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Continuing

Unity (1918)

Kevin Kerr's account of the influenza outbreak that decimated supposedly “saved” towns after the First World War covers a vast amount of ground from its cloistered setting of Unity, Sask. While Kerr (a University of British Columbia graduate who won a 2002 Governor-General's Award for this work) was ostensibly writing about a pack of frightened villagers that becomes xenophobic and terrified as influenza cuts a swath across the nation, he ended up writing something far more difficult to grasp – a study of society's most troubling question: Shall we be soft, or shall we be hard? Shall we be permeable, go out into the world, invite the world to our homes? Or shall we, rather, build walls, cut communication and keep ourselves pure? It's a choice that civilizations rise and fall by.

And maybe that momentous tone is the reason this Theatre at UBC production left me slightly underwhelmed; director Stephen Drover can eke out only a finite amount of complexity from his student cast, and Kerr's story demands extreme finesse.

Jocelyn Gauthier, playing the stoic farm girl Beatrice, is good at breaking down but spends most of the play holding herself together. Beatrice reads from her diary (a handy, if obvious, narrative device that keeps us abreast of the town's hardships); she writes to a soldier who may or may not know her name and, most endearingly, she furiously knits socks for the boys overseas, despite her sister's taunts.

A couple members of the cast have a dampened way of delivering their lines that leaves them sounding like 10-year-olds reading aloud. As the bodies begin to pile up and plague takes over the town, one can't help but think, “Oh, good, I didn't like him anyway.”

Still, Kevin McAllister's awesome minimalist set gives the students a fine, stretched sort of diorama to play in. And, though much of the play's dark humour is missing, this university production gives a worthy account of a First World War massacre many have forgotten. And just in time for flu season too. To Nov. 22. $10 to $20. Frederic Wood Theatre, 6354 Crescent Rd., 604-822-2678.

Cyrano de Bergerac

It's a rare thing to see so much talent working to so little effect. James Fagan Tait's translation and direction of Edmond Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac is surprisingly dull: Its 17th-century Parisian characters stand around and talk, but they never seem to communicate; the insertion of contemporary idioms is cloying; and, aside from elaborate period costumes (by Nancy Bryant), there's not much to look at.

Rostand's play is based only nominally on the real Cyrano, a French dramatist, and fabricates an elaborate love story around those two loose facts. Cyrano (David Mackay) longs for the love of blond Roxane, but believes he is too ugly to win her. Sublimating like mad, he skewers all men with his merciless wit. “My elegance is inside,” he says.

Melissa Poll plays the love interest as an odd confluence of valley girl and saint. And yet the one scene I truly enjoyed, the famous balcony scene where Christian apes the beautiful words of shadow-skulking Cyrano, is invested with the smartest comic energy. To Nov. 23. $31 to $59. Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage, 2750 Granville St., 604-687-1644.

Opening

Hairspray

Tracy Turnblad, the portly heroine of this addictive and optimistic musical, just wants to dance – preferably on the Corny Collins Show, where cool kids prance in a mist of privilege and, yes, hairspray. While pursuing her dream, Tracy drags her shut-in mother toward the burgeoning liberalism of the Sixties and helps to topple racial segregation in sleepy Baltimore.

This lavish production, based on the wicked 1988 comedy by John Waters, comes to town in the wake of last year's cinematic rendition (wherein John Travolta made a stellar comeback as Tracy's big-boned mother). To Nov. 23. $56.50 to $86.50. Centre in Vancouver for the Performing Arts, 777 Homer St. 604-280-4444.

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