Ron Reed and The Top Ten Thousand of all Time

The Top Ten Thousand of All Time

by Ron Reed

What do The Allman Brothers, Portishead, WH Auden, and the Toronto Blue Jays have in common? A solitary late-night disc jockey counts down his top 10,000 favourite tunes from a mysterious radio station in the heart of Kerrisdale. Pacific Theatre's founding Artistic Director performs his compelling one-man show that has played theatres and living rooms in Vancouver, Toronto, San Francisco, Houston Texas, and across western Canada.

"A remarkable personal masterpiece. Lingers long after you leave the theatre." Daily Hive, Top Five Indie Productions, 2013

"Quirky and deceptively simple. As much about the work and calling of an artist as it is about the songs that make up the soundtrack to a person’s life." Vancouverscape

Bio

Ron Reed is the founding Artistic Director of Pacific Theatre. He began his actor training in the BFA program of the University of Alberta and completed his MFA at the California Institute of the Arts. He has been nominated for multiple Jessie Richardson Awards as an actor (for Shadowlands, A Man For All Seasons, Cotton Patch Gospel, Mourning Dove, God's Man in Texas, and The Seafarer) and in 2022 won Outstanding Performance in a Supporting Role for his work in "How The World Began" at Pacific Theatre. As Artistic Director, Ron was awarded a special Outstanding Artistic Achievement Award in 2011 for for Curation and Execution of an Outstanding Season of Theatre. He was nominated for Canada’s prestigious Siminovitch Prize in 2007, and as a playwright has been nominated for Dora Mavor Moore and Sterling Awards, winning the national Chalmers Canadian Play Award for Book Of The Dragon in 1997. He lives in Richmond with his wife Carole and little dog Scout, and is devoted to his two daughters and their families in Tofino and California.

Playwright's Notes

There came a time when the theatre company I founded was on the ropes. We laid ourselves off, put Pacific Theatre on barest life support, not knowing if the patient would ever recover, and I spent a couple years unemployed. Before then, most of my artistic work was as an actor, but during that long dark night of the vocational soul, I kept alive creatively by writing. The Top Ten Thousand Of All Time came out of that period, written entirely as an act of self-indulgence, a kind of messing-around-in-the-sandbox exercise I was sure would never be performed. To this day I'm astonished that such a quirky and personal piece manages to connect with an audience of anybody but my own peculiar self - sometimes quite powerfully. Check your eschatology at the door, crank up the volume and enjoy!