Johnny Tomorrow and the Way of the Planetarium
Johnny Tomorrow
A man in a silver space suit, that being Johnny Tomorrow, a time traveler with a penchant for the history of astronomy, is a man on a mission. He’s utterly delighted to be taking our soggy Sunday afternoon audience on a laser lit trip through time and space.
JOHNNY TOMORROW, written and performed by Michael John Unger, manages to be both entertaining and informative and I wished there were more families there under the canopy of stars at the HR MacMillan Space Centre. This is the kind of show that has something for everyone - a fast-paced smorgasbord of hard facts, fanciful imaginings, pithy voice-overs by Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan and a laser light show to the music of Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’.
Did you know that in 1977 Sagan and a group of fellow astronomers sent a cultural ‘record’ into deep space for future discovery by extraterrestrial intelligent life.
The ‘record’ contains things like a baby’s first words and music by Mozart and Brahms, and it will take thousands of years for the probe carrying it to reach the nearest star system beyond our own.
Eclectic is a good way to describe Unger’s storytelling. Among other things, I learned that Galileo, the father of modern astronomy, fathered numerous children out of wedlock, and that solar winds ignite gasses causing meteor showers.
Johnny kind of put things in perspective for me, when he referred to the earth as a dust mote suspended in a sunbeam. Astronomy he advises is both humbling and character building. I say go Johnny go!
Johnny Tomorrow is playing as part of the Vancouver Fringe. Go here for further details.