FROM THE DESK OF BILL MILLERD
Other Desert Cities launches the Arts Club Theatre Company’s 50th season. One of the initiatives we have instituted to acknowledge the 50th is to ask certain prominent cultural observers to write essays about the changes at our company and to the cultural scene in Vancouver in relation to the changes in our city. These essays will be posted on our website over the course of the season. Some may be printed in full and some may be the basis of a talk or interview with one of the scribes. in the meantime, I thought I would share with you excerpts from these essays and introduce you to the writers.
Jerry Wasserman, theatre reviewer (website: vancouverplays.com), as well former Head of the Theatre Department at UBC, describes in his essay what it was like when he arrived as an actor in Vancouver in 1972: “a theatrical Wild West—no one asked for your resume (no one I knew had a resume, much less an agent), no one asked where you had trained, or even if you had trained. They just wanted to see what you could do.” Max Wyman, a cultural guru (The Defiant Imagination) who has seen the changes in the cultural scene for the last 40 years places the Arts Club in historical context by describing a company that was transformed ,“from a tiny ‘family’ outfit in a single small space to a three-theatres-plus touring-arm-mega-production monster… a comfortable bunch of places where people enjoy putting on shows for people who enjoy going to see them.” Playwright Michele Riml (Sexy Laundry, Henry & Alice: Into the Wild) talks about the theatre experiences that, “undeniably shaped and altered me… Morris Panych’s 7 Stories blew my mind. I didn’t completely understand it and I liked that feeling a lot.” And Charles Demers, comedian and writer (Vancouver Special), takes a personal look at Vancouver theatre and “the great challenges faced in a city hell-bent on becoming a playground for the rich (at the cost of pretty much everything that makes it great),” concluding that, “several generations of talented, devoted people keep working furiously to continue filling its stages with cool stuff”.
Devoted people are involved with Other Desert Cities and the rest of the season. Thanks for being part of our 50th.
Bill Millerd
Artistic Managing Director
artisticdirector@artsclub.com
