelly, but the R. Kelly who wrote Donnie Darko." "My head almost exploded," Small says. "We just wanted to go for an overwrought title, because people don't really care what the title is," Richmond says. "We've been hammering alien stuff." Small pulls out a book with ideas they brainstormed earlier. One joke centres on a popular YouTube clip of a CBC broadcast from the 1990s where Peter Mansbridge refers to "the Internet" as "Internet," and a quote from an Internet user in the U.K. - "I can indulge my deep and abiding passion for all things Thai." In its current context, the phrase generates laughter in the room. As the pitch meeting progresses, some ideas come out fully formed - sketches about generations of Internet users developing giant hands and big eyes, the Internet as a treasure trove of pornography, or the possibility that the show can crash like a computer. Much like a game of telephone in a drama class, the pitch meeting dissolves as it goes on. The final discussions are all about Facebook and something called "The Internet Goat," which according to Small, "If you don't get it, we can't explain it." ACT IV: Three days before the show goes up, most of these bits are gone. Instead of a show just about the 1950s view of the future, or a collection of jokes about Facebook, or even Richmond's treasured "Bard-Bot," a bit about Pop-Bot's uncle who quotes Shakespeare and demands mead, the new show title is I've Seen the Future... and the Future Is Smoke Free! and most of the bad bits have been cut. The evening before, Richmond and writer Alex Wlasenko were in the rehearsal space until 4 a.m. cutting sketches and characters, working on the order of the show. Bard-Bot was starting to annoy Richmond, even though he wrote it. Richmond tried to cut Obama Girls, but the cast stopped him. Now the show is hosted by a little girl who tries to get Vaudeville puppet Jerome the Giraffe to quit smoking. There's lots of music, some original, such as Bollywood Batman, others that come from the top of the charts like Katy Perry's I Kissed A Girl. There's also a terrifying live ukulele version of a song about serial killer John Wayne Gacy, performed as a dance piece. Uncomfortable vibes spread throughout the off-stage cast at seeing a man in a clown mask jaunt around under spooky green lights. The comedy is enhanced by the squirm of the "little girl" cast - actor Justine Shore has a phobia of clowns, and was picked to do the scene for that reason. It's the sort of anti-Vaudeville element that entertains through the sheer weirdness of it.
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"The thing I love about Jacob and Britt is that no matter how much you love something, they're willing to throw it out," says Wes Borg, a 20-year veteran of comedy writing and a founding member of Edmonton's Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie. "They have a dark cabal of brilliant skit-smiths who sit in the dark and randomly throw out brilliant scenes that I wrote." Borg has a good laugh. It's his second Atomic Vaudeville since he moved to Victoria in September. The first thing he noticed in Victoria was the lack of comedy - with the exception of Atomic Vaudeville. Taylor Lewis is also new to the act. He's got the boyish looks of Milhouse from The Simpsons with the stage presence of Dustin Hoffman. An acting student at UVic, he wanted to be involved since he saw his first show. He heard about the June pitch meeting 15 minutes before it happened, and has been tagging along since. He is referred to as "the little one." "I die a couple of times, which I hear is a really big honour. If they kill you off at least once, it means they like you," Lewis says. "I'm in a couple of dance numbers ... I'm also doing a Mel Gibson Mad Max Thunderdome thing. Then I get killed again." Lewis also has a bit where he explains, in graphic, pungent detail, various disgusting Internet phenomena. He does it straight-faced, without cracking. At the end of that scene, Celine Stubel, playing Lewis's mother, calls for a doctor. Enter Dr. Theatre, played by Michael Delamont, a giant of a man who has been with Atomic Vaudeville since the early days. Stubel calls for a "real doctor." "Can a real doctor whisk you away to the mystical land of Elsinore on two planks and a passion?" shouts Delamont, his voice booming. "Rhetorical!" Delamont, along with comedy partner Rod Peter, joined at the same time. Delamont is probably best known as the soused, giggling standup comedy host Jimmy Peekaboo, Doctor Theatre and God, among others, while Peter has a tendency to do more movement and physical comedy pieces. The show is still evolving. The show that happens on opening night is different from the show on closing night - Richmond and Small are always fine-tuning, dropping, extending various scenes to find out what gets the biggest laughs. The current show is no exception. As far as their audience goes - the typical audience member is a male between 20 and 30 - they attribute it to the style of show: People can come at any time, can leave at any time, can get a drink at the bar. "A lot of people that come and see the Vaudevilles aren't regular theatre-going people ... they don't go and see the live theatre at Langham Court or the Belfry," Small says. "Club kids," Richmond says. "People are realizing that a lot of the patrons going to the theatres are a lot older, and that there's not really a new generation coming up that's eager about theatre, unless they infuse the scene and make it a less formal, interactive event," Small says. Small mentions the night where tomatoes were placed on the tables for lobbing at the cast. Richmond was hit in the ear, by cast member Peter. Peter got his: At free water-gun night, while he was climbing up on a human pyramid, he was nailed in the eye several times. Peter told the audience to die afterwards. He meant it. Of course, he has "Vaudeville" tattooed on his waist. That's dedication. ACT V: The night before the show goes up, the cast does a complete run-through. The two technicians put filters in lights, figure out what scenes need spotlight follows, work on getting the cues right for blackouts, fade outs, and get the correct music in order. Props are finalized too. There's a large Elmo head that now has tin-foil hair, while the Hater-Bot puppet's light inside keeps falling out. Richmond and Small talk about the order of the show while the rest of the cast are on a dinner break. "In the first half, it's loquacious," Richmond says. "We've got a show order, but we're already sure we're going to change it," Small agrees. Richmond goes to fix Hater-Bot, while Small puts batteries in flashlights used in a musical number. As the night goes on, some members rehearse with scripts in hand. They create new lines and drop others. Others practise dance steps. The Obama girls discuss how to create the illusion of waterboarding. The show wraps around 11 p.m "Don't hesitate. If you make a mistake, just be confident and keep going," says Small, her last directing note of the night. |