Vigilante - written, composed and directed by Jonathan Christenson
World Premier, Citadel Theatre (Mclab Stage), Edmonton, Canada
A Catalyst Theatre production
March 7 to 29, 2015
Review by Graham Hicks
It sure is fun, and fascinating, to watch the evolution and growth of an artistic genius in our backyard ... like watching your immensely talented kid brother slowly reveal his extraordinary potential.
This review is about Jonathan Christenson’s latest rock-opera Vigilante, playing on the Citadel’s Maclab Stage in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, through March 29.
But before we get there, the artist and the show need context.
Christenson, born, raised and resident in Edmontonian, is playwright, lyricist, composer and director of his own shows.
He’s written musical theatre most of his adult life. House of Pootsie Plunket (1999) and Blue Orphan (2001)brought Christenson a national profile with his collaborator at the time, Joey Tremblay.
But it was when Christenson went solo - writing, composing and directing - that both his artistic reach and his reputation soared. Christenson's dark phantasmagorical musicals, inspired by some of history’s famous literary and real characters (Frankenstein, Edgar Allen Poe, the Hunchback of Notre Dame) took him to a higher artistic level.
Frankenstein has toured world-wide several times. Nevermore is currently running off-Broadway. Citadel Theatre artistic director Bob Baker, recognizing Christenson’s gift, bought Hunchback to the Citadel’s big stage.
Where Christenson sought collaboration was in set design and mood. Bretta Gerecke was his visual right hand. Her sets, costumes and giant skeletal hands were integral to whatever dark fantasy was at hand.
With Vigilante, Christenson has gone in a completely different direction while still retaining his essential Christenson-ness.
The theme of the misfit, doomed to eternal alienation, is still here. But Christenson has reined in his unbridled imagination, tightened up his focus, to write about real people … more or less.
The Donnellys were a notorious Irish immigrant farming family in Ontario in the mid-1800s, at such odds with their neighbours as to have ended up being massacred, (mostly murdered then burned in their own home) by a vigilante mob.
The historical story, as always, is a launching point for Christenson’s imagination.
But for the first time since he wrote Frankenstein about 10 years ago, he lets his characters - these eight nasty, violent, free-wheeling Donnelly brothers and their mother Johannah (Jan Alexandra Smith, gracing a Citadel stage after a long absence) – be real human beings.
They may be consumed by raw black emotion that is the death of them, but they are believable human beings.
Also quite fascinating is the absence of Bretta Gerecke’s sets and visual signatures. Other than the black lips and deeply shadowed eyes, Gerecke's signature adornments – the enormous skeletal hands, raw leafless trees, Brothers Grime costumes - are gone. The replacement is insistent raw lighting with a personality unto itself, that builds in its reds and yellows to the finale of the burning house.
Christenson's favoured and stylized personality traits, contained inside real characters, is a compelling study unto itself.
The brothers Donnelly have the syntax, the rhythms and the barely contained anger of most of Christenson’s anti-heroes, but revealed through a relentlessly real narrative. The brothers – or the same actors portraying other characters – slither about the dance scenes like giant beetles on a corpse. But always they come back to being a family bound by oath and blood, staying together as the outside world turns increasingly and vehemently against them.
Christenson’s other productions have been off-beat, dark musicals. Vigilante is more punk, an edgy rock opera. The live band is an on/off stage character, its fiddler and guitarists emerging as musical witnesses to the action on stage.
Vigilante will be controversial. It took me about 30 minutes to buy into the show, but by the climatic, fearsome and quite thrilling ending, I was completely inside. Other audience members – mostly younger – were captivated from the opening scene on. And yet others felt they never were fully inside the show.
Kudos to Christenson’s restless spirit, forcing him once again to take chances, try new things, move in new theatre directions. Vigilante will bring him new fans, and we will all be excited when he emerges with his next new production, as he tends to do every two to three years.