FRINGE HEADS NORTH EAST
Comedy duo in the old neighbourhood
Not many Calgary neighbourhoods get one, let alone two shows built around them, but not many Calgary neighbourhoods are the North East.
That’s the culturally — and culinarily — diverse, eclectic part of Calgary that, as luck would have it, has spawned a number of the city’s most gifted improv comics, including Loose Moose mainstays Jamie Northan and Andrew Phung. The dynamic comedy duo turn their comedy lens on their old neighbourhood in a pair of improvised comedy extravaganzas that anchor each weekend of the Calgary Fringe Festival.
The first is North East: The Show, a comedic — but loving — look at the neighbourhood both guys grew up in, which returns by popular demand, says Northan.
“It just keeps selling out,” he says, “and people keep asking us to bring it back — so we’ve got no problem with that. We love celebrating the North East.”
The second weekend will be the première of the duo’s new show, NE: Kill Hard, in advance of taking it to the Edmonton Fringe Festival in mid-August.
The show came out of a process any theatre artist will understand: the duo had their number called in the lottery draw for the 2015 Edmonton Fringe, meaning they had a time slot in the most lucrative Canadian fringe festival before they had a show to perform in that slot.
Not that that fazed Northan and Phung.
“That happens a lot in fringe,” Northan says.
“You get your spot in the lottery, or you get your bring-yourown-venue, and then you go ‘oh sh--, we’ve gotta write a script!’ ”
Luckily, Northan has been doing improv with Phung at Loose Moose for a decade now, so being under the gun to come up with — if not a script, then at least a comic premise — on short notice was hardly new for either artist.
“It was ‘OK, we need a concept,’ ” says Northan.
“So we batted around some ideas, and then one day, Andrew just went, ‘what about an action movie?’
“My first thought,” he says, “was like — ‘yes!’
“My next thought,” he adds, “was — ‘ how?’ ”
Phung had some experience in performing action-adventure-improv-comedy: he played the villain in Kung Fu Panties, created by Northan’s sister Rebecca. He also had some martial arts training.
“He was great in that,” says Northan, “but they had 80 hours of rehearsals!”
NE: Kill Hard will be much more on-the-fly, he says.
“We love the whole range, the whole sub-genre of action,” he says. “We love Jet Li, we like Jason Statham, we like Bruce Willis, Jean Claude-Van Damme, the whole spectrum of it,” he says. “Jason Bourne — so we kind of just want to pick a different action movie every night and do that. “Not verbatim,” he adds. “We’re not going to copy a movie — but we’re going to go with that feel or that style — so you might see Russian gangsters vs. one of us one night.
“You might see one of us beaten down,” he adds, “by the new Japanese overlord of our small town another night.
“You might see the average Joe,” he says, “who gets thrown into the middle of action and now has to fight his way out to save his family on the third night. You never know.”
As far as who will be the hero and who will be the evil villain, that remains a fluid situation, Northan says. “We’re going to play everything every night,” he says, “and we might even switch characters mid-scene — if it needs to happen — we’ll facilitate the story first, and see what it needs.
“Certainly,” he adds, “I would expect, on any given night, one night I’m the hero and probably the next night, he is, but we’ll see how it goes.”
No matter who plays who, Northan says the pair have discovered the trick to selling theatrical action sequences — with no bullets, stuff blowing up, or megatronic robots — to wow the crowd.
“We have the secret,” Northan says, “which is slow-motion!”