"It's Love, Not a Favour"

My table for two, right beside the stage, at last night's premiere of Meet Me at Vie's: A Musical Celebration of Hogan’s Alley was set with a tablecloth, a framed photo of an East End house (251 Prior Street for me), and a double-sided handbill.

"The Alley News" handbill mixed a traditional theatre program with those things you find in coffee shops. It had ads for upcoming gigs by the play's four musicians: vocalists Krystle Dos Santos and Dawn Pemberton, Chris Davis (who played mostly piano here, but also trumpet and drums), and bassist-guitarist Steve Charles. Most of those ads were for Infidels Jazz events; Infidels co-presented Vie's with Musical TheatreWorks, who describe themselves as "the only not-for-profit company in Vancouver dedicated to the development of new musicals".

Dos Santos wrote the show about Vie's Chicken and Steak House (209 Union Street) and the Black Strathcona community around the restaurant: the primary Black neighbourhood in Vancouver's history. The Vie's team is largely a reunion of Dos Santos' team from Hey Viola!, a prior stage show about Black Nova Scotian activist Viola Desmond. Dos Santos co-created Hey Viola! with Tracey Power of Musical TheatreWorks, who is the director of Vie's. Davis, Charles, and lightning designer Jillian White were also there.

Pemberton is thus the new co-star. While Dos Santos plays the restaurant proprietor Vie, Pemberton plays Nora Hendrix, Jimi's grandmother. Nora lived in the neighbourhood and worked at Vie's; the Jimi Hendrix Shrine endured on the premises long after the restaurant's 1979 closure. Dos Santos and Pemberton have a fun dynamic together and reinforce each other's stage presence well, as they've done in the Betty Davis project.

Per the show, Vie was born in 1901 and established the restaurant in 1948, while Nora Hendrix was older by perhaps a decade or two. Name-drops abound of famous Black entertainers who came to Vie's for good food and a safe late-night hang in community, indeed many of the same names you hear before any given Tyrant Studios set.

All of the show's dozen or so songs were smartly crafted and delivered with vigour, some in jazz styles but mostly in R&B-soul traditions. Davis and Charles shared co-music-director credits. Davis' piano was the fulcrum underneath the vocals, ranging from an early jazz style to gospel. On trumpet, his bebop moment got immediate applause last night despite the audience being a decidedly non-jazz one. Charles played mostly bass, sung a bit of background vocals, and switched to tremolo'd electric guitar on the bluesy "We Still Shine", one of my favourite numbers.

Dos Santos and Pemberton are both powerful vocalists anywhere, and Vie's was no exception. Their lapel mics provided minimal amplification and sometimes basically none, depending on which ways they turned their heads; but we didn't need any, and that's not just because I sat right at the front. The house was intimate enough that we could easily hear them do everything: talking, joking, talk-singing, belting.

I counted only two songs that weren't new originals. One was 1968's "If You Love Her" by local group (and Motown recording act) Bobby Taylor & The Vancouvers.

The other was Jimi Hendrix's "Little Wing", sung as Nora learned of her grandson's passing, rendered softly by Pemberton with Charles featured on delicate guitar.

Plot was not a significant part of the show, other than telling Park Lane's history toward demolition for the Georgia Viaduct construction. The dialogue was more like a hang, lingering through time and space while Vie and Nora discussed people, places, and memories around them, bearing some awareness that they were becoming memories.

I noticed frequent "It wasn't just X, it was Y" phrases everywhere from dialogue to lyrics to text in the handbill. I'm not declaring that ChatGPT touched any part of it, but I admit that particular shape of a sentence is harder to ignore with each passing month.

The play ran without intermission, but Dos Santos encouraged the audience to stay for an after-show with a featured guest, different each night. Opening night's aftershow was a brief talk with Vancouver-born writer Wayde Compton, who founded a Hogan's Alley Memorial Project and is the editor of a book called Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature, among other works. The tension between whether to make a museum of sorts around Vie's and Hogan's Alley, or to facilitate new life for it and eschew such a museum, animated the talk. You can walk through the former neighbourhood today and see almost nothing of what had been there.

"What if Black Strathcona was kept alive on purpose?" Dos Santos asked (I can't remember if in character or not) to frame the discussion, her play meanwhile doing exactly that. Opening night didn't sell out, but it felt full, and people around me chatted excitedly about discovering history that they hadn't yet explored. Dos Santos, who moved to Vancouver around 2011, never comes across as working a cynical angle with Vie's for any marketing reasons. You can tell she does educationally-minded projects like this one because she's passionate about the subjects. As one lyric said about the nature of community support, "It's love, not a favour."

Vie's has eight more showtimes at BMO Theatre Centre in Olympic Village over the next nine days, ending on May 2nd. Tickets for all are accessible through the same link I used to buy mine. I recommend it as an engaging, ambitious project by multi-talented people in our scene and as a purveyor of Vancouver lore you deserve to know.