Green goggles

Islanders have a strange relationship with Anne of Green Gables--the musical and the book more than the TV movie, though that, too, gives us ambivalent feelings. Early exposure embeds the story deep in our DNA. "Ice Cream" might or might not be a better show tune than "You Won't Be an Orphan for Long" from Annie (which debuted 13 years after Anne, I'll have you know) but that's like a left paw wondering if life would be better if they were right-handed. You just don't know. We grew up proclaiming, "School again! School again!" every September, which was enough to cue giggles. It's not much of a song, really, but everybody knew the dance number that was being invoked.

Provincial minds can overrate their own marginal distinctions, but Islanders have the hard data to prove Anne's more than a local obsession. The provincial population is about 140,000 but 3.3 million people have seen the musical. Summertime on the Island sees a flood of Japanese tourists, mostly female, many wearing to dress up in frocks and wear braided red-haired wigs as an ode to their heroine. Anne has turned much of the province into a Victorian-era theme park, which Islanders resent, but it generates lots of cash, which we like, a lot.

At the opening of Anne of Green Gables - The Musical at Toronto's Elgin Theatre, P.E.I.'s Minister of Communities, Cultural Affairs and Labour was on hand for opening remarks. Carolyn Bertram was a total charmer, but the effect was to turn the whole show into a living, breathing tourism advertisement. One suspected the P.E.I. government might have underwritten Dancap's partnership with the Charlottetown Festival. Liked the sets? See them rendered in water, soil and sand as you drive from Cavendish to Brackley Beach! Liked the picnic scene? Try Cow's handmade ice cream next time you're in Charlottetown!

As a critic, you have to push aside nostalgia in order to set the script against the expectations of nowadays, the acting/directing against past productions. Though the musical has been tinkered with over the years, the current incarnation is a back-to-its-roots effort, with the original 1960s sets and choreography. Does that make it a museum piece or is it an artistic decision that has some contemporary resonance?

It's been at least 15 years since I last saw Anne of Green Gables and this time I was surprised by its imperial themes, particularly the strange school pageant where depictions of Eskimos and Indians flirt with racism. I had forgotten the cavalier treatment of teen pregnancy--treated with more levity than, say, school teasing. I had remembered Anne and Diana's platonic love song "Kindred Spirits"--it's the name of a fan magazine. But I had forgotten that it was the visit to the horrible Mrs. Blewett--we know she's horrible because she doesn't hang her laundry to dry sorted by colour and size--that made Marilla change her mind about keeping Anne. It's a funny scene, but there's no song in it and the Blewett character doesn't recur, so it didn't penetrate into my psyche. But the moment I saw the laundry, I knew exactly what was coming. Mrs. Blewett was there in my brain whether I knew it or not.

I can say this about the current production: Amy Wallis is probably the best of the four Anne's I've seen. And I always get excited when they start the egg and spoon race which is, strangely, more thrilling than the three-legged race that precedes it. But I didn't cry when... you know who... you know whats. A ritual is supposed to provide satisfaction each time, but get one ingredient wrong and the spirits will ignore you.

Yes, period

While most of their peers—Depeche Mode, Madonna, New Order—have relied on periodic reinvention for their longevity, the Pet Shop Boys have always operated by other strategies, constant repositioning in a well-defined and carefully guarded terrain. The songs on all 10 of their official studio albums can be placed on a quadrant graph with "exuberant" at the top, "regal at the bottom," "melancholy" at the left and "wry" at the right. I've always liked them best when they've kept close to the melancholy/exuberant corner (The dance tracks of Behaviour, most of Very)and have had a growing impatience with wry/regal--most of the Fundamental album.

This precise emotional landscape is what makes the Pet Shop Boys sound distinctly like themselves (okay--occasionally like New Order) even while a new generation of electro-pop groups adopt their trademark disco-bass surge, tingly synths and laser-beam sound effects. The ironic persona transcends the quotation marks that make their 00s descendants, for all their homaging, sound very much 00s, not 80s. Neither a retro band nor of the electro-pop moment, PSB own their longevity to their creation of their own little world. That holds true even on their newest release, Yes, despite the participation of Xenomania as producer and co-writer on three tracks—if the collaboration has added something new to the formula, it's a sprinkle of cinnamon in a barrel of cookie dough.

Yes's core through-line follows the exuberance that made Very a best seller, a through-line that drives through the lyrics and even the packaging as well as the bounce of lead single "Love etc.,” Tchaikovsky-sampling "All Over the World," laser-beam bubbling "Did You See Me Coming?" and writhing “Pandemonium.”

The inevitable regal side turns up on tracks like “Vulnerable," "King of Rome" and “Legacy"--I accept them but don't love their theatricality. There are two experimental one-offs (yes, I’ve just added another dimension to the PSB quadrant graph): “Beautiful People” gets a hand from Final Fantasy’s Owen Pallett but it’s glaring Echo and the Bunnymen-ness that makes it jump out at you; and the album’s only car wreck, “Building A Wall,” another of their unsuccessful attempts at being overtly political.

For all the Very 2 ambitions built into its DNA, Yes’s melodies and themes come across as overly cautious and restrained—perhaps even rout—as if the meticulous programming necessary for the album’s shiny surfaces contaminated everything. The exuberant beats only periodically pry open the tunes. But when it happens—like the chorus of “All Over the World” where Neil Tennant plays a the role of Cher-like diva presiding over a dance floor with the line “This is a song for all the boys and girls/You hear it/Playing all over the world”—it’s beautiful release.

T.S. Eliot's kind of Spring

Except for all the multisyllabic German names and the harsh cut of the boy's school uniforms, Spring Awakening doesn't make much of a show of its late 19th Century German setting. Considering the 2006 musical version gleefully tampers with Frank Wedekind's play--I doubt the original had bare-butted simulated sex and lines about "My Junk" and being "Totally Fucked"--you wonder why they didn't go all the way and make the thing contemporary or in a more trendy conservative era like the early 1960s of Mad Men. I doubt you have to go back 130 years to find teenagers who believe in the stork stumbling innocently into sex, though I suppose I can more easily imagine young Germans than young Americans stumbling from innocence right into SM sex play.

Duncan Sheik's songs--the same sort of adult-oriented indie pop that made him beloved by critics way back on his debut 1996 album, that got him recognized as a smart songwriter that was perhaps out of sync with the industry's whims--are the show's main selling point. They're emotional without being theatrical, so we see the cast members grab a hand-held mic and break character every time they launch into one. The performances by the young cast are good but, since the soundtrack comes from MOR land, not Broadway, there are few opportunities to punch the audience in the gut.

Spring Awakening's caused some buzz for its racy content. You can see atypical theatre audiences buying into the passion. But as far as stage time goes, "happy sexual discovery," though its the main story line, accounts for about 15 percent. The rest is taken up by revelations of suicide, sexual abuse, pregnancy and abortion, with side trips to masturbation and homosexuality. Though it might claim to be an unexpurgated High School Musical--its teens Barbies moulded with genitalia intact--Spring Awakening actually comes a little closer to Jerry Springer: the Musical.

Springer into action

Jerry Springer - The Musical had its Canadian debut at Hart House Theatre last night, directed by Richard Ouzounian. It's the perfect show for a student production really: a great showcase for the leads and forgiving for weaker voices so long as the the performers really go for it--which they did.

Musical high

What's astonishing about High School Musical 3 (I must plead ignorance on numbers 1 and 2 which didn't get theatrical releases) beside the joyous sweat and cuddly vim of the performances (was there a story there?) is how much cultural clutter the filmmakers must sweep away nowadays before we partake of goodhearted wholesome song and dance numbers.

And I don't just mean the de-sexed gay character, sashaying his choreography moves with his rhinestone jeans, asymmetrical argyle sweaters and pink-buuffanted backup dancers, though I can totally see Ryan Evans and his artsy prom date Kelsi boogying at a gay club in the East Village two or three years after graduation, if they're not already doing it on the weekends. Nor do I mean how the black kids get to be almost-main characters but not quite and how they can only date each other, each colour of this rainbow-coloured universe staying safely in its place. Or how Troy, because he's good at dancing, has to compensate by being hyper masculine in other ways: A glossy teen with perfect hair wouldn't have rummaged through a salvage yard for jalopy parts in any era, not even Archie Andrews. Or the victory party without drinks of any kind and the absence of drugs. I mean how everybody has to get out of the way of the heroine, Gabrielle, because she has to have zero personality characteristics except being sweet.

All the other female characters--and I should point out that the female friendships in HSM3 are closer to particle physics than intimacy--have singular defining characteristics: Sharpay's star-struck consumerism, Taylor's political ambitions, Martha's big-girl brains (she'll be at the clubs with Ryan and Kelsi soon), Kelsi's offbeat funkiness, Ms Darbus's striking similarity to Mrs. Doubtfire. Appropriately uniformed, they all do one thing extremely well. In the male world, you make your lead stand out among his peers by having him do everything well: Troy can sing, dance, play basketball, fix his car, bond with his friends, haze the juniors. His is alpha dog in all arenas. But Gabrielle? We're told repeatedly how great she is, but we never see her do anything particularly great except her swooning numbers with Troy. She's sweet, period. Even at Stanford, all she does is wander by herself, a damsel in distress as yet unaware that she needs to be rescued. It's true that near the end of the film they do say she's going into pre-law, but it might have been medicine or film studies or engineering--I'm sure the writers just made her major up on the day. In order for her to be the romantic female lead, she has to be about absolutely nothing. It's the zen approach to femininity. Girls might be good at one thing or the other, but all that's going to get them is a beta. To rise to the top, to be the one everybody aspires to be, they must effortlessly be little more than a vessel for the leading man's dreams.