Almost Live episode #167
One of the most popular Pantos ever!
While Ariel (a human teenager with two legs and an environmentalist-bent) is busking with her girl band at New Brighton Beach, she falls in love with a teenage mer-person. Ariel dives into an ocean adventure where she makes a questionable deal with a devilish octopus named Ursula, fights off evil electric eels with her trash crab BFF, Sebastian, and has to help save the ocean from a mysterious purple slime of despair.
Host Amy Amantea will be joined by special guests Maiko Yamamoto, Artistic Director of Theatre Replacement and Dawn Petten who plays Ursula, the hilarious, wicked and purple sea witch.
A filmed theatre performance (originally produced in 2022) with VocalEye audio description by Eileen Barrett.
Presented in partnership with The Cultch and Theatre/Replacement
This event will not be recorded.
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About
Theatre Replacement’s Artistic Director is Maiko Yamamoto. A leader in the Vancouver and national arts scenes and known internationally for her work, Maiko has created over 25 new works for TR, drawing upon her love of formal inventiveness and exploration, conceptual play, creative research, artist-centred processes and experimental and multidisciplinary practice. Yamamoto often collaborates with intergenerational artists, individuals and family members in making work that searches for playful, immediate and authentic ways of bringing audiences and performances together.
TR was founded in 2004 by Yamamoto and James Long. The pair met in theatre school at Simon Fraser University and for over 18 years, led the company and established its foundational collaborative practice. Together, they were the co-recipients of the distinguished 2019 Siminovitch Prize in Directing, recognizing the influential shared and individual practices of the company’s co-leaders.
In 2022, Yamamoto became the sole Artistic Director of the company. For TR, she continues to build experimental and intercultural new works that interrogate systems and structures for making and producing art and fosters opportunities for like-minded emerging and established artists to create works that expand the boundaries of contemporary performance. 2024 is TR’s 20th anniversary, celebrating 2 decades of signature performances and ongoing programs designed to serve a diverse public.
What’s In Your Fridge: Dawn Petten of East Van Panto
(originally published in The Georgia Straight, Dec 19, 2022)
What’s In Your Fridge is where the Straight asks interesting Vancouverites about their life-changing concerts, favourite albums, and, most importantly, what’s sitting beside the Heinz ketchup in their custom-made Big Chill Retropolitan 20.6-cubic-foot refrigerators.
On the grill
Dawn Petten.
Who are you
I’m a Vancouver theatre actor and I’m playing Ursula in the East Van Panto’s 10th Anniversary show The Little Mermaid, running to January 1. I’ve been lucky to have been onstage in seven of the 10 pantos, having had the pleasure of being Hansel, a Prince, a Tin Them, a Harp singing a song about cheese, Gloria Macarenko, and Alice in last year’s Alice in Wonderland. But this is my first time playing the villain! It’s the one show where an actor can say honestly: I can’t WAIT to be boo-ed.
The East Van Panto is like an annual love poem to East Van and all the families in it. It’s seriously my favourite gig. There is nothing sweeter than seeing East Van families walk and bike together down Commercial Drive to come to the York Theatre. So many families have made it their yearly tradition. Then to be onstage doing the most outrageous things, with a room full of laughing people, and kids leaping forward in their seats to shout at the top of their lungs, “Look behind you!”—well it is such a raucous joy to behold. I was a HUGE Veda Hille (our musical director and lyricist) fan before I ever met her, and after a decade of getting to sing her unbelievably inspired and hysterical lyrics to her brilliantly curated pop song selections, I’m still pinching myself and laughing my ass off with her in the dressing room. This year is extra special for me as my own little Panto child will be onstage with me! Come see us! I can guarantee your cockles will be warmed!
First concert
Parachute Club at Ontario Place. The whole audience Sha-dat-bop-boop-be-do-yay-ay-o’ing with “At the Feet of the Moon”. I remember that, before playing a new, as-of-yet-unfinished song, Lorraine Segato asked the audience to help write the final verse and submit their ideas. Being an earnest teenage poet, I hastily scribbled a stanza of a most-flowery-over-the-top love poem. Later heard the song on the radio and listened attentively for my verse. Didn’t make the cut. No regrets that I bought the concert t-shirt. Years later at Luv-A-Fair a drunken guy came up to me and gushed, “You are so Lorraine Segato in the sexiest way” and I felt so flattered and seen.
Life-changing concert
Vancouver Folk Festival 1997: My first folk festival. Had no idea what I was in for and had my mind blown. The music, the food trucks, the hippiness, the sun, the helicopter dancers. It is the quintessential blissed-out Vancouver experience. And where else can you listen to Veda Hille and Tanya Tagaq and K’naan and Po’ Girl and a ska band in the same day. A weekend of wonder. And between new favourites we slipped out of the gates and dove into the ocean to cool off. Came back with salty hair and bodies to pig out on corn on the cob and pavlova before howling at the full moon with Ani DiFranco. Magic. I kept returning, and the magic keeps giving.
Top three records
Metric Fantasies Any Metric album really, but this album is perfection. Every song jettisons my pulse and body into full ON mode. The compulsion and propulsion of the rhythm and the poetry are irresistible. When I was doing the national tour of the Electric Company show Studies in Motion, in which we all started the show in the nude, one night pre-show 12 of us crammed into one dressing room in our little backstage robes over our nekkidness and blasted this album at top volume, dancing on the chairs and dressing room tables singing so loudly that we utterly missed the “Places” call over program sound and stage management had to come hunting for us. We were ecstatic with it. (And how can I not mention that Emily Haines and I went to the same performing arts high school and acted in a play together where I played her hallucination in a giant rabbit costume singing, “I get no kicks from champagne!”). This is also the album I play without fail when going through a carwash.
Arvo Pärt Spiegel im Spiegel My favourite piece of classical music. The first time I heard this I had to just lie down on the floor and surrender. Deceptively simple and spellbinding. It’s like the most epic parts of your life in a cinema score. You feel it all unfold: all your moments of trying and yearning and loving and losing and regretting and emerging all over again. As someone who plays the cello, I dream of one day inhabiting this piece with its perfect patience, and simultaneous repression and reach. When I had a fussy unsettled newborn, I put this on and watched the world slow and siphon to just these notes, my daughter still and silent listening with every cell of her new being.
PJ Harvey To Bring You My Love PJ Harvey in all her iterations blows my mind. This album: raw dark carnivorous desire. Unbelievably theatrical. It grabs my guts and makes me want to revisit past bad decisions.
All-time favourite video
Kate Bush “Running Up That Hill” Okay, Fave video, fave song, fave album of ALL. (I feel personally proud like a mama bear that a new generation has resurrected and devoured this song.) This video—not lipsynching or performing the song, but kick-ass modern dance! Marching clones! I spent my entire theatre-school years trying to get my classmates to recreate those moves in every dance piece we did, trying to get fellow actor Raugi Yu to whip me around his body corkscrew-style like Kate Bush.
Spoiler alert: I get to sing Kate Bush on stage in this year’s Panto. It is perhaps my favourite moment onstage ever. And there may be in brief an homage to the awesome modern dance in that video. Living the dream.
What’s in your fridge?
Marinating salmon. This year I joined Skipper Otto Community Supported Fishery, and every week I pick up the most delectable locally caught fish. The salmon has the name and face of the fisher (well, the package does…) and tells me it was caught off of Haida Gwaii this past summer. I’ve also got smoked albacore tuna lox in the fridge and delicious ling cod for future tacos. My kid loves to eat fish like I do, and since we are Under the Sea in this Panto, it’s only fitting! I love that the Panto this year celebrates our ocean and the need to protect it, and Skipper Otto does just that by supporting local fishers in sustainable practices. The best marinade for salmon and steelhead trout as be found here.
Homemade deodorant. Yeah that’s how West Coast I am. But seriously once you have the ingredients, so much more effective and cost=efficient than the store natural deos (maybe we should check with my castmates about the effectiveness after a sweaty show of singing and dancing in a giant octopus costume!). Coconut-oil based so if you don’t want to apply your deodorant with a baster, you gotta pour it into an old deodorant stick and keep it in the fridge. Refreshing to apply! You want to know the good recipe too? Go here.
Homemade Bailey’s. It’s the season! Homemade Bailey’s is so easy and extra-delish, dreamy and creamy. I love it with holiday morning coffee … I also bring a bottle to the theatre every Panto for us to have a toast the end of matinees! (When there isn’t an evening show) Every Christmas I gift some to my 70-something-year-old neighbour and she packs it in her coffee mug to the dog park on the daily. Shhhh don’t tell my Bailey’s gift receivers how easy it is after going here. I toast you, the Panto audience, and wish you all the joys of the season.
