Ruth Alexander in Dead in the Water, Lodestar Theatre/ Theatre Yes. Photo by Mat Simpson

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the opening moment of Dead in the Water, an exuberant woman bursts through a door and onto the stage.

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She’s dressed for showbiz, white silk suit and red lipstick but minus shoes, oddly. And she heads to the white grand piano as if it’s her natural habitat. She beams at us, and we beam back. It’s an irresistible social contract. We really can’t help it; the charismatic Ruth Alexander is stage presence on legs.

In the time-honoured mantra of lounge singers world-wide the character we meet in Alexander’s solo show says “thank you very much for being with me tonight.” Amanda Bridge, career entertainer, is emphatic, very ‘tonight of all nights’, about that. And there is nothing tentative and everything confident about her easy rapport with the keyboard and her jaunty opening song: “my story’s not that peculiar…. The melody sounds so familiar, and yet so easy to forget.”

That idea, turned to narrative, turns out to be a theme song of sorts for this new play by a startlingly versatile theatre artist, premiering in a co-production between Lodestar Theatre and Theatre Yes directed by Max Rubin. Alexander and Rubin of Lodestar are the new co-artistic directors of Theatre Yes, and this show is their introduction.

Amanda Bridge has a story. And in this very funny and moving one-woman play, which emerges from a cabaret with gathering force, she’s going to tell it — in all its hopes and setbacks, its absurdities, its fleeting triumphs and cumulative disappointments, its wince-making humiliations. As she tells us, comically, she keeps a “Pandora’s box of shame” for the latter, until it’s at capacity and the lid just won’t stay put.

It’s a story of an entertainer on a vividly bumpy journey towards two possibly contradictory destinations: a satisfying, sustainable career and the perfectly empathetic and romantic life/love partner. Isn’t both what we all want, in essence? Ah, the career in the entertainment biz. It takes Amanda, as she recounts, from “carefree bohemian” squalor in swinging London to a series of gigs in piano bars across Europe, with all the attendant “way too much fun.” Scratch the exotic, recounted hilariously by Amanda in song and monologue, and gradually it’s a tale of ” drunk men in suits on expense accounts and free vodkas with strings attached. Followed by scrabbling unemployment.

Ruth Alexander in Dead in the Water, Lodestar Theatre/ Theatre Yes. Photo by Mat Simpson

Accompanied by whimsical animated line-drawings (uncredited in the program) which appear and vanish, we’re treated to a comic series of blokes. They seem like promising material at the time (making allowances, of course, as one does), and we get Amanda’s adjusted view of them in retrospect. Amazing, and not amazing, how the alluring seaside fisherman turns out to be just another guy with dental problems and b.o. selling drugs on the quai. As her neighbour Sal, a self-styled psychic, has told her at the outset, you’re going to have to have to meet some naughty boys en route to capital-R Romance. “And so the frog-fucking begins,” says the ever-game Amanda, setting forth on her free-wheeling adventure.

A composer, a pianist, and an expressive singer with a deep, multi-angled voice, Alexander, who accompanies herself effortlessly, uses her original songs, with their clever rhyming, in varied ways in the storytelling. Sometimes the piano is a confessional, sometimes a refuge, sometimes a comic device. There are a-rhythmic Sondheim-esque ballads, cunning multi-syllabic patter songs, lounge-y songs, songs with a music hall reverb. Some reveal feelings and thoughts that are happening in the immediate present tense. Or review Amanda’s big life-changers in retrospect, or admit fears for the future. This is a show where the present, past and future are simultaneous.

Time is the enemy for a woman in showbiz who’s dexterous at making do in the present, putting the future on hold, and getting a cat for company. Marriage is elusive, a lot more elusive than booze. Motherhood has a definite time limit. Is the mysterious thudding heartbeat Amanda has heard all along actually her biological clock ticking? And more than once in the course of Dead in the Water we hear Amanda wonder aloud “have I reached rock bottom?”

Dead in the Water, a gallows humour title for a far-from-meagre solo show, is a gallery of colourful characters, with inflections, idioms, accents and body language of their own. And at the centre, in music and speech, Alexander boldly charts the gradual arc from giddy delight to desperation, a sort of comi-tragedy of missed opportunities in Rubin’s vigorous production. Amanda feels for discarded post-Yule Christmas trees and worn-out teddy bears. And we feel for, and with, her.

REVIEW

Dead in the Water

Theatre: Lodestar and Theatre Yes

Written and performed by: Ruth Alexander

Directed by: Max Rubin

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: April 6 to 16

Tickets: on a sliding scale at varsconatheatre.com