A Campus Connoisseuse

Having just gotten out of William Yang’s China, I cannot help but rush to praise this work of live art. In one word, it was beautiful.

Yang is the sole speaker in the production, which is a narration of his pilgrimages to China and his discovery of a connection with his Chinese roots. Yang, a gay, second generation Australian, was charismatic and a wonderful monologuer. His story was enlightening, a view into a world I’d never seen before, fantastically illustrated by his photography of the journey.

The performance setup is simple: Yang, speaking, with two visual backdrops, showing his photographs, and a musician playing traditional Chinese instruments to it. The wording, displays, and music are exquisitely chosen to work together. I’ve long been a hater of using visual backdrops on stage, but having seen for once this technique used properly has personally called this stance into question.

It was presented at the Frederick Wood Theatre as part of the PuSh Festival, which I can only hope is overall just as good, and certainly worth checking out.

His story was engaging, and wondrous. I’d strongly recommend seeing it. It was a work quite earnestly deserving the standing ovation it got.

What wasn’t so deserving of a standing ovation, I found, was Theatre UBC’s Romeo and Juliet, which I saw last week. The play had been unusually sold out in advance with staggeringly long standby lines, so I’d come into it expecting that it had better be good. It wasn’t.

I’m certainly open to reinterpreting Shakespeare — but painting Romeo and Juliet into clowns, with awful makeup and costumes reminiscent of sixteen-year-olds that shop at Hot Topic, and jarring music accompanying songs not worthy of a B-movie — was not particularly pleasant for me to watch. I found the juxtaposition to hinder, rather than enhance the story.

I wasn’t exactly imparted with the impression that the director wanted to tell the story of Romeo and Juliet. Indeed, I think she just wanted to have a Tim Burtonesque fantasia, which on its own certainly could be fun. And I must say, the firespinner in the bikini did make for some good entertainment. What it has to do with Romeo and Juliet is still lost on me, but she was quite the spectacle.

The poster for the play appeared to promise nudity, and was a disappointment of the night — there was no nude Juliet, not to mention her performance sucked.

Speaking much more positively of the experience, Ben Whipple’s performance as Mercutio was stunning. It made the play worth the 10$ I paid for it. I enjoyed his performance as Fred Phelps in the Laramie Project, and was totally impressed with his job here. It was, in conjunction with the firespinner, the only reason worth seeing the play.

And as for the play being sold out — they’d removed about a dozen seats from the audience to make room for the atrocious band, and for Juliet’s balcony — enough to host most of the poor students waiting for hours in the standby line to the play that didn’t deserve it.