We Are Boy Band

Studio 58 to April 6, 2025

Tickets from $10 at www.etix.com

Posted March 31, 2025

Had I read the invitation to We Are Boy Band more carefully, I probably wouldn’t have made the trek to Studio 58 at Langara College. But I’m so glad I didn’t read it and got myself there for the Sunday matinee. I am such a sucker for theatre students’ energy, their bright-eyed-bushy-tailed enthusiasm. They just give ‘er with all they’ve got – and that’s a lot of got.

A closer reading would also have told me that We Are Boy Band was created by Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg and I am a huge admirer of this widely and wildly talented performer/choreographer. Who can ever forget her Highgate, “a morbid romp through Victorian funerary culture” back in 2013 at the Cultch? Or her Body Parts, a quirky and irreverently candid look at our body issues – most particularly her own?

In her program notes to We Are Boy Band, Friedenberg writes, “This devised show was born out of my fascination with the boy band phenomena, the manufacturing of fame, the performance of a very specific idea of masculinity and the intense joy so many of us feel when we hear one of those famous boy band songs.” I had to check out a definition of boy band; Google says it’s a “pop group composed of young men whose music and image are designed to appeal to primarily a young teenage audience.” Not the music I listen to or the videos I watch.

We Are Boy Band came together as a collective effort of the upper-term students – twenty performers plus a creative team of nearly a dozen – who, over a period of six short weeks under the guidance of Friedenberg, created something completely new from scratch. Imagine twenty performers (roughly half guys/half girls) all in white sneakers and a variety of white clothing – sweats, hoodies, trousers, singlets, touques, all white – on a white stage (with black painted lines like a web or a net), a white scrim, two vertical white banks of flashing lights. White.  White. White. Dancing, posturing, gesturing, face-making to percussive music. And crotch-grabbing, “Hey, girl”-ing, hair-slicking, pelvic-thrusting, torso-baring – the whole nine yards of what defines ‘boy band’.  Voice over, in the darkened theatre, provides some context: “We’re not friends; we’re more like family”; “Singers want to be actors and actors want to be singers”; “Where do I see myself in ten years? Probably in rehab”. And then, WOW. The performance area explodes with white-on-white, busting moves, looking fantastic.

At times We Are Boy Band is funny: the various ways we say “Hey, baby”, including the way we actually talk to babies. Or the way a guy might say, “Hey, girl” to his girlfriend – or his dog! And then there’s the way lyrics in Spanish throw a big soulful switch especially with wind machines to blow that long hair into a blizzard.

And at other times We Are Boy Band is kind of sad: the need for such hyper-masculinity as if being male isn’t enough. Guys as objects under both the male and female gaze. Up until Elvis Presley, male performers could just be guys, couldn’t they?

But the show is all-the-time entertaining, great looking (set design by Kevin MacDonald and costume design by Emily Friesen), terrific sounding (designed by Riley Hardwick), concept, movement and choreography by Friedenberg and a lot of fun with just enough edge to keep it interesting. Add youthful enthusiasm and it’s coming at you!