Actor must cut the Mustard in comedy with dash of horror
Mustard, the award-winning play by Toronto’s Kat Sandler, asks some serious questions about purpose in life. During a recent interview, the show’s star, Vancouver actor Andrew McNee, also had one query needing to be answered.
“When do I get to play a judge and sit at a big desk?” McNee, a character actor with several young-adult hits, said with a laugh.
As the titular character in Sandler’s Dora Mavor Moore Awardwinning play, McNee is required to go all-out physically, the latest in a series of roles that employ his impressive set of skills. In Mustard, he plays the clown-like imaginary friend of a 16-year-old whose mother appears to be on the verge. His character — who was once visible only to the teenager named Thai, who is played here by Heidi Damayo — soon becomes an integral part of the rapidly unfurling life of her single mother, Sadie, who is played by Jenny Wasko-Paterson.
Divorce is looming, and dangerous drinking has become commonplace. “The comedy borders on slapstick and absurdist, and it’s also quite a touching, sad story as well,” McNee said. “Ultimately, the play is about the re-negotiation of family and love — all different kinds of love.”
Mustard opens at The Belfry tonight, and runs through Nov. 25. McNee was in last year’s Belfry production of Onegin, and will be known to viewers for a variety of film and television roles aimed at younger audiences, including voiceover work in the My Little Pony and Mega Man animated franchises. McNee won a supporting actor Leo Award for his performance in Adventures in Public School, the 2017 teen comedy starring Judy Greer, and appeared as Coach Malone in three Diary of a Wimpy Kid films, another teenfriendly film franchise.
The role of Mustard offers something of a reprise from his father-figure roles. Termed a “darkly comedic bedtime story,” McNee is having fun creating a lovelorn imaginary friend within the parameters of the character. “It’s genre-busting. It’s got a bit of kitchen-sink drama stuff, it definitely has straight-up comedy and a bit of horror in there, too. But it also has a couple of scenes that fall into French farce, a Molière kind of thing where the pace ramps up, before it flips back to a mother-daughter moment.”
McNee is well prepared for the role. During his career, the father of sons aged six and eight has become adept at playing adult characters who are young at heart. “One of my strengths in that respect is that I really love to explore. My wife and I talk about the importance of silly a lot with our kids.”
When the current Belfry production wraps, McNee will revert to more traditional roles, and is pencilled-in to appear at Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach festival, Western Canada’s largest professional Shakespeare festival, this summer. He loves the variety his profession provides, and his role in Mustard is another reminder of his profession’s unpredictability.
“Every time I’m working I try to remind myself how ridiculous this is that I’m playing for a living. It’s really ridiculous. Whether I’m doing My Little Pony and Mega
Man or Mustard or Hamlet in Bard on the Beach, it’s this weird, magical, bizarre thing. I always think about how lucky I am that I get to do this.”