Factory Theatre’s The Waltz is a sweet yet substantial pas-de-deux

The back of the house program for  Factory Theatre’s production of Marie Beath Badian’s The Waltz says simply, “Enjoy the show”.

Not a problem.

Two teenagers meet unexpectedly under the wide-open Saskatchewan prairie sky in 1993. He approaches a remote cabin, hauling armloads of baggage and a boombox. Warily watching from the cabin, she trains her crossbow on him. 

So opens The Waltz, a warm and funny play that explores the experience of two first-generation Filipinx-Canadians who are – unbeknownst to them – connected through their mothers. 

They are the teenaged children of the two women whose story forms the play Prairie Nurse (2013), Badian’s award-winning hit prequel to The Waltz. Luggage-toting Romeo Alvarez Junior (Anthony Perpuse) was raised in Toronto suburb Scarborough, while teen archer Bea Klassen (Ericka Leobrera) grew up in the tiny town of Arborfield, Saskatchewan. Romeo is stopping in Arborfield to visit his mother’s friends on his drive west to study at the University of British Columbia. 

As they – and the audience – will discover, the urban-rural dichotomy is just the beginning of their differences  . . . and at the same time, they have much more in common than they initially believe. 

Both plays were commissioned by Blyth Festival and directed by Nina Lee Aquino. Familiarity with Prairie Nurse enriches the experience of The Waltz – but the play enchants – heck, it soars, even if you know nothing of its predecessor. Everything comes together: Badian’s razor-sharp dialogue, Lee Aquino’s tight direction, and – most of all – Leobrera and Perpuse’s winning individual performances and crackling chemistry.

80s and 90s romantic comedy is usually dismissed as lightweight and trite. Unapologetically wearing its rom com pedigree on its sleeve, The Waltz confidently rebuffs such generalization. In just 70 fast-moving minutes, the stories of Romeo and Beatrice (named after famed Shakespearean romantic characters) open a window into their different experiences of home, representation, identity, language, belonging, culture, community and family. 

And while The Waltz authentically represents the experience of first-generation Filipinx-Canadians, it is also a love letter to 1990s Canada – whether Bea’s largely monocultural Abbotsfield or Romeo’s multicultural Scarborough, realized through a myriad of merciless in-jokes (U of T Scarborough campus students – consider yourself warned). Thrown into the mix are the signature 90s nostalgia of gigantic boom boxes, CD binders, line dancing, boy bands and middle-part haircuts. 

Jacquie Chau’s beautiful set design evokes the openness of the prairies. Whether we are intended to identify the items in the giant jars placed on the stage floor on either side of the main set is left to interpretation. The effect harkens back to the glowing tealights strewn along the stage of another Canadian romantic comedy, David French’s Newfoundland-set Salt Water Moon, interpreted through an intercultural perspective by Ravi Jain. Intentionally referential or not, the effect is aesthetic and evocative of two more young people who come to find common ground (and possibly more) under a star-filled sky.

And yes, per the play’s title, there is dancing. Andrea Mapili has choreographed the dance portions with such verve and nuance that they provoke belly laughs  . . . and may just prompt the use of a tissue. For the truth is that Romeo and Beatrice’s eventual on-stage waltz is just the next movement in a sunny, sinewy and substantial pas-de-deux that they’ve been dancing since she first brandished that crossbow. 

Badain is currently writing the third play in this cycle. In the meantime, The Waltz is a charmer. 

Reserve tickets to The Waltz on factorytheatre.ca. 

© Arpita Ghosal, SesayArts Magazine, 2022