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Singer/songwriter Rodney DeCroo will perform at The Cultch for a 10-day run at this year’s Vancouver Fringe Festival. The Vancouver-based musician has teamed up with veteran theatre director Jane Heyman (who recently directed Three Sisters at The Cultch). Heyman is a teacher from DeCroo’s Studio 58 acting school days in the ‘90s and was brought onto the project to polish Allegheny, BC from a raw and blistering performance piece into an act of transformative theatre.

This is the final chapter in a trinity of works that began in 2012 with the release of DeCroo’s album, Allegheny.

Allegheny was a perpendicular move for DeCroo, a spoken word record drenched in electric atmosphere that returned the artist to his first love, poetry, while transporting the rest of us to a childhood as grimy as the corrupt Pennsylvanian river of the title.

Despite the stories of a blighted childhood in a small coal town just outside industrial Pittsburgh, Allegheny transcended to a defiant beauty that resonated with both critics and audiences. Allegheny was included in the year-end top 10 of two senior critics at the Georgia Straight and collected high praise from print and online publications such as The Vancouver Sun, The Province, Exclaim Magazine, Art Threat, The Tyee, Rabble and many others.

In short order, DeCroo followed this feat with Allegheny, BC, a haunting collection of 42 poems released through Nightwood Editions, focusing on both his childhood in Pennsylvania and his early adult years in BC.

In September 2013, collaborating with contrabassist-composer Mark Haney, DeCroo expanded and launched Allegheny, BC with a hybrid of poems, songs, and monologues at Vancouver’s Little Mountain Gallery. Haney and DeCroo took the project across the prairies, work-shopping Allegheny, BC in clubs, galleries, bookstores, even a Winnipeg basement. Along the way, it was met with the same acclaim and stunned silences — touching everyone from punks, old cowboys, literary and theatre types, to everyone in between.

Rodney DeCroo Performs Allegheny, BC at The Cultch
Dates: September 5, 5 pm
September 6, 10:30 pm
September 7, 7 pm
September 8, 1 pm
September 10, 8:30 pm
September 11, 5 pm
September 12, 10:30 pm
September 13, 7 pm
September 14, 8:30 pm
September 15, 6:30 pm
Venue: Vancity Culture Lab at The Cultch, 1895 Venables Street, Vancouver
Tickets: $10 weekday/$12 weekend (plus one-time $5 Fringe Festival membership); available online or at the Box Office, 1398 Cartwright Street on Granville Island.
*All advance ticket purchases subject to a $3 surcharge.