These little piggies went into musical
Production featured at Push inspired by online classifieds
Veda Hille and Bill Richardson created A Craigslist Cantata after being inspired by items for sale online
Craig Newmark began his online community of free classified advertisements in 1995 as an email service for people to trade or sell or give away stuff. Today, Craigslist exists in 50 countries and counting and has become a go-to site for just about everything.
The day that Vancouver indie rock queen Veda Hille and CBC Saturday Afternoon at the Opera broadcaster and author Bill Richardson sat down to discuss the Arts Club Theatre’s production of Do You Want What I Have Got? A Craigslist Cantata, an ad from a restaurant seeking musicians to perform for free to promote their CD and a musician’s response looking for a restaurant to feed people for free was going viral.
It was this very kind of thing that inspired the two artists to first delve into Craigslist as an inspiration and source for material in an earlier version of the show that played at the Push Festival under the Twenty Minute Musicals moniker in 2009.
Now fleshed out into an 85-minutelong work, the show includes a sixmember cast musical, complete with a live quartet, singing, dancing and plenty of witty lyricism. Both Hille and Richardson are cagey about what audiences can expect at the performance which is also part of this year’s Push Festival. Suffice to say that there will be moments that will send you straight to your smart phone to find the original advert that may have spawned the song’s subject matter. Richardson notes that the static nature of the very website — with things being added and deleted every second — makes it a very unique thing to use as source material.
However, the initial inspiration for the work was an $11 rip-off.
“The idea came from getting scammed on Craigslist, when I was between gigs and went on looking for job ideas,” says Richardson. “I paid $11 on Paypal for how to make money typing from home and all I got was something telling me how to scam money off of people; one of the oldest plays in the book. But I started looking further into the whole phenomenon and found a lot of good stuff.”
“We met to discuss it when I was curating the 20 Minute Musicals and I instantly hit on the title “Do You Want What I Have Got?,” says Hille. “And at that moment, it happened. It’s a real mix of Bill’s serious labour of spending a lot of time on Craigslist and sending me some of the straight ads and some extrapolated/philosophical lyrics from them and me composing to it.”
A good deal of the material is verbatim, which opens up the whole issue of “ownership” of the source material. Now that people who pen viral Craigslist entries are getting jobs writing comedy and such, does the public domain concept suddenly become something else and if it does who decides? Hille says that is one of the things considered in the whole experiment and what her, Richardson and director Amiel Gladstone have been working on.
“Many of the ads we’ve used are from two or three years ago and have lost their currency in terms of goods,” says Richardson. “But they also remain the same, as the thing that is inherent in all of those ads is that they are all about longing and something deeply human and moving that is more than just selling something.”
“It wasn’t like that as much when we started,” says Hille. “Now you have people trying hard to get into the “Best of” section because it has spawned high-paying jobs. This also means that now we see people interacting with the show on Craigslist, where we’ve seen people posting about going to see the show and so on.”
With original songs such as “Children’s Guillotine,” “Free Man’s Toupee” and others, it’s assured that Richardson’s renowned wit and Hille’s acclaimed art rock are a fine fit. As late as two weeks before the premiere, new ads/songs are being added to the score. Richardson says it could become episodic but works very well as a fixed show, too.
“I’d kind of forgotten how much I love musical theatre having invested so much into the whole indie rock thing,” says Hille. “But in researching this, I went back and started watching all of the old musicals like Cabaret and reminded myself of how great they are.”
“I’m obviously of a different generation in terms of musicals because I see Cabaret as modern,” laughs Richardson.
For a show birthed in the digital world, the final production favours the “lessis-more” approach of unamplified voices, minimal sets and none of the multimedia accoutrement common everywhere. Heading back to minimalist staging, silent film and such is so cutting-edge at the moment. You probably couldn’t find a more appropriate stage design concept for sale on Craigslist.