Back in the Future - Actor Rick Miller brings the post-war generation alive in BOOM

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March 16, 2016

Lake Champlain Weekly
By Benjamin Pomerance
March 16, 2016


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To remember a time that he never knew. That was the challenge, the force that drew Rick Miller toward a project that appeared to be built on a foundation of insanity. He was never a Baby Boomer, never experienced the social and political and cultural upheaval between 1945 and 1969 that turned North America upside-down and inside-out so many times over in so many ways. His birth came later, entering the world at a time when people talked in vague mysteries about the rebellion that had ignited in bygone days.

Yet somehow, enigmatically, those years of turmoil spoke to him. Civil rights struggles and anti-war rallies and ideological enemies and artistic revolutions and children who were so much more plugged-in than their parents and an older generation wondering exactly where and how and why the kids had gone wrong — all of it just seemed so familiar. At times, he felt like he had actually been there.

So he decided to find out why. And in the process, he decided to put himself there — as Janis Joplin and John F. Kennedy and Edward R. Murrow and Joe Cocker and Pierre Trudeau. There as Walter Cronkite, emotionally overcome when reporting the news of Kennedy’s assassination. As Mick Jagger, howling to anyone who would listen that he can’t get no satisfaction. As Martin Luther King, Jr., telling a nation and a world that he had a dream.

As a participant in the civil rights movement and the feminist movement and the Cuban Missile Crisis and Beatlemania and McCarthyism and the advent of the Frisbee and the space race. As his mother, a middle-class white woman from Ontario. As Rudolf Schmitt, a Viennaborn advertising man and illustrator who migrated to Montreal in time to watch society stand on its head. As Laurence, an African-American man from Chicago.

There even as himself, a kind of time-traveling Greek chorus. All told, there are more than 100 characters whose identity Miller inhabits during Boom, the solo performance that the longtime Just For Laughs television host will bring to Montreal’s Segal Centre for Performing Arts from March 20 to April 10. Yet of all the personas that the impressionist must adopt, the most difficult tends to be the one that he thought he knew the best. In writing and performing a quarter-century of combustible history, staring into the mirror often proved to be the hardest step.

“I never lived through a minute of it,” Miller states. “So, in that sense, I’m just an actor documenting what happened. But Boom is not about nostalgia, although it certainly makes some people feel nostalgic. It’s not a juke-box musical where you’re just re-living the songs and the artists of the past. I can’t just go out there on the stage and be Wikipedia, because you can find all of that online. This is personal. Even though I was never there, it’s very personal to me.”

The whole thing began with his father. Or maybe it began with the fact that he had just become a father. Even now, after a three-year gestation period before he would unleash Boom upon an audience, Miller says he can’t figure out what lit the fuse. Initially, he was just going to help his dad document his life. Yet when Miller actually heard his father’s stories, the impact jarred him. “They were so different from anything that I’d ever heard about the Baby Boomer generation,” he recalls. “You always assume that it was all like Leave It To Beaver, you know?”

And as time went by, he started thinking about his children. He contemplated what they knew about him and his background, what assumptions they might make and what questions that might never even think of asking. He considered the mistakes that he had made when guessing how his father must have lived during an earlier era, and wondered if his kids had developed similar conjectures about their father’s formative years — or if they even cared at all. Each time, he found himself reaching the same conclusion. He needed to build a bridge.

“We spend more and more time focusing on how unique we are,” Miller explains. “We don’t really learn from history. We don’t know how to talk to our parents. We don’t know how to talk to our kids. I’m certainly guilty of that. It wasn’t until later in my life that I started trying to find out more from my parents. And now that I have kids of my own, I feel like I’ve somehow become this connecting link between two very different generations.”

So spanning that decades-dividing gap became Miller’s mission. And the performer whom Entertainment Weekly anointed “one of the 100 most creative people alive today” decided that if he truly wanted to bring these generations together, he needed to bring these generations together — literally. In the safe communal harbor of a darkened theatre, they could sit elbow-to-elbow and collectively experience their evolution. And if the presentation were right, they could walk away when the lights came back on realizing that the conversations had just begun.

“If you come to see Boom with people from several generations,” Miller declares, “I guarantee you’ll have more interesting discussions after the show than you ever have had.” All of the puzzle pieces sitting in the theatre’s seats fit into this plotline. To some, of course, the production returns to moments that they remember first-hand. As Miller runs his gauntlet of people and places and things, memories roar back about what happened where and when, perhaps accompanied with new questions or long-awaited answers of why.

To others, however, Boom distills a seemingly distant past into a spirit of personalized immediacy. Intentionally, Miller avoided making the play solely about the lords and ladies of history’s spotlight. The people who were buffeted daily — willingly or unwillingly — by this history form the production’s heartbeat. “I go from playing The Beatles,” Miller explains, “to being my mother in the car on the way home [from a Beatles concert] having not heard a word because of everyone screaming and yet still feeling more alive than she ever had felt before.”

That’s why the arc of the performance holds such importance. In the beginning, Miller heavily utilizes a multimedia extravaganza — vintage advertisements, keystone newsreels, descriptive images — to tell his stories. As the show progresses, however, Miller relies less on the technological aids, injecting himself directly into these people and their transformations. In much the same way, he hopes to transition every audience member from observer to intimate participant, grasping how this period affected their existence on the most personal of levels.

“People come up to me and tell me, ‘You showed me my life up there, and I didn’t realize that it made any sense until now,’” Miller says. “Sometimes, I think you have to see something through somebody else’s experience before you can understand what happened in your own life.”

And for at least a certain segment of the crowd, it proves that time travel doesn’t exclusively lead to foreign lands. As Miller crafted Boom, an expected-yetunexpected truth crystallized for him: the number of Baby Boomer generation hallmarks with contemporary antecedents. From the Occupy Movement to divisive reactions about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to choices that continue to push the fashion envelope, the cycles of this supposedly bygone time are coming home to roost again.

“We forget that every generation thinks that it’s special,” Miller explains. “We forget that every generation’s parents think that their kids are entitled. Back then, parents thought kids watched too much TV. Today, parents think that their kids are on their smart phones too much. Kids used to do duck-and-cover drills in case someone dropped a nuclear bomb. Today, we have all of the homeland security measures in case of a terrorist attack. Expressions from the ‘60s were used in the Occupy Movement. It’s different, of course, but so much of it is the same.”

It could also easily become overwhelming. Miller performs his character-to-character chameleon act so frequently that one worries about him reciting Jawaharlal Nehru’s speeches in Bugs Bunny’s voice or singing Perry Como’s songs in Little Eva’s costume. Yet the overarching themes rise to the surface through interactions among just three people — Laurence, Rudolf, and Miller’s mother — whose lives intertwine in unexpected ways before the production ends.

And in every performance, before the grand finale arrives, Miller finds himself. A projection of “Earthrise,” the iconic first-ever photograph of the Earth from outer space, beams onto the set. The colors captured by astronauts from Apollo 8 seem to throb in the darkened room. There are spoken lines from the monologue that accompany this image. Yet before he opens his mouth to talk, the Toronto-based artist always ends up breathless for an instant.

“Every night, at that moment, I realize how we all tend to be locked in our own bubbles of disconnection,” Miller says. “And I want to tell people to get out of that bubble, because it’s screwing you up. I look at the Earth and I think how we’re so small and so fragile, and how we are all living in conflict. And I want to do something about it.” He pauses. “And then,” he finally continues, each word delivered after a measured silence, “I think about how zooming out to look at the Earth in this image kind of gets us there. It gets us out of that bubble. It gets us looking at so much. And that’s the message for everything that we are doing here, in a way. We’re going outside our own generational bubbles. We’re zooming out and looking around. And when we do that, we realize that there is so much to see.”

The Montreal premiere of Rick Miller’s “Boom” runs from March 20 to April 10 in Montreal’s Segal Centre for Performing Arts (5170 Cote-Sainte-Catherine Street). For tickets and more information, call (514) 739-7944 or visit www.segalcentre.org.

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