by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

“It’s always something gone wrong with me,” says Richard Marsella, over the phone from Brampton, Ontario. “There was the kid’s book gone wrong, and now this is Lawrence Welk gone wrong.”

Thing is, for Marsella, down isn’t up, back isn’t front, but a little bit wrong is a whole lot right—at least as far as his alter ego’s live musical/theatrical variety night, the Friendly Rich Show, is concerned.

Over the last year, Marsella, his co-creator and on-stage foil David Hannan, and his big ol’ musical ensemble the Lollipop People have been presenting the Friendly Rich Show on a monthly basis at Luna Lounge in Toronto. Having diddled, whittled and fiddled the show down to a sleek 75 minutes, and fine-tuned its frequently disturbing foolishness, they’re bringing it to Montreal for a six-day stand at Théâtre Ste-Catherine. A rotating selection of musical acts, including Roughage, Ladies Luncheon and Geneviève et Mathieu, will warm up the crowd each night.

The show is a logical extension of both the music Marsella’s been creating with the eleven-piece Lollipop People—a creepy, black-humoured melange of old-tyme folksiness and avant-garde inventiveness—and the extensive pedagogical work both he and Hannan have under their belts. There’s also a residual obsession with classic kiddie TV to be blamed, from Mr. Rogers and Mr. Dressup to Pee-Wee Herman’s postmodern spin on the genre. (Take note that Gary Panter, the comix artist who designed the sets of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, is creating the artwork for the next Lollipop People CD and possibly the planned Friendly Rich Show DVD—“It’s total pop-a-boner material,” says Marsella.)

“I love the thing of aiming to make it for kids, but it never quite gets there. A flaw in my creative process, I guess. The music I do is quirky and bizarre, so I think it’s a natural fit to meld the two together. But it always goes wrong. I tried writing this kids’ book, Magnified Lyle, and it’s just too dark, it never really succeeded with kids, but quirky adults ended up eating it up.”

Tyke-tested

Marsella and Hannan certainly have their bona fides creating entertainment and activities for children. Marsella, the director of the Brampton Indie Arts Festival, has generated music for children’s TV shows (and childish TV, too—The Tom Green Show benefited from his compositional skills) and conducted workshops in making instruments out of found materials, while Hannan works with a children’s theatre group. In fact, the pair first met when Marsella directed a music day for the at-risk youth group Hannan was working with. While the two have gone to great pains to make sure the show is acceptable for children, it’s probably best suited to grown-ups who haven’t quite grown up.

“It’s a dark spin on it,” says Hannan—every bit as charming and chatty as his on-stage persona Soot, a grim, mute, egg-infatuated clown, is dour and silent—of the Friendly Rich Show’s variation on the kids’-program template. “Everything we do, kids can come and see. We don’t swear, we don’t do any vulgar things like that, but it’s got that dark, twisted side to it. Doing the kids’ shows during the day, I’m able to break out and do this stuff at night, so it’s a nice other side for me.”

“I’m naturally a weirdo, right,” says Marsella, “but the reason I know I’m not insane is that I’m able to realize what the space I’m in is—usually. So if I’m in a school, working with Grade 4 kids, I know what conduct is.

“In my early years on stage, I would always get naked and just be a jackass. I ended up not really liking the Tom Green approach to making art—even though I’d worked with him! I don’t like the shock humour. I want to appeal to a Grade 4 kid or a 40-year-old. I want it to be perverse, but I don’t want it to go over that boundary. I want kids to be able to walk in and check it out. That’s the fine line I’ve been walking.”

Jesus, Rush and Naked Marvin

The extent to which Marsella has cleaned up his act is a matter of opinion. There may be no curse words in the Friendly Rich Show, but there are plenty of other disconcerting elements. His band the Lollipop People, whose last CD was titled We Need a New F-Word, offer odd and intricate odes to disease, despair, religious irrationality and death. “They’re willing to join in on this act, to participate,” says Hannan, approvingly, of the band. “They’re not doing the typical musician thing—‘I’m not going to put on that hat, I’m just here to play music.’”

A feature of the show that’s maybe a little too appealing to kids is the recurrent crank call. A local Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise might be the unhappy recipient of inquiries about breasts, while an evangelical hotline might get the third degree about made-up illnesses. Another repeat target was Rush singer/bassist Geddy Lee, who once found a drunken collective singalong of “Closer to the Heart” on his answering machine. “He hates me. He absolutely hates me,” chuckles Marsella. “I consider him to be a bit of a cartoon character. He’s not real to me, even though he’s a living, breathing human. He really got mad at me, so I stopped out of respect.”

Then there’s the inclusion of the octogenarian interpretive dancer Naked Marvin. “He’s a shrivelled-up old man,” says Marsella, plainly enough, though he’s quick to point out that Marvin ain’t quite in his birthday suit. “Even though he wants to get naked, I always think that the beauty in what he does is not getting entirely naked. A kid could potentially see his legs and his upper half. But no one, no one of any age, needs to see—or smell—his ding-a-ling.”

The notoriously unpredictable Naked Marvin is as yet unconfirmed for Montreal. “He shows up whenever he likes—kinda like Polkaroo,” says Marsella, tossing in a gratuitous Polka Dot Door reference.

Circus tense

Of course, no kid’s show, even a deliberately dark and disturbing one, would be complete without an assortment of puppets and critters. It’s in the Kafkaesque marionette show and the assorted robot whatsits that the capable craftsmanship of Hannan, who’s trained as a theatrical set designer, shines through. “We go from your basic, low-tech shadow-puppet type things,” he says, “into using mechanical monkeys and deer heads that can sing and tell a story—and then the Frying Egg Circus goes low-tech again, so it bounces back and forth.

“That’s the nature of the show, too. It has these waves through it. We get the audience on our side, then turn them against us. With my character, that’s what I do, anyway. I rope them in, then shoot them away, then have them come in. It’s that twist—what should we be thinking about this show? They’re not quite sure, in the end.”

Confounding psychodrama is at the core of the Friendly Rich Show, concentrated in the antagonistic interplay between Soot, who Hannan calls “that dark, angry force within the show,” and the ringmaster Friendly Rich.

“I essentially play the stage manager,” says Hannan, “so I keep them in line, but there’s always this struggle where I want to take over the show, and where I need to keep Richard in check, but then he starts pushing me around. So there’s that push-pull thing going on between our characters.”

“I want it to be odd,” says Marsella. “I want you to feel uncomfortable at this show. The best quote came from this girl who came up to us after a show in Toronto and said, ‘I couldn’t actually look anyone in the show directly in the eye—it was so uncomfortable.’ That was the greatest compliment I thought we could ever get.” n

With various opening bands at Théâtre Ste-Catherine nightly from Monday, July 24 to Saturday, July 29, 8 p.m., $15. Go to www.friendlyrich.com for more info.

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