REVIEW: Mad Mad Mad Mad World at the Citadel!
“We are all walk-ons in other people’s lives,” British playwright Alan Ayckbourn once said.
It sounds really wacky – the Citadel is presenting a theatrical concept that boggles the mind. It’s two interconnected full-length plays that add up to one comedy. The two run at the same time in two different theatres with different audiences, but with the same cast in both. It was Ayckbourn who booted the concept into commercial theatre with his 1999 diptych House and Garden – but it took Citadel Artistic Director Daryl Cloran to bring the idea to Edmonton for the first time.
Consider the idea for a moment. The actors, who play the same characters in both plays, have to shuttle – no, race from one theatre (The Club) to another (Maclab), and back. Often while changing costume. The two theatres are physically the farthest apart of any venues at the Citadel and the race includes running up five to eight flights of stairs, down the corridor past the lobby and into the theatre.
The sheer audacity constitutes a theatrical event the audience is asked to take part in.
To write the two plays Cloran turned to prolific Toronto playwright Kat Sandler, who specializes in dark comedies. Sandler opted to write two comic plays about modern politics.
“The subject lends itself really well to farce,” she observed.
You can see only one of the plays at a time. And although they take place chronologically – the order doesn’t make much difference as both of them stand alone.
The Party is indeed a party, a political fund-raiser as the actors work the room, sit beside patrons and try to persuade us to vote for their candidate. Both contenders are wooing the rich kingmaker “Butch” Buchanan (Glenn Nelson).
The evening starts out promisingly enough with the dependable Rachel Bowron doing her classic smart-mouthed waitress routine. She is soon joined by another sturdy local comic talent (Luc Tellier) with a name funny enough (Dill Pickerel) that everyone just calls him “Virgin,” because he obviously is just that.
We meet Pauline Abel (Colleen Wheeler – channeling Glee’s Jane Lynch), a foul mouthed political operative; and Heather Straughan (Martha Burns), a pant-suited Hillary-type political veteran. Heather even has the requisite cheating husband (Kevin Bundy). There is dim bulb movie superhero, “Sharkman” Bill Biszy (Jesse Lipscombe), who is running for office and whose gay black drag queen partner is Marky Wright (Thom Allison). Allison in both plays is in danger of running off with the whole production. Vidashka (Amber Lewis) is a va-va-voom, but a surprisingly pragmatic Eastern European who proves she is a lot more than the local sex bomb. Cynthia Jimenez-Hicks is a common sense teen offpsring who is unimpressed with the goings on, and is rather sexually adventuresome.
The Party is full of broad characterizations, lewd humour (a statue’s severed penis is a hilarious ever growing gag), snappy patter and improbable situations.
Is it funny? Well, with reservations – yes it is. There are languorous moments where the performers seem to be marking time, and others that would benefit from a little comic punching up, but the idea is such fun that overall the evening is solid entertainment. Who can fail to laugh at an exhausted actor who staggers into the room and blurts out, “I feel like I’ve been running up concrete stairs all night!”
The preview we were permitted to attend was certainly ready for prime time. Of the two, The Candidate is the most realized – and funnier.
This one takes place some months later (in the Maclab) and assumes the form of a classic farce – with numbers of doors opening and closing as performers pop in and out. We find ourselves attending a political debate the evening before the election. There have been some major changes from the earlier play. It would not be helpful to go into plot details because the discovery of the changes is a joke in itself. It’s better you see them for yourself. All of the characters have changed a bit, and the substance of The Candidate is quite different. The end of the first act, in particular, is memorably side-splitting. You can still see the seams showing but that’s half the charm of both evenings. At one point, apparently abandoned by an actor who was probably out there running somewhere between the Citadel lobby and the Second Cup, Lewis, completely in character, was given time to engage in a little funny improv.
Glenn Nelson happily channels one part Scrooge (he plays the old grump in the Citadel’s Christmas show), a bit of Lionel Barrymore and his own decades in local theatre, and is twice as funny as twins at the mercy of a mustache that seem to have a life of its own. Lipscombe is a hoot as the boneheaded action hero. When his political smarts abandon him, he breaks into speeches from his movies. Tellier is a superb physical comic with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of pratfalls and double takes. In both shows Thom Allison, who is as good in straight performance as he is at outrageous vamp, is a riot. He’s playing both stages, of course, but he also changes into some very impressive costumes, including Dolly Parton (who also sings a song), the Statue of Liberty, a macho sports freak and a politician’s wife (in a pink outfit and pillbox hat) invoking the shade of a certain Kennedy.
”It takes a lot of money to look this cheap,” he breathes at us.
Co-directors Daryl Cloran and Kat Sandler deserve a lot of credit pulling this chaos together. The two realize that sometimes letting the outlandish premise breathe a bit of suspense into the production, a degree of merry improv could surface from time to time and be very effective. They should be congratulated on selecting an ace cast that faultlessly rise to the challenge.
The Party and The Candidate run simultaneously in the Citadel through April 21.
Photos by Ian Jackson
