Allegheny, BC - A Life Lived

Rodney DeCroo is starting to make a name for himself as poet (a book published) and singer-songwriter (six CDs). The Cultch Lab stage is bare;  often a double bass player supports both DeCroo's guitar and his speech.  His show includes some half-dozen songs, spoken word and poems (one verse is rhymed, while the others sound like literary prose).  

DeCroo circles the stage (Jane Heyman, directing, must have told him to keep moving) with an apparently artless sequence of recollections about people and places.   Pittsburgh, Fort Nelson, Cranbrook, the Cobalt Hotel and New Westminster Secondary School are named, yet only the program reveals that he was born near the dirty Allegheny River, came to BC, returned to the United States and was back in BC at the age of 16.

His is an account of a lost boy who has few choices but he has LIVED and finds himself in his thirties. He is poignant about his father, who, after Vietnam duty, was a "war-torn man." He tells anecdotes about false teeth, beer and strippers when very young, a game of stone-throwing which results in his being hit on the head, guides and hunters in northern BC -- alien to most of us urban types. DeCroo jumps from one place and one phase of his life to another. This lack of transitions is my only misgiving about the evening.  

DeCroo is a powerful and intense performer with impressive stage presence, and his life so far, recalled - even re-lived - seriously is well worth our attention. NOTE: Click here to read more details about DeCroo'life and work in a recent issue of the Georgia Straight.)