Bye Bye Bombay toured to eight Fringe Festivals across Canada this summer including: Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Calgary, Victoria and Vancouver. Bye Bye Bombay was also invited to be performed at the Bowen Island 'Fridge Festival' in September.

Take an adventure to Bollywood and beyond.

Jonno Katz directs Cara Yeates in this multimedia adventure. Bye Bye Bombay incorporates a blend of fast-flashing images and sounds that draw you deep into the heart of India.

Bye Bye is one-woman show that features a diverse cast of characters including Russian dancing girls, Sunita and Rajesh the story telling puppets, a drunk maharaja and an unwilling hero. Gauri, a young girl from Canada find herself dodging rickshaws, marriage proposals and while exploring haunted castles and becoming a Bollywood star? Through her surprisingly tragic journey young Gauri learns more than just the art of crossing roads in India.

Here are some reviews of the show:

"Aren't we lucky that this little performer landed in Winnipeg this summer? With the slightest movement, a raised eyebrow or a shift of the hand, Cara Yeates goes from impressionable to confident to smarmy to elegant as a host of colourful characters. This fantastic one-woman show has to be the stand-out production of the festival. Her use of puppets, her skilled transformations and her creative use of multimedia come together in a well-oiled machine that is firing on all its comedic cylinders. Don't miss Bombay before it says "bye-bye."

FIVE STARS - Uptown Magazine – G.B.

Brava to actress Cara Yeates for stitching a gorgeous sari of a show from the simplest components. I was utterly absorbed in her fascinating tale, which mixes truth and fiction so fearlessly that what is real (Yeates as an actress in Bollywood) and imaginary (her character is a young Indo-Canadian trying to flee her teenage angst) blend into brilliance…Videos and images of ageless India are projected as Yeates executes flawless dance moves. Add the music of Tarun and this whole hypnotic hour of power is an absolutely intoxicating introduction to the magical, mysterious muddle that is India.

- Vancouver Sun, Peter Birnie

"Bye Bye Bombay is the first treasure I have seen at this year's Fringe Festival. Cara Yeates gave a tour-de-force performance on August 2nd show. She incorporates puppetry, dance, singing, lip-synching, mime, and the effective characterization of approximately a dozen characters….Yeates is a revelation from the beginning to the end. She lips synchs and dances to several Bollywood style numbers. At times a wonderful effect is created when all the stage light is off except for the projection screen that displays images of Bombay and backlights Yeates' dancing. There is a moment where something serious occurs that leads to a heart-wrenching monologue by Yeates that shows her versatility as a dramatic, as well as comic actor. Yeates physicality is amazing and she is a sensational dancer. And don't forget about those puppets whose significance is crucial; once this significance is revealed, the audience realizes how brilliant Bye Bye Bombay is. Bye Bye Bombay is one of the best shows at the Fringe…Do not miss Bye Bye Bombay!"

FIVE STARS– CBC Saskatoon - Jason Dubray

"One of the best things about the fringe is all the places you get to go. If a show works, the audience finds itself transported to some other place, or time, or galaxy (although theatre tends to stick to this galaxy, alas, which I'm basically OK with). Bye-Bye Bombay does the transporting better and more effortlessly than most. Cara Yeates plays a young, moody woman living in Vancouver, who is depressed. Her friends suck. Her life sucks. Her mom is trying to control her. In other words, she's every young person who ever wanted to carve out an identity of their own and didn't know how, apart from the gloomy video diary she makes for YouTube. So she buys a plane ticket to India, for no other reason than it's a lot cheaper than flying to her first choice (Abu Dhabi) and it's as far away from Vancouver as you can get. And off we all go, to Mumbai (Bombay), where Yeates and a friend get cast in a Bollywood film, search for the Mumbai McDonald's, go on location to some Maharaja's palace, and just generally try to create some psychic space in the craziest place on earth, all while trying to grow up a little. It's a crazy, overwhelming, funny and sad trip, complicated by the young woman's own relationship with her own depressed mother, who always dreamt of visiting India but had a kid instead. Yeates makes excellent use of various media in Bye Bye Bombay: there are slide shows, short films and a pair of Indian puppets trying to create their own mythological world alongside hers. She developed the show in the One Yellow Rabbit Summer Intensive and it shows; sometimes, a simple gesture or movement does the work a five minute monologue would require in another show. We run into a few shady characters in the world of Bollywood, but they're more reflective of the movie industry than anything else. The storytelling is a little episodic, and Yeates' vocal energy can flag from time; in a larger space like the Big Secret Theatre, words sometimes get swallowed, but the show itself fills the theatre pretty seamlessly. Yeates has that Bollywood shimmy shake down so cold she doesn't need many words to communicate the experience. After all, it's not every day you walk in from Stephen Avenue and find yourself sitting in the middle of Mumbai, a place, I imagine, where words also have a hard time making themselves heard."

- FOUR AND A HALF STARS -Calgary Herald -
Stephen Hunt

"Navigating an overwhelming collage of media (music, video, crude cartoons, even puppets!), Cara Yeates creates a fitting representation of her extraordinary experience acting in Bollywood. Set up as a defiantly juvenile coming-of-age-in-a-strange-land tale, the episodic narrative reveals emotional layers and parallel stories as Yeates exhaustively assumes an array of characters like a sleazy talent scout and two Indian men arguing in frantic Hindi over directions to McDonald's. Honest, thoughtful and original. Bye Bye Bombay is both well-written and well-executed; as touching as it is funny."
FOUR STARS -EYE WEEKLY - Chris Bilton

"Through puppets, cartoons, slide shows, dance numbers and some clever, old-fashioned monologues, Yeates drops us in India with young Gauri. She dodges rickshaws, conquers Bollywood and even grows up along the way…Yeates proves it doesn't take an hour of introspective
dialogue to pull off a captivating transformation. With a lip-synched Bollywood routine -- each winking smile and flick of the wrist straight from the screen -- the gawky, gosh-golly Gauri is gone, and we enter the second act of her coming-of-age adventure. Yeates has a spunky comic timing and delivery, but she's even better at physical characterization. That necessary skill of the solo performer, the character change, is handled with grace. She goes from elegant tour guide to smarmy director without blinking.

FOUR STARS – Times Colonist

Last seen in 2005's Knee Deep in Muck, Cara Yeates returns to the Fringe with her thinly fictionalised account of a young woman who runs away to India, only to find herself swept up in the colour and frenzy of Bollywood. Good writing by Yeates and a strong one-woman performance, combined with crisp direction by Jonno Katz (Uber Alice), excellent sound design and some clever…visual projections make Bye Bye Bombay well worth seeing. Yeates just needs some more a few more distinct characterizations and a little more seasoning to shift her into the five-star catagory.

FOUR STARS - Monday Magazine

Ottawa
Venue 3- Studio Leonard Beaulne

Sunday June 17 9:30pm
Monday June 18 6:30pm
Wednesday June 20 8:00pm
Thursday June 21 11:00pm
Saturday June 23 6:30pm
Sunday June 24 12:30pm

Toronto:
Venue 9 - George Ignatieff Theatre
15 Devonshire Place (S.of Bloor)

Thu, July 5 6:30 PM 904
Fri, July 6 7:00 PM 910
Sat, July 7 Noon 913
Mon, July 9 3:15 PM 928
Wed, July 11 7:45 PM 943
Fri, July 13 11:30 PM 959
Sun, July 15 2:45 PM 968

Winnipeg Venue #8 School of Contemporary Dancers
Thu, July 19 7:00 PM 557

Sat, July 21 11:15 PM 573
Sun, July 22 4:00 PM 576
Mon, July 23 4:15 PM 583
Tue, July 24 7:45 PM 592
Wed, July 25 5:45 PM 598
Fri, July 27 9:30 PM 614
Sat, July 28 6:00 PM 619

Saskatoon:
Victoria School Auditorium

8/2/2007 5:30:00 PM
8/4/2007 1:00:00 PM
8/6/2007 10:15:00 PM
8/3/2007 2:30:00 PM
8/5/2007 5:30:00 PM
8/8/2007 8:30:00 PM

Calgary Times
Big Secret Theatre,
EPCOR Centre for the Performing Arts

Tues. Aug 14 5:00 PM
Wed Aug 15 7:30 PM
Thurs Aug 16 9:00 PM
Sat Aug 18 5:00 PM
Sun Aug 19 1:30 PM

Victoria:
Venue 4: St Andrew's School
(1002 Pandora Ave)

Technical Rehearsal: Thursday August 23, 2:00-5:00 pm
Thu Aug 23, 6:45
Sat Aug 25, 6:00
Sun Aug 26, 9:00
Tue Aug 28, 7:15
Sat Sept 1, 2:30
Sun Sept 2 4:00

Vancouver:

See flyer for details.

Bowen Island - Frigid Festival

September 29th 7pm