Poli Pop goes the bedtime routine at MTYP

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This article was published 26/01/2024 (949 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The wild, wacky and delightfully random Brush Theatre of Seoul is back in Winnipeg for Poli Pop, its second show with the Manitoba Theatre for Young People after last year’s imagination extravaganza, Doodle Pop.

Capable of turning even the most serious viewer into a smiling, giggling mess, the cast and crew of Brush combine fairy tales, video projection, live instrumentation, buffoonery and dance inside a deceptively simple, perfectly choreographed world, where anything and everything can happen.

Brush’s work is random, innovative and impossibly charming, capturing wonder as our best children’s performers all do.

This 10-year-old company has a 10-year-old perspective. It’s an asset, and a requirement, for any creative person making a career in the world of play.

After blazing through a pair of matinée performances Wednesday, the Brush team — performers Lee Seungheun, Kim Donghyun, Jung Hyunki, Park Sohee, Kang Joung Hae and Kim Sion — ran through about five minutes of Poli Pop for the media, an unpredictable, joyous snippet, where chimneys puff out smoke and cups of cocoa pop out of nowhere.

“We don’t follow a chronological storyline,” said Lee, 34, who plays Pola, one of two siblings who let their imaginations run wild right before they fall asleep. “We just leap from here to there.”

Doodle Pop was about scribbles coming to life, and Poli Pop is about fairy tales, but Lee says they’re not so different.

“There’s something in their core which stimulates our imagination. It doesn’t have to be combined by cause and effect,” she says.

After touring the show around Korea last year and performing in Hong Kong, Poli Pop is having its North American première in Winnipeg — a dream coup for MTYP artistic director Pablo Felices-Luna and co.

The show is ultimately about sibling love, fantasy and dreams, Lee says. A lot of the show was driven by dreams she and the rest of the Brush team have had.

For example, in the show, the characters play with Grandpa’s sweater. That came from a scene in a North American movie Lee saw as a kid.

“I can’t remember the title, but it was so shocking, please tell me if it rings any bells,” she says. “A boy was laying clothes on his bed, then the clothes stand up and become a demon, and when someone walks into the room, the clothes fall back on the bed.

“That’s been stuck in my head for a very long time.”

Poli Pop opens today and runs to Feb. 4. Tickets available at mtyp.ca.

 

Carole King Tapestry singalong

If there is one negative about the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s production of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, it’s fighting the urge to sing along with the cast.

If you can relate to that feeling, head to the John Hirsch Mainstage on Sunday at 7:30 p.m. for RMTC’s Tapestry singalong, with the cast going track-by-track through King’s landmark, Grammy-winning album.

Lyric sheets will be available at the free event, with donations accepted at the front door in support of the Actors’ Fund of Canada.

 

Improv Season starts … now!

The Gas Station Arts Centre and the Winnipeg Improv Fest are joining forces to do something never done before: presenting a full season of improv shows at the Osborne Village venue, with shows every month until May.

The fun begins Sunday at 7 p.m., with improv troupe Club Soda improvising five different movie premises just in time for Oscar mania with its show Director’s Cut. At the end of the night, the audience will play judge and jury, selecting the victor of the “ultimate accolade”: the Winnipeg Improv Festival’s Best Fake Movie Academy Award.

Tickets for the show, which also includes performances by the pros and students at Stephen Sim’s Improv Company training centre, cost $12 online or at the Gas Station box office. The next shows in the season are on Feb. 16, a duos show, made up of two-hander improv; March 16, an anniversary show to celebrate Club Soda’s seventh birthday; and April 27, when Sim will strut his stuff in a solo show.

 

Gabs Sings Babs a smash for WJT

Winnipeg Jewish Theatre artistic director Dan Petrenko knew Winnipeg loved Barbra Streisand. But this much?

Each of the company’s three performances of Gabs Sings Babs, starring Toronto cabaret singer Gabi Epstein, was a sellout. So in order to keep up with the demand, Petrenko programmed a matinée last Monday at 4 p.m. to give more fans a chance to see Epstein’s tribute to the EGOT winner at the Berney Theatre.

The run of Gabs Sings Babs is the first of the WJT’s limited engagement musical series, which Petrenko programmed to help bring in newer, younger audiences during the sometimes slow winter season. “People responded really well. We sold out 10 days before the run started and we were scrambling to make sure we could keep Gabi here for another day,” he says.

Next up for WJT is March’s Pain to Power: A Kanye West Musical Protest, an original show commissioned by the company in the wake of West’s anti-semitic rant in 2022. Created by Seth Zosky and CJ Capital, the show explores those creators’ struggle with their lyrical hero’s brush with hateful controversy. The show will run three times between March 9 and 10, with Petrenko hoping the concept draws new viewers into the venerable company’s audience.

 

Space Girl goes digital

After sending the Cherry Karpyshin Mainstage out of the stratosphere last season, Manitoba playwright Frances Koncan’s sci-fi, celeb sendup Space Girl makes the leap to the internet, playing digitally through Sunday.

Starring Brynn Godenir and Justin Otto, the show spoofs viral memes, social media influence, the bible, colonialism and the tech industry. Onstage, it played as a bold, if at times jumbled, vision of a new frontier of theatre. Online, the comedy becomes even more meta, with main character Lyra filming herself on a smartphone while being filmed by somebody else.

Some audience members were flummoxed by the show onstage, but seeing it live, I imagined a company staging Space Girl in the year 2124, when I predict it will function as a telling critique of the beginning of our tech-dominated, egotistical end. Maybe this digital production will allow that to happen. To my Free Press colleagues a century from now, I’d love to know what you think.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com