Queen Tilly & the Marys

Queen Tilly and the Marys is a raucous response to musical theatre that explores comedic absurdity, camp materiality and the radical potential of intergenerational play. Developed during the height of the pandemic, the work is a tragic-comic ode to a group of women elders raised within the marginalized immigrant communities of East Vancouver (the unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. These 80 and 90 year-old Croatian women and their close neighbourhood friends take center stage in the work, re-enacting their personal history with masquerade, gender play and hyperbolic theatricality. Working alongside Milton, her mother and aunts re-thread the relics of their personal performance history through filmed musical numbers that reference feminist punk, slapstick comedy and folk tradition. Technicolor video projections spill beyond the screen into a boisterous mess of live dance and ad-hoc sculpture that exalts lineages of DIY pageantry.  Queen Tilly and the Marys preserves local history through a mode of storytelling that reverberates with the vulgar glory of maximalist femininity, Slavic bravado and comedic criticality.