LOVE BOMB

 

At The Firehall Arts Centre until October 10, 2015
604-689-0926/firehallartscentre.ca

Posted October 1, 2015

A love bomb sounds like something you wouldn’t mind having strapped to your chest. Not so. To ‘love bomb’ someone means to inundate someone with expensive gifts in order to manipulate them: jewellery, designer clothing, a nice apartment. But it can also include drugs. And the manipulation can extend to demanding sexual favours and pimping out.

Love bombing is especially effective with young, insecure girls and women who mistake love bombs for love and who subsequently end up addicted, on the street or dead.

So where is Nicola, Lillian’s daughter with whom she has a stormy relationship and whom she hasn’t seen for seven months?

Meghan Gardiner, who wrote the LOVE BOMB book and lyrics, has come up with an extremely clever framework for this Shameless Hussy Productions’ world premiere. It’s a whole new kind of musical in which the songs provide sequential clues to an unravelling mystery. Rock star Justine (Sara Vickruck) sings her upcoming set – under some duress – during a sound check to distraught Lillian (Deb Pickman) who inveigles her way into the all-but-empty club, listens and takes notes. While the music is Justine’s, the lyrics come from Nicole’s diary – a series of poems that tell of her leaving home and eventually hooking up with a badass called Brian. Lillian, hearing Justine’s songs on the radio, has picked up on place names in Justine’s songs, realized that the lyrics are not Justine’s but Nicola’s and is prepared to do anything to get to the truth about her daughter.

So LOVE BOMB is a musical but not like anything you’ve heard before.

And you’ve never seen or heard anything like Sara Vickruck, either. Built like a little soccer player with a crazy haircut, work boots and black jeans, she’s simply dynamite. I don’t know where director Renée Iaci found her, but LOVE BOMB is loud and proud with her. In fact, she’s what shameless hussy is all about: strong, rebellious women “telling provocative stories about women to inspire the hand that rocks the cradle to rock the world”. Vickruck can belt a song, croon a song and massage a song into existence – and she can act, too. It’s a fantastic combination. And for all of Justine’s bravado, Vickruck lets us peek into her character’s psyche to see a young woman not fully confident but letting ‘er rip, anyway.

While Gardiner wrote the book and lyrics, Steve Charles wrote the music and some additional lyrics. It’s important to listen hard to the lyrics – not always easy – for therein are the clues to Nicola’s whereabouts. Vickruck performs eleven songs on three different guitars; the Firehall has seldom rocked quite like this.

Drew Facey’s set is an exposed brick club – empty except for Lillian and Justine; Itai Erdal’s lighting really takes off in the final moments. It’s a pretty spectacular curtain ringer.

On top of it all, it’s an important play – especially for parents. As hard as it often is to keep our teenaged children close, it’s a nasty world out there waiting for young adults – frequently young women – who feel abandoned or unloved. How many Nicks or Nicolas are there out there? And how many, like Justine, manage to escape?

LOVE BOMB is a very strong opener for the Firehall Arts Centre and, without suggesting it’s exclusively for young adults, it would make a great touring show throughout the school system. Let’s keep the kids safe.