The Cultch Historic Stage to April 19, 2026
Tickets from $35 at 604-251-1363 or www.thecultch.com
Posted April 17, 2026
Expect the unexpected when Veda Hille and Maiko Yamamoto get together. Friends for almost three decades, they met on a Leaky Heaven Circus set after which star-struck Yamamoto offered Hille a ride home. Coffee and cookies followed and the rest is history including years of collaboration on the annual much-loved East Van Panto, produced by Theatre Replacement (founded by Yamamoto and James Long) with music and lyrics by Hille.
And now they’re here with the genre-defying End of Greatness, created and performed by these two Vancouver phenomes.
End of Greatness is a cosmological concept. Wikipedia tells us, “In cosmology, the “End of Greatness” is an observational scale, typically around 100 Megaparsecs (roughly 300 million light-years, where the universe’s structure transitions from being “lumpy” (clustered with galaxies and filaments) to being homogeneous and uniform.” Hard to wrap your head around that but Hille and Yamamoto take it and run with it – all over the place, beginning with moss (Hille) and mushrooms (Yamamoto) – both of which go back millions of years in the earth’s evolution. At the other end of the timeline they talk about Voyagers 1 and 2, still out there beyond the heliosphere. Heady stuff.
But Yamamoto and Hille bring it down to earth by comparing it to a chocolate vanilla pound cake with whole cherries embedded in it. The cake, made by Keely O’Brien, is displayed while Hille blends the slurpy icing which she slowly pours over the cake before offering a slice to a lucky person in the front row. I’m not sure I completely get the analogy but the cake looked fantastic.
By now you get the idea: this is quirky in the extreme, possibly profound and spiced up with Hille’s songs (with the help of musicians Julia Chien and Thom Gill), Norse mythology and folktales. Hille’s description of the Japanese-made Roland synthesizer with 128 pre-sets that she plays (going back to the “New Age songs of my youth”, she says.) I especially liked her song with the recurring line, “I’ve got an appetite for destruction.” Don’t we all.
Landscape and visual design by Geoffrey Farmer merges the ancient plant life (with textile design by Hitoko Okada) with the contemporary (b/w projections and some neon effects). Lighting designer Jeff Harrison includes small lights that flicker on and off over the audience producing a magical, we’re-all-in-this-together feel. Deb Chachra, a theatre scientist and formerly a professor of engineering at Olin College of Engineering near Boston, Massachusetts, is the consultant.
End of Greatness is a strange, sometimes enchanting, often enigmatic show that is kept aloft by Hille’s dry wit that cuts through the airy fairytale softness with hard science. “That’s certainly one of my aspirations: to make people laugh”, Hille said in a conversation with Stir. But the overwhelming take-away – and really what carries the show – is the obvious and very deep relationship between these two. “I value you”, says Yamamoto. “I value you, too,” responds Hille. “In some ways, I think Veda and I are very different, but we’re also the same person”, says Yamamoto in the interview with Stir. “I think that just came from just feeling very close to each other and feeling like we were entangled in each other’s lives.”
I still do not see Maiko Yamamoto and Veda Hille as the same person. Not in my universe – unless you include their commitment to arousing us, engaging us, entertaining us and making us think. I’m not sure I saw the dark side of this particular moon but it could be that I simply didn’t want to see it. After all, Voyagers 1 and 2 are still out there, albeit they are decaying, but they are still sending messages to earth. That must tell us something. Maybe give us hope?