For next season, Toronto’s Factory Theatre has picked up the most buzzed-about show from the start of the new year in Vancouver: Do You Want What I Got? A Craigslist Cantata, written by CBC Radio 2 host Bill Richardson and composer Veda Hille.
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
Here is what Colin Thomas wrote in his review for the Georgia Straight, in January:
The tone of Cantata is approximately two parts absurd hilarity and one part potent loneliness. CBC Radio host Bill Richardson, who wrote the show with songwriter Veda Hille, combed Craigslist for oddities, and he’s come up with some doozies: “Need Sarah Palin look-alike for adult film”; “Children’s guillotine… Only been used once.” Without losing the characters’ eccentricity, Richardson and Hille also reveal the posters’ humanity. Take the woman trying to give away her collection of cat hats, for instance. They belonged to her pet, Snowman, who is now deceased. As the poster sings, in absolute earnestness, about how some of the hats are cute and some are more formal, it’s impossible not to laugh—especially when Snowman’s ghost starts to sing back. But Craigslist Cantata isn’t about ridicule. The woman is nutty, but she’s also grieving.
And she’s lonely—like a lot of us. That’s the genius of this piece: it recognizes that in a culture in which we’re trained to believe that we’re primarily consumers rather than citizens or members of a community, when we reach out for connection, many of us do so in the language of commerce.
Hille is an expert at finding the poetry and musicality in mundane speech. Sometimes that exploration is bare-bones: she speaks one passage while accompanying herself on piano, accentuating the rhythms and melody of her words. And sometimes Hille expands the musicality of speech into full, fantastic numbers, including “Hi, My Lady”, in which performer Dmitry Chepovetsky sings an intoxicatingly rhythmic song about being infatuated with a black-clad woman. Hille also layers her musical motifs beautifully: snatches of songs—and therefore stories—float up in other pieces, reminding us of the commonality of their themes.
It’s fantastic that Factory Theatre has picked up the show, co-produced with Acting Up Stage Company, for a February-long run in 2013. For further details, click here.
To give more of a taste of what’s going on, here is Bill Richardson in a Vancouver TV interview:
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
