As a queue began to form outside of Arts Umbrella on Granville Island for Bangs, Bobs & Banter: Confessions of a Hairstylist, I overheard stories of Joanna Rannelli from friends and old classmates who came to watch her final performance on tour. They described fond memories growing up together on a softball team, admiring Rannelli’s acting over the years, praising her liveliness on stage.
They were right. Rannelli’s range spanned ten unique characters during her one-woman performance, comedically switching between long rants as various clients (with distinct personalities) to shorter monologues as a hairstylist and building up back-and-forth conversations with herself. Her acting was sassy, emotional and scandalous, portraying people we’ve all met in our lives (whether we liked it or not).
On stage, the wigs were everything! Eight perfectly-styled wigs hung from two racks on either side of the black box theatre, full of volume and drama. Between character changes, transition music played as Rannelli flipped the next wig onto her head and immediately transformed into a completely new character.
From the audience, the wigs added a layer of immersion which remodelled Rannelli into another person, further embodied by her new walk, voice and mannerisms. At every punch line, the audience laughed at her dirty jokes, vibrant expressions and relatable rants on the subject of doing too much.
Between the comedy of the over-worked mother, the older woman that no longer puts up with any BS, the stereotypical “valley girl” and a woman figuring out how to send her first nude, the range of characters captured the vastness of the female experience.
One of my favourite characters Rannelli played was a woman with cancer. She had no hair but reminisced on her days on-stage with her black silky hair. The emotion Rannelli portrayed was beautiful and heartbreaking, touching on the femininity women feel they lose to sickness or as they grow older, especially in a society that, for women, puts beauty above other traits.
Throughout the performance, Rannelli’s depiction of the hairstylist hearing the wild stories from her clients was bittersweet and heartfelt — a comedic acknowledgement of pain, struggle and the daily chaos of being a woman. But I felt for the character — who hears a hairstylist's story after she listens to her clients’ confessions all day?
Then I realized that Rannelli wrote the show so the audience become the listeners.
Even though the hairstylist does not dive into the personal details of her life, Rannelli created a sense of intimacy between this character and the audience because we experienced everything she did for a day.
Any person who consistently goes to the hair salon knows to never ‘cheat’ on your hairstylist. There’s so much trust in someone cutting your hair before sending you out in the world again to face your hidden struggles.
The different dynamics between Rannelli’s hairstylist character and the clients mirrored healthy and toxic relationships many people experience in their lifetime, but beyond that, depicted how complex (and beautiful) our lives are.
Past the heartbreak, vulnerability and uniqueness of each character, Rannelli produced unmatched comedy and a pearl of wisdom: to never get bangs!
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