Canada is known around the world for Gordon Lightfoot and Leonard Cohen in songwriting, and Wayne Gretzky was a pretty good hockey player. And when it comes to live theatre, Rick Miller is becoming something of a phenom himself. This fall, Toronto’s Factory Theatre is mounting all three of Miller’s one-man shows starting with MacHomer this month and followed by Bigger Than Jesus and Hardsell.
His zany, madly funny MacHomer sees Miller performing Macbeth with more than 50 voices from the TV cartoon series The Simpsons. Since its debut in 1995, Miller has travelled the world performing the incredibly funny and entertaining production in more than 150 cities. Recently, it was announced that MacHomer will be part of the Stratford Festival in 2012.
From Shakespeare, Miller took on religion in his cutting-edge Bigger Than Jesus, co-written by Daniel Brooks over a period of three years. The play took home three Dora Mavor Moore Awards after it premiered in 2003. His last play, Hardsell, was probably his least successful. But, given the immense popularity of the first two, that’s still a pretty solid effort. We have simply come to expect so much from our own theatrical boy wonder.
If you have never experienced the very gifted Rick Miller, you are in for a very special treat or treats. Go to www.factorytheatre.ca for more information.
Absurd is the word at Soulpepper
Back in the 1960s, the term “Theatre of the Absurd” was used to describe (often incorrectly) everyone from Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee to Harold Pinter and Eugene Ionesco. Each of the playwrights had elements of “absurdism” in at least some of their works; Ionesco remained most strongly in that camp.
One of the finest plays of Ionesco, Exit the King (1962), recently opened at Soulpepper’s theatre, using the same translation that won a Tony Award for the fine Australian actor Geoffrey Rush on Broadway. I found it a very solid, consistently funny yet often surprisingly moving study of death and its many discontents.
Watching one of Canada’s best actors and finest clowns, Oliver Dennis, rant and rave against his “end,” while being aided, abetted and cynically mocked by his former wife, Queen Marguerite (Brenda Robins), quickly becomes a meaningful portrayal of how humans are never prepared for nor willing to accept death. Dennis pulls off this compelling portrayal while soliciting howls of laughter and our uncontrollable tears from the crowd.
There are moments when the momentum lags in director Albert Schultz’s production (two hours of an old man bitching will do that to you). But then along comes an exchange that makes us shudder in our giggles. After more than 90 minutes and nearly two full acts of almost non-stop laughs, we suddenly shift to a devastating monologue by the former queen, as she poetically eases Dennis’s king into accepting death.
Exit the King runs until Sept. 10 (www.soulpepper.ca).