A glow from the musical nebula: the multi-verse originality of Andrea House in 650 Light Years Away. A Fringe review

650 Light Years Away (stage 25, Spotlight Cabaret)

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

In the mapless universe where Andrea House, a questing explorer of dark nights, is looking for a guiding star, what she finds instead is a bright nebulous effusion of light.

The good news is that the Helix Nebula is the closest one to our own planet. The more unsettling news from the galaxy is that it’s only 650 light years away. Ah, a long-distance relationship … with certainty.

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This wonderful ‘story concert’ of a show by House and jazz composer/keyboardist Chris Andrew, extraordinary originals both (with superb bassist Rubim de Toledo), finds a wild, beautiful poetry in doubt, unstable footing, the unknowable. Its reach is as intimate as love, as specific as gridlock on the Henday at rush hour, the pirate ship at WEM,  or “7.5 years of bad luck” as forewarned by an astrologer who “looked like Sabrina Carpenter (pause). If she lived in Kamloops and had three kids.” And it’s as elusive as your ancestors centuries ago. Or the truth. What would happen, she wonders aloud, if we told the truth all the time?

House reveals that she was born an oak tree, singled out amongst the poplars and cut down as “young wood” to be a boat. “I was shaped by men,” she sings. “I cried when I realized I wouldn’t be a tree any more.” But then, boats move in a magical way, on an element not of the earth. The score, music that slides in and out of cleverly rhymed rap, rhythmic spoken word, jazz, Latin beats, silky ballads that turn fierce, is unique. Actor/playwright/musician House can wrap her lustrous, dramatic, multi-angled voice around any genre.

And there’s a playful wit about her way with imagery, and narrative teases. Her Brit relative Wanda, a physicist, is reassuring, but “she’s high all the time.”

Directed by Davina Stewart, the whole experience of 650 Light Years Away and its vertiginous view of time, will leave you a bit dizzy, and breathless (and so does the multi-branched talent of this remarkable artist). And isn’t that really what you’re after at the Fringe?