Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
✭✭✭✭✩
written and directed by Rick Miller
David Mirvish, Kdoons and Wyrd Productions, Panasonic Theatre, Toronto
•January 20-February 1, 2015;
Grand Theatre, London
•April 14-May 2, 2015
Joni Mitchell: “And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look behind” (from “The Circle Game”)
Everyone knows that Rick Miller is a fine actor. That is evident when he has played roles in conventional plays like David Ives’s Venus in Fur. But Miller has talents that lie beyond playing individual roles. Playing multiple roles in multiple languages as he did in Robert Lepage’s Lipsynch gets closer to making fuller use of his talent. Miller is not only an actor but a singer and he is not only fluent in several languages but can reproduce even more accents and dialects. Besides that, he has a gift for mimicry and impersonation that extend to voice and gesture.
While Miller showed the quirky side of his multifaceted abilities in MacHomer, a one-man presentation of the play in the voices of characters of The Simpsons, his newest show BOOM is his first show to utilize the full range of Miller’s talents – and the effect is dazzling. BOOM charts the history behind the Baby Boomer generation from the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan in 1945 to the moon landing in 1969. In the course of the show’s two hours, Miller voices over 100 figures – politicians from Truman to Reagan to Trudeau, musicians from Elvis to Janis Joplin and the Beatles and lipsynchs all the characters in countless television advertisements. BOOM would like to be a time capsule of the baby boom generation, but ultimately is it a theatrical tour-de-force for Rick Miller.
Miller begins the show by setting up video interviews with three real people whose reminiscences structure the evening. The first is Miller’s mother, Maddy, who was born in Cobourg, Ontario. The second is an African-American named Leonard, who lives in Chicago. The third is a man from Vienna named Rudi. We assume that Miller has chosen these three for their diverse perspectives on the period 1945-69. It turns out there is more to it than that and that is the greatest surprise of the play.
This is because Miller has so much material to present he does not leave himself enough time to place these images and soundbites within a critical context. All his manages is to suggest that the early part of the period was about “containment” both political and emotional and that the second part was about “freedom” from this containment. That is hardly new and far too often Miller will settle for a familiar cliché such as “we become our parents” than presenting any new insight. The first half of the show when Miller explains”containment” across a wide range of areas is the best. The second half, however, turns into a hit parade of the greatest sights and sounds of the 1960s with even less analysis.
Despite this, the show is a technical marvel. Yannick Larivée’s set consists of a raked U-shaped platform suggesting a circle in the midst of which is a cylindrical scrim. What is simply dazzling is the precise synchronization of David Leclerc’s projections of archival film footage mixed with lists of key dates and events in history and Bruno Matte’s lighting that determines whether the images appear outside or inside the cylinder. Miller does his own rapid costume changes, sometime portraying a figure sit directly through the scrim, sometimes as a silhouette projected onto in from behind. For any theatre artist the incredible unison of Miller’s acting with the lighting and projections, is a marvel that must be seen.
Periodically, when facts course over the cylinder in a timeline, Miller points out events that will later have great importance, such as “1959: The first human death from AIDS”. Strangely, one of the signal events that Miller omits is the advent of the computer. While he focusses on the space race and concludes with man first steps on the moon, he neglects the tools that made that event and indeed his own show possible beside indelibly marking life in the 21st century. Nevertheless, even if BOOM presents no new perspectives on the time period it covers, Miller’s talent and the show’s sheer theatricality are breathtaking.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: Rick Miller ©2015 David Leclerc.
For tickets, visit www.mirvish.com or www.grandtheatre.com.
2015-01-21
BOOM