How to Fail as a Popstar: Vivek Shraya fails upwards
20 Feb 2020

by Drew Rowsome -Photos by Dahlia Katz

There is a usual arc to a Behind the Music documentary, popstar autobiography, or a diva's one-woman show. The tale of climbing to the top and the struggles of achieving stardom and success is usually the most interesting first half. The second half - after a commercial break, pages of photos, or an intermission - then relates the downfall due to angst, drugs, scandal or thieving accountants and, hopefully, redemption and a return to divadom or at least critical respect. Or, for popstars, off to Vegas for a residency.

How to Fail as a Popstar is, though it exploits and parodies the format, a different journey. Though writer and performer Vivek Shraya has achieved success in many artistic genres (she can now add theatre to that list), she never succeeded in her original quest to become a pop music star. With a further twist on the autobiographical saga, Shraya had many opportunities, support and a lot of semi-lucky breaks. The reasons for her self-described "failure" are humorously recounted throughout How to Fail as a Popstar, and then devastatingly enumerated at the climax. It is a deliberate metaphor that, as Shraya tells us, the performance ends just when we are used to the second act beginning.

On its surface, How to Fail as a Popstar is structured to feed our expectations of an autobiography of a pop singer, with short scenes chronologically laying out the saga in a straightforward manner. Shraya is an engaging presence, self-effacing, and very quick with an insightful quip. There are a lot of laughs at the expense of '90s culture and the Canadian music business. And more gentle laughs from interactions with Shraya's family, Shraya's own pretensions, and growing up in Edmonton. And some wonderfully uneasy laughs from an audience, myself included, who experienced many of Shraya's disillusionments with arts establishments. It is very entertaining, with the monologue interlaced with songs both original and covers, that comment on the narrative, illustrate a point, or are occasionally comic moments all on their own.

But it is the underlying tension that drives How to Fail as a Popstar in a more potent and novel direction. Shraya is an adequate singer but seems (deliberately?) uncomfortable with the choreography. Except for delivering a devotional bhajan and a blistering version of her own "I'm a fag 4 U." The choreography flows and the vocals transcend by filling with righteousness from Shraya's soul beyond a pop performance. It all ties together with the climax where Shraya matter-of-factedly but with clear condemnation points out that achieving success, as a popstar but by extension as anything, is undermined when one is brown and/or queer. And/or different than the cookie cutter popstar template. Different from established norms.

For a production that moves so quickly, How to Fail as a Popstar builds slowly and calculatedly, lulling the audience in with laughs and the familiar, with Shraya shedding a faux-nervousness, before pulling the threads together and arriving at an emotional crescendo. Director Brendan Healy (Acha Bacha, The 20th of November, Pig, Arigato Tokyo, The Silicone Diaries) helps keep Shraya in motion though she, like a true popstar, is quite capable of holding centrestage just with presence and a fierce intelligence. Shraya informs us that to her being a popstar was being a god or Madonna (as if there's a difference . . .) but we should all be grateful that, despite her disappointment, she became Vivek Shraya, artist at large..