The lovely, bearded Leila really mucks up her first Christmas
KITCHENER — Toronto actor Izad Etemadi has met with such success with his one man show, “Love With Leila” he simply wasn’t ready to let the bearded and not so beautiful character disappear.
On Tuesday, Leila returns to the Registry Theatre for “A Very Leila Christmas.” And if it’s anything like his first show, the new version will be hilarious.
Etemadi is a serious actor with a seriously bent sense of humour, which he expresses on stage. There is no fourth wall. Etemadi speaks directly to the audience. He asks questions, while telling the tale of his heroine Leila, who in the first play was a young woman living under her parents’ roof and desperate to find love.
But there was that beard thing. Leila, despite her charm and flamboyance, is no beauty. She also lacks the social graces.
For Etemadi, playing a female, particularly one like Leila who revels in her femininity, was a huge learning curve. Just getting her mannerisms right, how she walked and moved her hips, the way she flung her head scarf over her shoulders. It was a heck of a workout.
“The first few times I had to really focus to make it feminine, but I’ve spent four years with that character and now if feels like Leila has taken over,” he said.
As for the improv which is a large part of the comedy in the show, Etemadi doesn’t consider what he, as a guy of Persian ancestry, would think or do. It’s all about life from Leila’s perspective.
“What would she say about this?” he asks himself.
“Love with Leila” has toured North America, including appearing off Broadway in Nov. 2015; and recently awarded the 2016 Broadway World award for Best Independent Production.
In the original production, Leila is on stage surrounded by a simple set that represents her home in Iran, where she has too much time on her hands, enough to invent all sorts of romantic ideas. When a handsome medical student moves next door and expresses interest, Leila is over the moon. And being inexperienced in matters of love, she often asks the audience how to proceed with this new relationship. In “A Very Leila Christmas,” her life has changed dramatically. Leila has immigrated from Tehran and now lives in Canada, working at a call centre where she is surrounded by Canadians who gush about the upcoming holidays.
Foolishly, Leila assumes she understands this yuletide cheer and decides to hold the best Christmas party ever, but thoroughly mucks everything up.
“She wants to celebrate Christmas, but doesn’t know how,” said Etemadi who pulls on his considerable improv training in every show, because he has no idea what will happen.
“She really gets sucked into it,” he said. “She spends a lot of money and is excited to show off her (decorated) apartment.”
From the time Etemadi first introduced Leila to surprised audiences, he has felt her gain confidence. But he can’t let that confidence become too strong or the humour disappears.
“A lot of the comedy is around what she believes,” he said. “We’ve all had moments like that, when we were naive and dumb and just felt ridiculous.”
Fortunately, ridiculous is what Leila does best.