promo photo for Atomic Vaudeville’s Ride the Cyclone
As SummerWorks winds down for another year, I’d like to thank the festival on behalf of the Panic Manual for accrediting us again. Here’s a few more reviews, hopefully you were all lucky enough to catch one of these or a different show from this great festival.
The posters for Suburban Beast’s Post-Eden call it a live film. This is an apt enough term for a show where two large video screens dominate the stage and the cast monologues and acts for a while in front of filmed scenes of themselves. The concept is interesting enough, and the presentation is certainly innovative. But the story lets the production down; it’s a bit prosaic, and much as it struggles to tie a few disparate story threads together, it doesn’t quite manage it.
Susan (Sascha Cole) and Robert (David Coomber) are a married couple trying to sort out their lives after a messy affair. Their teenage daughter Ashley (Jenna MacMillan) finds herself drawn to local brooding teen Jacob (Kevin Walker) who’s convinced that the world is about to end. And Eden (Lindsey Clark) is the family dog, who died of a protracted illness. The attention the sick dog got left Robert feeling unloved; Ashley, meanwhile, is convinced that the deceased dog is restless under the ground in their backyard and has cursed the family.
Having a person play the dog is not nearly the weirdest thing in this show; a couple of the images that come across the screen are very odd, like the one where Ashley and Jacob have rubber animal masks on and make out in the street. Stuff like that is way too abstract for this show’s good, as it’s hard enough to believably mesh live acting with filmed scenes without trying to throw in that level of bizarre too. For such a central plot point, the “curse” of the dead dog doesn’t really get much play. The parent’s storyline ends up being a fair bit more interesting than that of the two teenagers. There’s some mumbo-jumbo about wildlife in the area acting up, but it’s all talked about a lot more than it’s shown and mostly seems extraneous to the plot.
Still, the production wins points for creativity in presentation, and the cast is pretty good, with extra credit to Clark, who gets partially buried in sand on stage, something I’d sure not want to be doing every other night for a week and a half.
(after the click: Smackheaded Peter and probable fan’s choice pick Ride the Cyclone)