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by Veda Hille & Bill Richardson, directed by Amiel Gladstone

Factory Theatre and Acting Up Stage Company, Factory Studio Theatre, Toronto

February 7-March 3, 2013;

National Arts Centre, Ottawa

November 12-22, 2014

“Did anybody see me today?”

Do You Want What I Have Got? A Craigslist Cantata is one of the most imaginative Canadian musicals to come along in decades.  It was the idea of writer and broadcaster Bill Richardson to set actual listings from the online classified website Craigslist to music, which versatile indie Vancouver composer and musician Veda Hille supplied.  The show sold out its entire run at the 2012 PuSH International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver.  The musical is filled with abundant humour involving outrageous adverts for items for sale, items wanted and personals.  But beneath that surface Veda and Richardson find an underlying melancholy that raises the show from being an extended exercise in quirkiness to an exploration of a society of individuals who, despite their digital connectedness, are, in the words of the show, “alone” and “empty”.

Craigslist is an appropriate subject for a Vancouver musical since in 2001 Vancouver became the first city outside the U.S. where Craigslist expanded.  There are now local sites in more than 70 countries with 50 million new ads posted monthly.  By calling the piece a “cantata” the creators connect a genre that until the classical period was almost exclusively religious with “Craigslist”, which is definitely secular.  The implication in the title and throughout the work is that the there is a kind of church of Craigslist where people go to find help and salvation. 

In reality, the musical is really a song-cycle united by its source material and similar themes.  Actual Craigslist ads, both sung and spoken are mixed with the creators’ own more generalized observations which help to give us a point of view on what would seem to be a collection of miscellanea.  While the show does not have a plot, the creators have also organized the material to form a general thematic arc.  We begin with the initial song “Bus Boy” about a missed connection, to a series of ads about things, into ads about situations involving pets and roommates to conclude with a long sequence about the search of love.  The last song “Missed Connections” expands on the missed connection that began the piece to suggest that Craigslist itself is an enormous compendium of missed connections.

A quartet of singers – Dmitry Chepovetsky, Bree Greig, Daren A. Herbert and Selina Martin – form the central group Craigslist ad placers who are accompanied by Veda Hille herself on the piano and Barry Mirochnick on percussion, xylophone, keyboards and electric guitar.  One of the delightful aspects of the show as a musical is that the accompanists also sing and the singers also play instruments, thus blurring the distinction between the two groups and forming a community live on stage that more tightly interconnected than the virtual community on Craigslist.

Every member of the cast has a chance to shine.  Chepovetsky is probably funniest as creepy guy who will pay a girl to slip into a bathtub full of noodles while he is out of the house.  Daren A. Herbert, who has the strongest voice of the six and is the best dancer, has a lovely, wistful song about wanting to meet up with the guy he saw as a clown on stilts in the local mall because he liked his sense of humour.  He is very funny as a guy who is “not gay at all or anything like that” who is looking for another guy to drink coffee with in their underwear.  He also displays his dry wit as a purse-snatcher struck with romance for one of his victims and as a farmer who needs to get rid of a moose that died on his property. 

Bree Greig has two standout numbers.  In one she is a girl looking for a new roommate whose list of who is acceptable is so restrictive it’s hard to imagine she’ll get any responses.  In the another she is a 23-year-old, living back at home who wants to get rid of the 300 stuffed penguins she has collected since childhood.  The way Hille has written the song and the way that Greig performs it suggests that the young woman is reluctantly confronting the fact that she has to give up the relic of her childhood if she is ever to move on to adulthood.

Selina Martin is given a roster of some of the oddest characters in the show.  Most memorable is her portrayal of a woman who wants to get rid of about 300 hats she’s made of cats and kitten over the years.  Now that her last cat Snowball has passed away, the presence of the hats has become a painful reminder of happier days.  As with Grieg’s young woman with her penguins, a situation we first judge as ridiculous we soon start to view as poignant.  Martin also takes on the comic role of a fusspot who goes about trying to correct the atrocious spelling and grammar found all over the website.

Hille has reserved one song for herself alone.  In this she is a woman who wants to give away a great amount of sponges for free but who is bizarrely restrictive about what times of the days they will be available – only one per person.  Hille also leads off two songs that become choral odes that form her and Richardson’s commentary on the Craigslist phenomenon.  In one she tells the story of Noah’s ark and Noah’s method of determining when the flood has finally receded (found in Genesis 8:6-12).  Noah periodically sends forth a dove who returns with nothing.  One day, however, the dove returns with an olive branch in its beak which tells Noah the waters have abated.  Hille and Richardson thus liken the various ads on Craigslist as dove sent out into the wilderness in hope that they will bring some response.  Since the musical depicts only one successful transaction, the overriding implication is that of the millions of ads sent out few will ever be answered. 

A second song that Hille’s leads is about famous people’s last words.  Goethe asked for more light.  Oscar Wilde complained about the curtains.  At the end Steve Jobs apparently said, “Oh wow.  Oh wow.  Oh wow.”  In a technique used elsewhere, the song begins with a tone of ridicule, but when it is taken up by the entire company it turns into a choral ode of surprising power and Jobs’ words, which at first seemed banal, take on a mystical sense as an appropriate response to an individual’s perception of an ineffable mystery.

In the wonderful final song “Missed Connections” the refrain “Did anyone see me today?” refers no only to being seen in the outside world, but perhaps for the Craigslist community being seen in Craigslist.  Hille and Richardson make the strong suggestion that people in the virtual community need to seen or read in order to validate their own existence.  There’s a real pathos in the hope that someone you noticed or who you thought noticed you would ever communicate that feeling on Craigslist.  And even if they did would you or they ever be able to find it amidst the thousands of similar pleas for acknowledgement?    

Robin Fisher has created a handsome, three-level wooden set that does not impede Monica Dottor’s amusing choreography that takes much of its inspiration from the synchronized illustrative movements of boy- or girl-groups of the late 1950s and early ‘60s.  Director Amiel Gladstone cleverly situates the action over the entire theatre including the side exit to the auditorium and the back entrance.  Hille’s varied score moves from standard off-Broadway pop to tangos, hymns, folk, to avant-garde 20th-century dissonance and even heavy metal.  It is imaginatively composed and inventively scored.  If there is a flaw it is that the musical seems to end several times before the final ending of “Missed Connections” that ties up the show.

People often set out doggedly to write the next great Canadian musical but, in fact, like The Drowsy Chaperone or Ride the Cyclone, Canadian musicals like Craigslist can arise in the most unlikely places with the most unlikely subject matter.  Craigslist combines such relevance, humour and poignancy with such a strong score that it is sure to go on to a long life within Canada and abroad.

              

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Veda Hilla (at piano), Dmitry Chepovetsky, Bree Greig, Selina Martin and Daren A. Herbert. ©2013 Joanna Akyol.

For tickets, visit www.factorytheatre.ca.