Improv celebrates Toronto’s everyday quirks
Toronto, I Love You (out of 4) Bad Dog Repertory Players. Directed by Julie Dumais Osborne. Until Jan. 30 at Bad Dog Theatre, 875 Bloor St. W.
Toronto loves improv, and apparently improv loves Toronto right back.
But sometimes nationally renowned improv shows and performers fly under the radar, at least in newspaper arts sections, because they’re so tricky to “review” in the traditional sense. How can you judge a show’s merits when its form requires it to change so fundamentally from performance to performance?
Then again, even a straight play changes one day to the next. The audience, the energy in the room or on the stage, even the moods of the actors — the live human factor means that the performance a critic sees will not be the same that audiences see on another night. But that’s the beauty of live performance, its ephemerality, which is more prominent in improv than anything else.
So after this love letter to improv, let’s talk about Toronto, I Love You, improv’s love letter to Toronto, performed at Bad Dog Theatre until the end of the month featuring the Bad Dog Repertory Players and directed by the company’s artistic director, Julie Dumais Osborne.
After a successful debut at the 2014 Fringe Festival, it has worked its way into regular season programming, becoming a favourite for homegrown audiences who want to laugh at their city out of joy instead of out of cynicism. Because this is definitely a joyful show about making connections in the urban sprawl, sometimes to the songs of Broken Social Scene and Arcade Fire (we’ll allow Montre- al to step in here).
In addition to the cast — Craig Anderson, Jess Bryson, Nigel Downer, Lucy Hill, Colin Munch, Hannah Spear, Amy Matysio and Sean Tabares — actor and musician Nicolas di Gaetano provides an improvised soundtrack to the story; a mix tape to accompany the love letter.
The structure of the show consists of three locations: two cast members each choose one of their favourite Toronto haunts, and the third comes from the audience.
These introductory spiels reveal telling details or traits about these places that will turn into characters and storyline later.
Toronto, I Love You turns the city’s everyday quirks into weird, exaggerated celebrations. And the more mysterious, the better.
A suggestion at our performance concerned Gale’s Snack Bar, a rarely open restaurant on Eastern Ave. with obscenely cheap food and one staff member who isn’t named Gale.
Over the course of the show, the restaurant was revealed to be a front for the real Gale, created by Lucy Hill, a magical mob leader who controls the wind in search of her estranged daughter. Storylines are less compelling when they rely on more conventional stereotypes, such as overworked supermoms who buy $15 greeting cards.
The structure gives the players enough leeway to go to unexpected places, but the eventual resolution of these three stories also allows them a final destination for sentimental, feel-good moments and lessons of friendship, love and co-operation. Those must come naturally for a group of improvisers who operate under the general agreement of supporting each other, on or offstage. Some of the best moments come from those not directly involved in the scene, like a choral whisper of “Gale” whenever she entered.
Munch and Matysio were natural leaders and highlights as a pair of married Polish shopkeepers but, to follow the sentimental tone of Toronto, I Love You, teamwork is the real star here.