Going it alone

Danny Hoch brings Brooklyn’s gentrification
to the stage. Plus: Tom Papa and Maboul

TELLING IT LIKE IT IS: Hoch

By NEIL BOYCE

Producers and theatre managers like travelling solo shows because they’re cheap to mount, there’s just the one damned actor to deal with (and maybe his agent), and you only have to shell out for a single hotel room.

Happily, audiences like them too, especially when they reach the level of work arriving this week. For those whose appetite for solo acts was merely whetted by the recent Fringe festival, a brace of performers hit town as part of Just for Laughs.

Danny Hoch’s ambitious work captures a whole neighbourhood as the Brooklyn-based actor, poet and playwright shifts chameleon-like through a series of gritty urban types in his newest piece, Taking Over.

In the one-actor/multi-character brand of theatre that Americans are so good at, Hoch created the unique niche of hip hop theatre—and a still touring Hip Hop Theatre Festival—where the work concentrates on street culture and street language in its many forms. Taking Over looks at the changes that money, greed and real estate have brought to Hoch’s beloved Brooklyn.

A ballsy performer whose brain works faster than most, the Obie Award-winning Hoch gets inside his characters to a scary degree. In his varied work on film and stage, he’s a Cuban street vendor, an ex-con, or the ultimate white boy/wanna-be-black, Flip-Dogg.

Having finished an extended run in January at California’s Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Hoch and co. are readying the new work for a three-city run this summer that takes it to Los Angeles, Montreal and New York.

It’s directed by Tony Taccone, whose previous work with Sarah Jones in Bridge & Tunnel earned that actress a Tony award and Drama Desk nomination. “I’m proud of this piece,” says Taccone. “By examining gentrification in his own neighbourhood, Danny is grappling with issues that affect cities everywhere.”

Elsewhere on stage this week, though in a more observational humour stand-up style, is this year’s pick for the Richard Jeni One Person Show series at Just for Laughs, Tom Papa, and his new work Only Human.

“It’s about my constant struggle to try to be a higher form of human being,” says Papa, “and discovering that a human being is not really that high a form after all—[we’re] nothing more than giant monkeys with clothes.”

Known for his many appearances on the late night talk show circuit and tours with Jerry Seinfeld, the comedian has spread it around with work in the film Analyze That and voicing parts in Bee Movie and the upcoming Rob Zombie creation, The Haunted World of El Superbeasto.

Up in Laval, a far busier stage is being set for Maboul, Stéphane Crête’s collection of contortionists, jugglers, hula girls and Cirque-like acrobats that aims to overwhelm spectators with the sheer number of acts shown in rapid succession.

Out to top his past hit at Just for Laughs, La Clique, Crête wanted something “poetic and crazy” this year; his unhinged cabaret fuses theatre, music and circus acts in a parade of oddness.

Taking Over at Centaur Theatre
(453 St-François-Xavier)
Only Human at Gesù (1200 Bleury)
Maboul at Salle André-Mathieu
(475 de L’Avenir, Laval)
All shows to July 20. Info &
tickets: (514) 845-2322, hahaha.com