|
History
class >> The Canada Show makes the past palatable by AMY BARRATT
This was over a shaky cell-phone connection last week, as Horak and his cohorts drove from Toronto to Thunder Bay, where they were to appear at another in a long line of Fringe festivals. This weekend they return to Montreal to give three performances as part of Just for Laughs. Ryan Gladstone, whose job in the show is to represent French-Canadian rights, was particularly nervous about bringing his Alberta-school-system French to Quebec for the Montreal Fringe last month. Well, the three 20-somethings from Calgary (now based in Toronto) survived their Fringe run and even found themselves invited back for the comedy fest as winners of the Just for Laughs Best Comedy award. “Wherever we’ve done the show in the country, different parts get different strong reactions,” says Horak. “The Good, the Bad and the Métis bit got booed in Winnipeg. Elsewhere in Canada, when we did the FLQ crisis scene, people just laughed. In Montreal, you could hear a pin drop, it was so tense. But by the time we got to the end, with Trudeau spanking Bourassa, they’d be going crazy. There was this tremendous release.” Anyone who sat through Canada: A Peoples’ History in its entirety should be rewarded with free tickets to The Canada Show. The one-hour comedy show crash course is the perfect antidote to the CBC’s exhaustive, and frankly exhausting, documentary. A raucous ride through the 200-odd centuries that humans have lived on these shores, The Canada Show gleefully celebrates the underdog-First Peoples, francophones, women-and ridicules the powerful. Horak and partner-in-crime Ryan Gladstone originally envisioned touring the show to schools in the noble aim of making Canadian history more fun. A high school tour is still in their plans, but they hope never again to find themselves faced with gob-smacked preschoolers, as they were last summer due to an unfortunate booking at the Winnipeg Kids’ Fringe. A two-month cross-Canada tour-for adults-is in the works for early next year. They have a slightly different version for grown-ups, with different references and a little more innuendo. The show has been through “many, many drafts,” says Horak, with little changes still being made from night to night. “The first draft came off as a kind of lecture,” he says. “It was only when we let our own personalities start coming in to it that it really began to work.” Horak’s character represents the interests of the English; Ryan Gladstone, as mentioned, sticks up for French Canadians, as well as putting a furry face on the beaver trade; Jeff Gladstone, Ryan’s brother, is the guitar-playing straight man, who tries to maintain a modicum of respect for the subject. It’s coast-to-coast fun, and you might even learn something.
Someone from infinitheatre tells me that the running time of Long Long Short Long (recently extended to July 21) is not three hours, as I wrote in my review, but two hours and 35 minutes. I stand corrected. : The Canada Show, at the Centaur Theatre, July 19 at 3pm, July 20 at 11:59pm, July 21 at 7pm, $12.50, 288-3161 >> Stage Listings |
“To be honest, we were scared shitless of doing the show in Montreal,”
confesses Bruce Horak, one of the writer-performers behind The Canada
Show.