Theatre review: The Cave serves up a strange, dark carnival of animal songs
Messages on climate crisis delivered in a creatively charged cabaret that defies expectations
Alex Samaras, Derek Kwan, Neema Bickersteth, and Andrea Koziol in The Cave. Photo by Delal Hagos
The Cultch streams The Cave until January 24
If the idea of a musical with singing animals has you picturing The Lion King or (god forbid) Cats, The Cave is here to confound your expectations.
Filmed at 2019’s Luminato Festival in Toronto, the J Mar Electric production brings a distinctive old-cabaret feel to a show that describes itself as an “interspecies song cycle”. The loose story centres on a group of forest animals fleeing a global-warming-caused forest fire. Taking refuge in a cave, they tell stories to each other, becoming increasingly agitated as the inferno traps them.
The anthropomorphized creatures are only abstractly suggested. In one of the most innovative and effective conjurings, a small murder of crows are depicted with their human hands clutching a horizontal stick like claws, heads poking left and right skittishly. In Allie Marshall’s coolly stylized costuming, a spider wears a weblike black hoop skirt; skunks sport black hoods with a strip of white fuzz; and the snake has a flat, oblong hat that hints at a sleek, reptilian head. Their faces, though, with white foundation and dark eyes, are more Weimar-era Berlin.
It’s the dark-carnival music and atmosphere that most set apart this production, created by John Millard, Tomson Highway, and Martha Ross.
Backed by a crack sextet that includes an old-timey accordion, clarinet, and banjo, Millard and Highway’s songs, sung in English and Cree, range wildly between the playful and the dark, swinging between shades of Tom Waits, Kurt Weill, and Danny Elfman. The performers—Alex Samaras, Neema Bickersteth, Derek Kwan, and Andrea Koziol—sing in an array of vocal styles as they bring to life multiple creatures. Some of the numbers are fun: “I was living simply under a rock with my children who numbered sss-eventy-sss-even,” sings Koziol, then proceeds to name each, every one starting with ‘S’. And Kwan bring to life a hilariously hyper Beaver who sings about being overworked. Others are more emotionally charged: Kwan’s desperate, “impossibly hungry” wolf howls and pants, “I don’t feel like myself”. The singing is strong and diverse: Samaras has a flowing, jazz range, and Bickersteth displays rich, operatic chops alongside a lithe physicality for characters like the Lynx.
Millard, who also plays banjo in the band, is our charismatic MC through all this, The Polka Dogs frontman’s baritone voice coming to life in some of the show’s more wonderfully off-kilter songs.
The tunes are stronger than the narrative structure and momentum, but the messages come through in the strange musicality. It's timely viewing that will appeal to older children as well--as we're all locked down in our own "caves" worrying about the disaster in the outside world.
Neema Beckersteth in The Cave. Photo by Delal Hagos
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