Millennials and boomers seemingly share little in common.
The former, born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, have experienced realities that are vastly different from those of the latter, who were born in the years immediately following the Second World War.
Millennials struggle to remember a time before instant, effortless global communication; boomers, for the most part, don’t know how it feels to earn a respectable salary, yet barely be able to afford the necessities of life.
But Andrew Cohen and Anna Kuman, two Vancouver millennials who work in the local theatre community, have discovered at least one entity that transcends these disparate generations: Joni Mitchell.
Inspired by the Alberta-born music icon’s recordings, the most famous of which are matchless in terms of articulating the boomers’ transition from youth to adulthood during the 1960s and ’70s, they wrote a new play, Circle Game: Reimagining the Music of Joni Mitchell. It premieres, in preview, on April 29 at Firehall Arts Centre while the official opening night is May 3.
Cohen and Kuman – who met and subsequently married while workshopping the play – recall Mitchell’s music becoming prominent in their lives in 2013.
“We noticed her music everywhere – it seemed like it was following us,’ says Cohen. “And the more we heard it, the more it interested us, so we started researching her albums and her lyrics. The takeaway we got from it was the power of her prose, and how incredibly poignant and relevant the lyrics she wrote 40 and 50 years ago were to today,
The goal of Circle Game, named after a song she released in 1970, is to make sense of Mitchell’s music – specifically, 27 songs chosen by the couple – in the present day.
It might strike some people as self-evident that Mitchell is a living legend, but Cohen and Kuman acknowledge an uncomfortable truth about the artist: her name is much more famous than her individual songs. Early in her career, before she had experienced success as a performer in her own right, Mitchell was best known for writing songs that became hits for others: Judy Collins’s 1967 cover of “Both Sides Now” and obscure singer-songwriter Tom Rush, whose version of “The Circle Game” predated Mitchell’s by a year and a half. Before immersing themselves in Mitchell’s vast discography, Cohen and Kuman knew of her best from the 2002 rendition of “Big Yellow Taxi” by Counting Crows and Vanessa Carlton.
“She wasn’t the Justin Bieber of her time,” Cohen quips. “I don’t know if there is somebody now who has that same balance of being high-profile while being as emotionally intelligent and having lyrics that are politically charged.”
“That was also a goal of ours: How can we take some of these lesser-known songs and bring their messages to light?” adds Kuman. “It was an experiment for us: What would this music sound like if it was the Top 40 of today?”
The couple are purposely vague about the structure of Circle Game. Instead, Cohen recommends that audience members “leave their preconceptions at the door.”
The play’s principal cast members play a combined 18 instruments and are “quadruple threats.”
“Radical, with love,” is how Cohen describes some of the play’s interpretations.
“We were very conscientious about which songs we rearranged and how, so as to pay homage to the originals and to also show how broadly a message can be taken, and to try to reach millennial and baby-boomer audiences with the same message.”
