Credit: Moonrider Productions
Newmont Stage at the BMO Theatre Centre to October 29, 2023
Tickets from $25 at 604-687-1644 or www.artsclub.com
Posted October 12, 2023
In response to feedback from the Arts Club, this review has been amended from its first publication, October 18.
“Sticks and stones may break your bones but words will never hurt you”. Thus did my parents console me when some school yard bully called me names.
What hogwash! Name calling stays with us long after childhood; it infects the way we feel about ourselves, attacking our self-confidence. It makes loving ourselves difficult and that makes loving someone else even harder.
In Christine Quintana’s new play Someone Like You, Isabelle (Steffanie Davis) tells her friend Harjit that, “fat isn’t a bad word; it’s just a word”; it’s only a bad word when it’s used to hurt, Isabelle tells Harjit.
But with billions of dollars spent by big pharma, fitness clubs, Weight Watchers, the food and fashion industry to make sure we think ‘fat’ is bad, it’s tough to buck the trend. Mothers of five-year-olds still put their little girls on diets.
Credit: Moonrider Productions
In the play, Isabelle, who hates all the euphemisms is, in her own words, fat: “fat and beautiful.” Although she exudes self-confidence (“I don’t hate myself, I hate how I’m treated”), by the time she’s in her early thirties she has come to believe romance will never come her way. At best, she can help her friend Kristin negotiate the online dating game.
Because Kristin is not very articulate and is having difficulty getting out of a bad relationship, Isabelle takes over Kristin’s text messaging with handsome Harjit (Praneet Akilla) and, eventually, in a balcony scene she conceals herself behind a hedge so Kristin and Harjit can have a face-to-face. Yes, it was silly when Edmond Rostand wrote Cyrano de Bergerac back in 1897 and it’s still silly in this new take on this old play.
Credit: Moonrider Productions
Commissioned by the Arts Club to write a new take on Rostand’s play, Quintana swaps out Cyrano’s nose for Isabelle’s size and Harjit, recently arrived in Vancouver from Red Deer, replaces Roxane as the love interest. Kristin stands in for Christian, whom, in the original, Cyrano has promised to look out for.
Director Jivesh Parasram reconfigures the Newmont stage with banks of seats on the north side and banks of seats on the south with a wide alley in between. Except for one scene, there seems to be no reason for this configuration and, in a play about intimacy, it doesn’t feel appropriate. As well, it creates blocking problems: the performers all too often speak to the north or south side and critical dialogue is lost when we are treated to the backs of the performers. There are also a few times when incidental music comes close to drowning out the speaker. Set and light design is by Wladimiro Woyno Rodriguez; costumes are by Donnie Tejani.
Set and light design: Wladimiro Woyno Rodriguez
Credit: Moonrider Productions
Although playwright Quintana says, “the core of Someone Like You is a female friendship—something so foundational to so many people’s lives, but so rarely represented authentically on stage”, we wonder, really, what the basis of the friendship between Isabelle and Kristin is. It appears to be one-sided with take, take, take on Kristin’s part and give, give, give on Isabelle’s. Kristin’s character, as written, is petulant, whiny and shallow and poor Chen is left to make the best of it.
Akilla has some difficulty with Harjit, too; both Kristin and Harjit vacillate between being real and caricatures. But Akilla does a terrific job of eventually explaining to Isabelle and to himself what love is all about.
Credit: Moonrider Productions
There’s a new star on the Newmont stage and that is Steffanie Davis who plays Isabelle. She’s beautiful, she’s funny, she busts some crazy moves and she can sing. The opening night audience went wild when she shook her booty. Davis was fantastic as Killer Queen in We Will Rock You at TUTS. in 2022. Next up for her is Belle in Beauty & the Beast, this season’s East Van Panto. Someone Like You marks her Arts Club debut.
Clearly the Arts Club is working to attract a younger audience and Someone Like You fits the bill. Online dating, apartment sharing, living on/near The Drive (where, “children in mullets” scamper down the street), doing without a car, drinking craft beer. A younger-than-usual Arts Club audience lapped up all the humour and pop culture references on opening night; it’s a great first-date date.
But for those of us who have been around the block or are of a certain age – are we allowed to say “old”? – we were left hoping for something more.