Muzik: Toronto’s last mega-club standing
After last month’s double-murder at Drake’s OVO after-party, the club is back in business — and on its best behaviour
It’s raining confetti for the second time in an hour at Muzik Nightclub. Two women walk by hand in hand, dressed in matching caramel-coloured fur vests, one with a streamer trailing from her heel.
The not-quite-capacity dance floor is eating up the Weeknd’s crowdpleasing “I Can’t Feel My Face” at a Sept. 19 after-party for the Rally for Kids with Cancer, a charity race car tourney. Actors Billy Baldwin, CSI: NY star Hill Harper and Seinfeld’s John (J. Peterman) Hurley circulate, as do a squad of models dressed in black lingerie, thigh-high stockings and garter belts.
This is Muzik’s second public event since an Aug. 4 shooting at the afterparty for Drake’s OVO Fest left a man and a woman dead, and the club closed for six weeks. Club owner Zlatko Starkovski previously told the Star it’s an incident that “could have happened anywhere,” but all evidence tonight suggests Muzik is making damn sure it won’t happen here again.
Block pedestals that might once have held bottle service trays now serve as perches for some of the 80 newly hired security guards who are observing the crowd of impeccably dressed women and dress-code-minimum-meeting men. There’s no line and no drama at the door, just an arched metal detector and a security guard who sympathetically asks “How are you doing?” before delivering a pat-down so intimate it makes tonight’s dance floor seem chaste.
The door at Muzik has a reputation as an impenetrable gate (unless you are a woman who came before 10:30 p.m. and then it’s free). But the rash of bad publicity, including its hosts at the Canadian National Exhibition recommending last week that the lease not be extended through 2034, seems to have humbled the exclusive club. While the venue was pleasantly buzzing, there was no lack of elbow room in the 41,000-square-foot, 3,000-person-capacity space. A cover charge that is routinely as high as $25 was $10.
Based on this random sampling, it’s less shocking that Muzik would be denied a lease extension beyond its current 2024 expiry but that the club would even want one.
In the transient world of nightlife, a single club dominating for nine years, as Muzik has since its official opening in 2006, is impressive. The kind of 30-year run Muzik hopes for is almost unheard of. It’s nearly double the 18-year lifespan of the recently closed, similarly supersized Gu- vernment nightclub.
Toronto’s executive committee has bumped a vote on extending Muzik’s lease until its first meeting of 2016. It gives all parties involved a chance to ask themselves the question: do we really want to be at this party for another 18 years?