Encounter: A Space Cabaret
With breaking news of alien vessels spotted around the Earth over four major population centres, Space Weather Girl not only looks the part in her iridescent shoulder pads, Galaxina wig, sparkling constellation skirt and glittering shoes but she is also a professional who is prepared to calmly control the narrative and avoid panic, informed and articulate as she delivers her reports.
With flipcharts, whiteboards and a heavenly voice, she is prepared for the encounter, as unpredictable but perhaps as inevitable as the space weather she reports on daily, the impact on the Earth of solar flares and coronal mass ejections perhaps not immediately discernible to the general public but their effects apparent, from beautiful auroral displays to more concerning overloads in power grids.
Written and performed by Zena Wood and directed and choreographed by Jen Wineman, Encounter: A Space Cabaret is a new science fiction musical comedy, the kind of strange and sweet show often only found in an underground chamber during the Fringe, educational and entertaining as it considers how emotion bends as easily as the space-time continuum, events long gone in time persisting and repeating in memory and shaping the present.
With Robert Briggs accompanying on keyboards, in shiny silver spacesuit Brandon M Weber is the Martian visitor Greg, an apparently charming humanoid who is also fortunately musically inclined but whose appearance hides an agenda, time ticking down for his species as surely as Space Weather Girl’s own biological clock, seeking warmth beyond the cold outer reaches of the system and tapping into the future, and perhaps their own destinies.
