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Life, Death and the Blues Best When It’s True to Life

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The production engages when actor/playwright Raoul Bhaneja digs deep into his personal experiences of the blues.

Raoul Bhaneja (centre), Divine Brown (right), and Jake Chisholm (left) in Life, Death, and The Blues. Photo by Michael Cooper.

Quite a few stories are told in Life, Death and the Blues, which was developed over the last 15 years by distinguished Toronto bluesman (and noted actor/playwright) Raoul Bhaneja. There are stories about how Bhaneja, a perhaps unlikely devotee of the blues as an Indian-Irish émigrée, became passionate about the musical form; historical details about influential bluesmen, past and present; and an examination of “authenticity” in the blues. This last one proves to be the weakest part of the show, while the parts told via music are the most enjoyable.

There’s probably no one else in Canada who could have pulled together a show like this—with these collaborators (a bit more on them shortly)—but Bhaneja. His band, Raoul & The Big Time, has won Maple Blues Awards, released five albums over 16 years, and plays regularly both locally and across North America. His parallel career as an actor has been no less noteworthy: he’s racked up more than 75 film and TV credits, roles in award-winning theatre, and a solo show, Hamlet(Solo), that he’s toured successfully for eight years.

In this show, Bhaneja takes care to let the musicians shine—especially his co-star, Juno Award winner Divine Brown, whose second-act gospel number is alone worth the cost of admission. As the show is semi-autobiographical, Bhaneja does the heavy lifting, but he also makes some questionable character choices, portraying himself, for example, as a pretentious amateur blues historian, whose shaky views on how race and background relate to a musical form linked inextricably with African-American culture are wryly skewered again and again by Brown’s more laid-back career performer character. (The fact that her character seems exceptionally wise is in fact addressed when Bhaneja covers the offensive “magical negro” plot device and stereotype used in mainstream culture.)

Questions of authenticity and cultural appropriation are valid, no doubt, when it comes to the blues, but introduced as they are with Bhaneja acting as both the protagonist and the antagonist, their treatment occasionally comes across as trite. A segment dealing with a Montreal-based blues phenom who was murdered, for instance, doesn’t advance the story in any way. The most compelling aspects relate to Bhaneja: the show works best when he’s talking passionately about his own experiences (an exceptional projected back screen, which features trips to Chicago, the deep South, and elsewhere, helps with this) and the blues legends that inspire him, and not so well when he’s introducing conflict by presenting racial and cultural stereotypes for Brown to skewer.

The show also succeeds when those on stage are having fun, which is usually when they’re playing music. Each show ends with special guests jamming with the onstage band, Bhaneja and Brown, and Bhaneja has used his deep roots in the blues community to program some exceptional talent. They recognize in him a man deeply invested in an art form they love; as audience members, we’d like to see more of that man on stage and a bit less of the stereotypes—even if they’re being set up only to be knocked down.


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