VARIETY
| Ample
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Expect juggling, improv, bird magic by MARK SLUTSKY
To remedy this sorry deficit of cheap live performance, local actor and impresario Joe Cobden is putting on The Windmill Variety Show, an evening of entertainment that promises an unprecedented 14 acts for a cheap five bucks. Cobden’s been acting around town for a while now. He appeared in the Centaur’s Beauty Queen of Leenane (in which he was the first anglo ever to take home the Soirée des masques’s Révélation award), and has quite a few more stage and screen credits to his name, including George Clooney’s upcoming Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, where he plays—appropriately—the Gong Show’s “Unknown Comic.”
A sampling of the show’s many acts might include Calgary’s Eric Amber, whom Cobden describes as “a giant in the improv comedy and street performing world. I don’t know what he’s going to do. Neither does he. He’ll probably tell a story.” Or Lillo, a “dove magician” who apparently will make those birds of peace appear ex nihilo. There’s Dr. Avocado, who performs surgical procedures on food. Dance lovers will be appeased with monster dancing from Solid State’s Helen Simard and Claudia Fancello, and tap from Sarah Febbraro. The Windmill sees the debut of the Four Frères, a group of gentleman singers, of which Cobden is also a member. “If we can hit the notes, we’ll sound nice because the songs are so good,” he rhapsodizes. “Such beautiful songs. Such glorious melodies.” They’re almost a barbershop quartet, though they shy away from such a designation or affiliation with the cringingly lame world of a cappella: “We’re not going to work in ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight,’” Cobden promises. Think the Four Freshmen, if you need a musical touchstone. Polymath
Cobden will also be juggling (“I love it,” he says, “but
it’s so fucking geeky”), and doing a tennis-based bit of
hilarity involving sampled sound effects courtesy of local showman So
Called. “I believe tennis has a special message for all of us,”
he says. “I believe… I don’t know, it’s funny.”
: The Windmill Variety Show plays at La Sala Rossa (4848 St-Laurent) this Friday, July 5, 9pm, $5 >> Stage Listings |
Used
to be you could go to a nightclub and see a comedian, a brass band and
a conjuror for the price of a couple drinks. Nowadays, if you want to
see live entertainment, your options are pretty slim. Sure, you can
catch a movie for $15 at some mammoth cinema complex, and, if you’re
lucky, the usher might ask you to turn off your cell phones in some
approximation of a witty manner before the screening starts. But where
do you go if you’re looking to see a fella juggle cigar boxes?
Or play the accordion?
More
to the point though, Cobden’s been a street performer since he
was 11. The dangerous spirit of street performing informs the whole
Windmill show. “I didn’t want to do a play, I wanted to
do a show,” he says. “And street performers are the best—they’re
level with the crowd; the hustle is tough, the failure is hard to take.
I wanted to do a show that might fuck up—to take a risk for once.”