ON STAGE
What: Boom X
When: July 30-Aug. 18
Where: Belfry Theatre, 1291 Gladstone Ave.
Tickets: $25-$50 depending on the show, with discounts for students and seniors. Available by phone from 250-385-6815 or online at tickets.belfry.bc.ca
When last we left Rick Miller, the actor/director/writer/musician and noted impersonator was performing his one-man multimedia show Boom at the Belfry Theatre four years ago.
Back then, this paper described the extravaganza as a “mind-boggling and dizzying tour of the world between 1945 and 1969,” and noted that the most successful parts of the show were “nothing short of brilliant.”
Now, Miller is back with the second instalment of a planned trilogy that aims to explore music, politics, history and technology over 75 years.
Boom X picks up where Boom left off at the end of the ’60s and follows Generation X from 1970 to 1995 through punk rock and disco, Watergate and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The new show promises to be every bit as dizzying as the first go-round, with Miller drawing on his versatility as a performer and musician to play 100 characters in 100 minutes — a pace that transports the audience through one year every four minutes.
“It’s probably why we keep the title, Boom, in there — it’s kind of explosive,” Miller said by phone from a cottage north of Montreal, where he was resting up for his three-week stint at the Belfry.
Indeed, over the course of an evening, Miller will sing 30 song excerpts that reflect the evolution of style, from one-hit wonders such as Devo’s Whip It and Carl Douglas’s Kung Fu Fighting to big bands such as Nirvana and U2.
“There’s a lot going on,” he said, with understatement.
Beyond showcasing Miller’s obvious gifts for music and mimicry, however, the Boom trilogy was conceived as a way to explore the trends that have shaped our lives.
“I studied architecture in school and I was just interested in the foundations of rock and roll,” he said. “I realized you couldn’t study that without looking at the history of politics and then of technology and then of sociology, because it had a lot to do with Baby Boomers.”
All of that dovetailed with Miller’s interest in his father’s stories of growing up in Nazi-occupied Vienna during the Second World War. “I just realized that the personal stories made the history so much more appealing and it turned into part one of this trilogy of, I guess, documentary plays.”
Boom examined his parents’ generation, while Boom X explores Miller’s generation. Boom YZ, which Miller is already writing, will look at his kids’ generation.
He creates the shows by extensively researching the time periods and then interviewing people whose stories form the basis for the main characters in each play.
“If I can step into my dad’s life or my mom’s life or my cousin’s or even my spouse’s life, I can understand a little bit about who they are and, hopefully, shed some light on where we’re going.”
In that sense, Boom X sets the stage for the current age of Trump, Brexit and climate change by first examining the divisive era of punk and disco.
“You were not one and the other, you were one or the other or you hated them both,” he says. “It was an era, I think, that set in motion a lot of the polarization of our political world today, even though the Wall came down at the end of the ’80s.
“The seeds of the political standoffs we’re facing today were planted at the end of Boom X. In that way, Boom X feels like a bridge show that you’ve got to see before seeing Boom YZ. And yet a lot of people are really anxious to see Boom YZ. It’s like, where the hell are we going?”
Miller doesn’t pretend to have all the answers and the Boom series is very much an interactive process. At the end of each show, he ventures into the lobby to record people’s observations and stories, which are then posted to encyclopediacanada.com as part of his company’s oral-history project.
“It adds huge value to the experience of the show, which isn’t just on stage,” Miller said. “It’s also the talk-back and it’s the conversations people have in the car and sometimes the stories they share after with us.”
