Meat-cute

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This article was published 22/09/2023 (724 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After 500 years of nocturnal solitude, Razvan is standing on a bridge in the dying hours of the night, waiting to colour his pale white skin with its first and final tan.

Throughout his many lifetimes, he has sucked the vitality from thousands of mortals to satisfy his haematophagic urges. Nobody likes eating the same meal every day, whether quinoa or carcass, but on account of his increasingly guilty conscience, the eternally youthful Razvan (Duncan Cox) can no longer stomach his cycle of butchered debauchery. For once, this vampire would like to be the one to be chewed up, spat out and left to rot in the sunshine.

But as soon as Razvan is ready to let go, fate intervenes in the stooped-over form of Wanda (Sharon Bajer), an unflaggingly trusting, insomniac 85-year-old with a dwindling memory and a half-empty bed.

“You’re not one of those jumpers, are you?” she asks from her adjacent balcony, wrinkled fingers gripping the railing as if holding on for dear life. “I know you must be in a very dark place right now, but sunrise is only a few minutes off. It will all seem better in the morning.”

That’s the meat-cute in Afterlight, a toothy, vivacious and cheeky new musical from the restless Cox and Bajer that offers the tired blood of the rom-com genre a much-appreciated transfusion from the moment the deep red curtain at the Salle Pauline Boutal theatre splits open.

What’s revealed on the stage is a jungle gym of urban malaise, designed by Kara Pankiw, a soulless collection of scaffolding that represent both the characters’ unfinished business and the rapidly disappearing worlds they once called home. Inside her dust-covered, dust cover-covered house, Wanda is surrounded by evidence of her former existence, while Razvan can recall the terroir of Ivan the Terrible’s Russian red as if it struck his taste buds yesterday.

Even before they walked on stage, Cox — who composed the music and wrote the bulk of the lyrics for the show’s 18 original numbers — and Bajer — who wrote the book and did a considerable amount of props work — faced a challenge in maintaining the audience’s attention in a rare example of a two-hander musical. Fortunately, this show’s heart beats fast enough to never require defibrillation, with the actors displaying surprisingly believable romantic chemistry under the direction of Jillian Willems.

In her distinguished musical theatre career, Bajer has played roles with enormous cultural cache, including the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz.

But in Afterlight, she has established a full character who goes beyond stereotype, imbuing Wanda with a hearty mix of sensual lust and ribald humour reminiscent of Madeline Kahn by way of Betty White.

“Catherine the Great inspired rumours,” she sings in The Mysteries of History, an Act One knockout that culminates in a Razvan-Wanda take on the Rockettes, with the characters wielding swords and canes. “Her stallion whinnied when she dropped her bloomers.”

At first, there is some worry that Wanda, who repeats herself incessantly and forgets what has just been said, will continue repeating herself incessantly and forgetting what has just been said, not to mention repeating herself and forgetting what has just been said. But as she and Razvan become closer, she is charmed, regaining her mental acuity through the transformative power of companionship.

“If I’m not mistaken, something inside of me’s been reawakened,” she warbles in Drawn to Your Glow. “This unquenchable thirst for truth, I thought I’d lost it. When I stood off the edge, I thought I’d tossed it off, but now I’ve met youth.”

It’s a clever twist on the classic vampire parable, wherein the ancient creature gains succour from youthful flesh, and a wonderful expansion of a dynamic famously explored in the 1971 cult classic Harold and Maude. In that black comedy, directed by Hal Ashby, a death-obsessed, hearse-driving young man meets a vivacious elderly woman. A peculiar love blooms, with both characters moving from opposite poles of the mortal extreme to ultimately learn in the middle that ends make beginnings worthwhile.

That film has endured for reasons similar to why Afterlight should. The story is non-traditional, experimental, strange and treats its characters as though they have a considerable amount in common despite their age gap, with both having experienced great loss and uncertainty. They both poke holes in the fallacy that grief or angst are markets cornered by single generations, revealing that such emotional struggles are natural human impulses regardless of “experience.”

The film is also carried by its Cat Stevens soundtrack. Similarly, Afterlight is a tour-de-force from musical director Paul De Gurse, the live band and the composer and lyricist Cox, who draws inspiration in equal measure from folk rock acts like Great Big Sea and, it seems, from musicals like Pippin and Little Shop of Horrors.

The most enjoyable songs of the evening includes Vampire in my Piano, which closes out the first act, and My Domestic Darling, which opens the second. During the first, Razvan establishes a makeshift coffin in the case of a Steinway, which, in a thrillingly simple bit of stagecraft, Cox manipulates from the inside so as to make the keys move on their own in near rhythm with De Gurse’s. To open the second, a pipe-puffing Razvan emerges from the piano alongside a cigarette-ashing Wanda, a G-rated allusion to a certain deed having been done.

Like Bajer, Cox has created a character that is an ideal vehicle for his particular set of skills. His speaking voice is nearly a singing one — Seinfeld’s J. Peterman delivering a soliloquy — while his singing voice has the quality of speech: clear, concise, and assured. Low, rich sustained notes are where Cox — who played Roger in this summer’s Rainbow Stage production of Rent — excels.

Despite a somewhat overlong second act, Afterlight is ultimately bolstered by its comic overtones — “Alas, poor Buttons,” Razvan exclaims after biting a cat’s head off and checking its ID tag — and packs an emotional punch any warm-blooded being should feel in their gut.

It’s good to remember we have so much in common, whether we were born in 1938 or 1523.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com