Andrea House, Farren Timoteo and Kendra Connor in Far Away and ong A-Gogo!, Teatro Live!, photo by Stewart Lemoine.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Far Away And Long A-Gogo, the “concert and vacation” that launches the new Teatro Live season starts, quite hilariously, in the kind of impasse that showbiz is designed to trounce. It’s a medley, slowed to lugubrious slo-mo, of musical theatre songs about being stuck in one place, and feeling bad.

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Farren Timoteo drags his way through Bidin’ My Time from Gershwin’s Crazy For You. Cy Coleman’s “There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This is Kendra Connor’s aspirational declaration. And the ne plus ultra of feeling low, the depression capper so to speak, is I Wish I Was Dead from the Bernstein/Comden/Green musical On The Town. Andrea House kills it.

After that, three Teatro faves, strikingly versatile actor/singers with great pipes (and a three-piece band led by musical director Cathy Derkach) deliver an unusually eclectic  ‘concert experience.’ It’s a musical invitation to consider travel and “a change of scene” in all its implications, literal and metaphorical, from every perspective including sideways, aerial view, comic underbelly, and dreamscape.

Andrea House, Farren Timoteo and Kendra Connor in Far Away an Long A-Gogo!, Teatro Live!. Photo by Stewart Lemoine.

There isn’t much by way of between-song commentary or theatrical trapping beyond three standing microphones, a chaise longue, a couple of bouquets — and a dexterous trio which includes Derkach on keyboard, Andreas Wegner on bass and Cooper Ray on drums. So there’s no travel agent, in effect, beyond the intriguingly wide-ranging selection of songs curated by Teatro resident playwright Stewart Lemoine, whose theatre, from the start, has always leaned imaginatively into the experience of music you might not know.

And, as gathered by Lemoine, they resonate in very different ways that pretty much leave the emotional itinerary to you — in travel to exotic destinations, including the uncharted terrain of love, for example, or transformational escapes from solitary terra firma like Strangers in Paradise (a tune by the Russian composer Alexander Borodin that found its way into the ‘50s Broadway musical Kismet).

Why do people travel? The puckish cynic Noel Coward is good on this; Connor sings, with appealing lightness, his Sail Away, a veritable manifesto to travelling light. “When you feel your song/ is orchestrated wrong/ Why should you  prolong your stay?” Which may be a warning against reliance on carry-on instead of checking, or chucking, your bag (discuss).

Fresh from a sold-out run of his solo show Made In Italy in Calgary (he’ll be at the Citadel in January), Timoteo, who has a powerhouse operatic voice, delivers the aria Il Mondo Era Vuoto (“the world was empty”) from the Adam Guettel musical Light in the Piazza. And at virtuoso tempo he nails the very funny patter song Tchaikovsky, a ferociously speedy rhyming list of Russian composers. It’s from the ‘40s musical Lady in the Dark, a collaboration between Kurt Weill, Ira Gershwin and Moss Hart. And I’m now mightily curious to see it, if only to find out how on earth this song tucks into the story of a woman courted by two guys and unable to make up her mind.

There are songs about the journeying involved in falling in love. And there’s an outstanding Rodgers and Hart song, It Never Entered My Mind (beautifully sung by House) about the solitary aftermath of love. The jauntiest of the evening’s songs are about the fun, and the sense of possibility, built into New York — the concept and the city. Take Me Back to Manhattan from Anything Goes gets a spirited delivery by House. “The crazy skyline is right in my line….”

The Act I finale, the Tonight quintet from West Side Story, is an astonishing capture of  about the rush of feeling one’s life transform, in the very moment. And the cast of three is joined by a couple of other Teatro faves, on opening night Jenny McKillop and Rachel Bowron.    

Neither play nor revue nor cabaret, Far Away and Long A-Gogo!, is billed as a concert that’s a musical introduction, through the Lemoinian lens, to a Teatro season of comedies — including Pith!, The Oculist’s Holiday and Coward’s Private Lives — linked by ideas of travel, adventure, discovery. And in the end, it adds up to thoughts about change — in locale, in sense of self, in emotional landscape. Also there’s this: it’s for all of us who have ever felt the urgent need to have a holiday from ourselves.

The last word to Cole Porter, via one of his musicals that rarely gets produced, Nymph Errant. “Before you leave these portals/ To meet less fortunate mortals … ” House sings in Experiment, a droll but telling exhortation to be curious and try things out, just like scientists do. At the start of a theatre season, words to live by.

Did you have a peek at 12thnight’s PREVIEW chat with musical director Cathy Derkach? It’s here.

REVIEW

Far Away and Long A-Gogo!

Theatre: Teatro Live?

Curated by: Stewart Lemoine

Musical director: Cathy Derkach

Starring: Kendra Connor, Andrea House, Farren Timoteo

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Sunday, and Nov 30 to Dec. 3, eight performances only

Tickets: teatrolive.com, varsconatheatre.com