Theatre Under The Stars

A Walk in the Park
It is great that there are so many things to do in Vancouver all within walking distance of our apartment. One of these annual activities is Theatre Under The Stars. Thursday night we took the 15 minute stroll to the Stanley Park Malkin Bowl for the performance of Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat. Written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice the musical is based on the “coat of many colors” story of Joseph from the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Genesis. The show was first presented in London in 1968.

Theatre Under The Stars
Now in its 64^th season, in addition to Joseph TUTS is also performing “Singing in the Rain’ on alternating nights until August 21^st. Last year we also attended in August and saw Thoroughly Modern Mille. You can read the full blog post from last year and the history of TUTS here. This year the weather was perfect, a high of 24 during the day, making it just cool enough for a light jacket during the show. As was the same last year the volunteers were very friendly and very helpful; we bought a drink and a snack and were ushered to our seats. We had not seen a performance of Joseph before but knew the basic premise of the story; it was also fairly easy to follow. The whole performance was upbeat with toe-tapping, hand-clapping rhythms. The enthusiasm and passion of the young cast was enough to make you want to get up and dance. In our opinion the stand out performances belonged to ‘Joe’ played by 17 year old Richmond resident Erik Ioannidis and ‘Saigon’ played by Amber Shikaze a UBC Speech Sciences student but the whole cast did a great job. There was also a young girl (seven or eight) pulled out of the audience to play the ‘12^th brother’ who also really got into the act, and smiled the whole time.

Support the Arts
With over 250 volunteers and professionals working on TUTS each year it is another of the organizations that Vancouver is lucky to have. Seeing productions from both TUTS and Bard in the same week did remind us of this. So no matter what theatre company, festival, arts club, or other group you choose as your favorite make sure that you support it in any way you can so that we continue to have all of these choices in this great city.