PANDEMONIUM: FEAR FREEDOM
Where: Victoria Event Centre, 1415 Broad St.
When: Oct. 27 through Oct. 31
Tickets: $25-$32 from
Atomic Vaudeville continues to confound — that’s the good news.
The bad news? Well, there isn’t any. Not with the company’s eye-popping 84th cabaret event — but only its second in three years — debuting tonight with a scattershot mix of comedy, theatre, music, improv and dance. The local performing arts community is never more interesting than when Atomic Vaudeville is running at full volume, as the company co-founded in 2004 by Britt Small and Jacob Richmond almost always bucks convention.
That’s why its most famous creation, Ride the Cyclone, became an off-Broadway hit, and it appears to be what the company is seeking out with the five-night Pandemonium: Fear Freedom. “It’s almost like a mini festival, in a way,” Small said.
“We invite people from lots of different communities, from the dance world to improv to music. It tends to be a really great gathering place, especially for people who feel like they may not fit into a more conventional performance company.”
Atomic Vaudeville decided against staging The Rocky Horror Picture Show this year, which had become its default, albeit expensive, annual spring production. The company decided instead to stage “its own campy musical,” The Batshits, which is built around the talents of its many associated musicians, composers, writers, and actors. “We were thinking our audience would go with us on that,” Small said with a laugh.
The company commissioned local musician Hank Pine to create the musical’s pilot episode, which functions as a prequel for what, exactly? Small is not quite sure. Atomic Vaudeville plans to debut The Bats--its on some medium next year, though exactly where it will land is to be determined. “There are a few things not quite complete, but we thought we’d show it anyway,” Small said of its presence at Pandemonium: Fear Freedom.
“We filmed it to build belief in it. [Pine] is going to shop it around and see if it can’t get picked up. There’s a similar vibe to Hedwig and the Angry Inch or The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which have had both film and stages versions.”
A difficult two years, during which the majority of Atomic Vaudeville’s output was presented online, gave the company time to retool. Richmond exited the company he co-founded shortly before the pandemic began, and the online programming provided Small and her team with an area of focus while the task of restructuring Atomic Vaudeville got underway.
Small spent five months with a pair of facilitators to look at how Atomic Vaudeville could evolve. She went back to the core of “why I wanted to start this company in the first place,” which led her to a new leadership direction. “I decided I really didn’t want to run the company by myself. I wanted it to do it in a team,” she said.
Atomic Vaudeville is now run by a trio of co-directors, including Small (who will handle production and administration), Kathleen Greenfield (administration and community), and Pedro M. Siqueira (community and production). The duties shared by the trio are purposely blurred, Small said, which changes the collective ideology within the company. “We all overlap a bit. We are all independent artists as well, so that means one of us can step away for a while, and not have everything collapse.”
Change will be gradual, but with new energy comes new experiences. Small is leaving room for the reinvention to be radical.
“We're running things a bit more collaboratively. The company is such a great place for not only emerging artists but established artists, too. We want to give them a venue where they can experiment and play. If people have ideas, we’re going to support them through development. We are a lab for artists to try out new ideas, so our company plays a unique role.”
