Fight the power

Edmonton-based Chris Craddock and Nathan Cuckow charm us with hip-hop style in Bash’d! A Gay Rap Opera

Craddock and Cuckow send up hip-hop's homophobia

The GCTC’s production of Bash’d! A Gay Rap Opera was born out of a 2007 Fringe Festival, and the organism that’s been ported to the GCTC professional stage absolutely retains the frenetic, frantic, performer-centric genetics of a perfectly Fringe production, with all its weaknesses and strengths intact. Fortunately for me, any minor weaknesses were more than made up for by the show’s great strengths.

Typical of Fringe style, the stage was bare save for two plush stools. Most of the scenes were delineated by the alternating presence and absence of light. With costumes a plain study in white streetwear, there was little to remove us from the strong core of the production: the performers.

Edmonton-based duo Chris Craddock and Nathan Cuckow provide the loft necessary to sustain this production through 65 minutes of verbal play. All words are rapped to music, with no breaks for plain dialogue. Craddock and Cuckow hitch themselves to it like workhorses, beaming out an unceasing energy. My guest at an earlier show remarked on how even the crass, raunchy humour managed to reach out and grab your sympathy.

This show sends up the typically grandiose and homophobic language of hip-hop. It might be here that the play falters a bit. Coming into a “rap opera,” I was yearning for a real verbal and rhythmic exploration. But with meter and rhyme fairly standard almost all the way through, the whole thing sometimes took on a singsong quality. I still enjoyed myself greatly, but without the edge of verbal surprise that would have thrilled me.

For me, though, these rough edges only served to reinforce the origins of this show and to direct my focus to the immediate charm of the two very entertaining leads.

As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – January 21, 2010
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/stage/stage.aspx?iIDArticle=19172