Wednesday, March 27, 2013

In a Word... Jacob Richmond, director and co-creator of Ride the Cyclone

Sarah Jane Pelzer (photo by Barbara Pedrick)

The Travelling Carnival
My prediction is that Indie companies will become the new Micro-breweries of Canadian Regionals in the next 10 years

Jacob Richmond is artistic director at Atomic Vaudeville, in Victoria, home of the Canadian phenomenon Ride the Cyclone: The Musical.

CHARPO: My Lord, what a Ride it's turned into! How's the tour going?

RICHMOND: The tour's going great, I'm not really on tour with the gang... I got a newborn baby at the house and he's keeping me crazy busy, pooping, crying, being adorable. Releasing pheromones through the top of his head that make me neurologically love him more than I thought was ever humanly possible. I am nothing more than Mother Nature's finger puppet right now.

So infrastructure is a good one I'd throw out there for aspiring theatre tour folks--to actually have one in place before you start touring.

CHARPO: What have you and your cast found out about touring? (For instance, is it harder or easier than you thought?)

RICHMOND: Way harder, but for different reasons. Britt [Small, Atomic Vaudeville artistic producer] and I are a little shoebox cabaret company in Victoria. We found it hard enough to tour "Legoland" for the Fringe. I slept in a laundry room for two nights during the New York Frigid festival a few years back, in an apartment building I snuck into...  and I was happy to do it, because I was living the dream.

Atomic Vaudeville's main office is a filing cabinet next to Britt's bed. (We didn't even have that filing cabinet before this tour) I guess before the tour Atomic Vaudeville's HQ was Britt's bed. 

So infrastructure is a good one I'd throw out there for aspiring theatre tour folks--to actually have one in place before you start touring.

CHARPO: How does a small company like yours deal with its future when you're in the centre of such a whirlwind?

RICHMOND: The great thing is, we still do our cabarets four times a year, they've become their own animal really and I don't think Britt and I could shut them down even if we wanted to. It's been almost 10 years running them, and now new blood is stepping up and running the shows... I just watched one a couple weeks ago, for the first time not being involved at all--just being an audience member-- Man, It's a super fun show. I think I had forgotten how much fun those shows are.

As for "Ride the Cyclone" our company is super excited to take it to other cities for extended runs.  A lot of blood went into this show from so many young artists in our community of Victoria. Before this show, Hank Pine And Jimbo Insell, (our set designers) had never designed a set before, now they can say they've designed a show for buckets of regional theatres in our country. We have a band of young musicians (like they're all 18 years old young) who [composer/lyricist] Brooke [Maxwell] (as a music teacher) handpicked from our community, all the cast at one time or another were Victorian theatre school kids who worked on this while still attending classes. 

It's nice to know our community can go to all these places, it gives me hope that one day our country can do this all over the place... for lots of other productions in lots of other communities. I think it's the next leap. Because you'll never be able to reproduce the energy you get as an audience member, being in a room, with the people who actually created the work from the foundation up. I think this is actually starting to happen with Centaur's Wildside, Belfry's Spark Festival, and I think there are several regionals realizing their fellow citizens of this massive country are just as interesting as some of the stuff from New York or London. 

My prediction is that Indie companies will become the new Micro-breweries of Canadian Regionals in the next 10 years--or rather my hope. If people could have just as much passion for their local culture as they do for the local beers, we’re all set.

Honestly anyone's guess would be just as valid as mine at this point.

CHARPO: And the future?

RICHMOND: The show's future is anybody's guess. Honestly anyone's guess would be just as valid as mine at this point. I think the folks involved are very sincere in getting "Cyclone" into the States. It's a really hard racket, commercial productions ... it's a big surreal chapter in "Cyclone's" future that I haven't yet had a chance to read. I just hope she, kicks, dances, sings her heart out wherever she goes. I'll be proud of her either way. It's the pheromones a musical releases on the top of her head... they make you love them.

CHARPO: There must be anecdotes. What's the one your family is getting tired of you repeating?

RICHMOND: So many, the time we were booked as "IF YOU LOVE FOREVER PLAID, YOU'RE GONNA' JUST LOVE YOU SOME RIDE THE CYCLONE" in a Fundamentalist enclave in northern BC--they were giving group rates to Church groups... as soon as we got to the drag number where a boy longs to be a Parisian female drug addled prostitute with a murderous past... and this is supposed to be the peppy part of the show, we might as well have slapped on Bob Marley's "Exodus" on the mains... because I have never seen a theatre audience go from 250 to about 20 in about four minutes. 

The time our sound guy had to sub in for a pivotal role in the play because an actor had gotten sick... (Show must go on) William Porter is a trouper, I didn't see the show... but I would gladly pay a couple hundred bucks to have seen this.

The time the aforementioned teen musician prodigies trashed their hotel rooms like they were four Eddie Van Halens in the 80's... (Actually that one is not funny yet--lots of scolding still remains to be had)

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