Are We Cool Now?

At The Cultch until October 10, 2015
604-251-1363/thecultch.com

Posted October 3, 2015

Do yourself a favour and see Are We Cool Now? at The Cultch. Variously described as “an indie rock musical” and “an innovative rock music/theatre fusion” it’s all about being twenty-something and being in love. Or maybe not.

If you’re well out of your twenties and that just sounds too precious, it isn’t. Writer/director Amiel Gladstone peppers this love story with some very pithy comments from the young man’s world-wise father (referred to but never seen), like, “Don’t count the feathers, just count the wings”, “Living is what you have to do to fight your fears” or, “The person you fall in love with is the person you’re going to hate in the end.” (Dad is thrice married.)

The young man in this two-hander has such a quick and quirky sense of humour, he prevents Are We Cool Now? from ever getting sticky sweet or needy. Lanky, short-shorn Ben Elliott (as Ben) makes such a nerdy, well-intentioned, can’t-believe-my-luck lover that you just want to feed him milk and cookies when his character’s heart gets broken. When he tells us that he wants to “buy [her] something to make [her] like me more”, you just want to give him a hug and tell him it’ll all be okay and, anyway, buying stuff never works.

But mostly why this show, produced by Western Theatre Company and presented by The Cultch works is that you love this young couple played by Penelope Corrin (Royal Canadian Air Farce) and Ben Elliott (Broken Sex Doll, The Best Laid Plans: a Musical). Corrin’s character – called Penelope – is adventuresome, boundary-pushing, risk-taking; his character – called Ben – is cautious, fearful of change, happy to remain in Winnipeg where his father lives. She doesn’t think she likes babies; he likes them and thinks she would like her own. He wants to settle down; she wants to see the world. Can these two make it work? They take a road trip and find out.

Gladstone, a fan of Vancouver indie rock star Dan Mangan, says he has, “always been curious about how to get the music we listen to every day on to the stage” so he looked for a narrative line through Mangan’s music with its themes of love and longing and he created Are We Cool Now?

And it’s so cool.

The music and lyrics, written by Mangan but arranged by Elliott and performed on stage by Anton Lipovetsky (Broken Sex Doll and Best Laid Plans), Spencer Schoening, (of Said The Whale) as well as Corrin and Elliott, ranges from all-out, percussive rock to quiet, a cappella duets. When it rocks, as it does in the title song, Are We Cool Now?, it really rocks.

The staging, with set and light design by Lauchlin Johnston sets the tone right at the start: a cluttered bandstand packed with hundreds and hundreds of photos ostensibly of the road trip Ben and Penelope took. Wooden crates on casters form the front of the stage and are ingeniously used by the performers. At one point, one crate forms a very narrow single bed on which the couple awkwardly tries to sleep. But the sweetest scene is when the crate becomes a bathtub in which the characters cuddle with candles at the foot of the tub/crate. Some very out-of-the-crate thinking gives this show its fresh and striking appeal.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t know the work of Dan Mangan; I didn’t. The music stands on its own and Gladstone’s blending of the music, lyrics and story is excellent. Without being smarmy, Are We Cool Now? will leave you smiling.

There is a new breed of musical in the air and young theatre-makers are onto something: going to a concert is sometimes not enough. We want story, we want the songs to add up to something, to take us somewhere and we want that ‘somewhere’ to be relevant. The musical, as a genre, is becoming cool again.