Here Come the Doubledeckers!

(Oh Gawd. Get that 60s Thames television theme song out of my head. NOW.)

Part the First of the duly-filed report on our day trip to see Avenue Q last night. I'll save observations on the show itself for the later one, except to say how awesome and awww-some the whole production was.

Pretty much, travels went according to the best-case plan I laid out yesterday. Best-case, that is, except for discovering a block into the journey that my mobile didn't work. I'd dropped it at the gym- nothing unusual about THAT- but this time it gorked the SIM card, which is so old it still says "Cellular One" on it and probably needed to be replaced anyway. We went home for Eleanor's phone and never needed it.

The Canadians let us in. They were actually more attentive than the Mercun guy was at 12:30 in the morning. Maybe if your head of state sickened me as much as mine sickens you, you'd be careful about admitting possible friends or agents of his. (More about His W-ship in the next entry.)

QEW/Gardiner sailed along nicely, and we even found relatively cheap ramp parking around the corner from the theatres on Yonge Street. (Yes, plural. More about that below.) We were in tow with a friend of Em's whose mother is a flight attendant and who sails her all about the country on a regular basis, yet she was somewhat skittish about setting foot in anything more exotic than a Timmy Ho's for dinner. I'd noticed that Spadina (heart of TO's Chinatown) was the exit right before Yonge on the way in, so I suggested we wander over there.

It was a wondrous wander, but a tiring one. I spent about as much time oot and aboot on this city's streets yesterday as I'd done in Manhattan last month, and I'd forgotten just how cool, and cosmopolitan, and BIG, this downtown was in its own right.  I also didn't know that, while I was working and working out in the morning, Eleanor had been defoliating a large patch of weedery in the back yard, and was pretty tired. So even though street signs were starting to show up with Chinese subtitles, Spadina was still a long block away, and we headed back east, but also south to the Asian subcontinent for an Indian dinner.

There's a short stretch of them on West Queen, just before the true Bohemian bonhomie of the block held down by the "Lavish and Squalor" clothing store and the Condom Shop. This one seemed neither fancy nor frightening, and it proved to be neither. Perfect chicken, shrimp and Indian breads, in sauces showing true inspiration. Halfway through the meal, it was clear that our guest was having some acclimation problems. She'd never had Indian food before. (Not that the full haul to Spadina would've helped, because she'd never had Chinese food either.) I think we converted her to foodieism, though, and I do hope her rents don't mind.

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Back on Yonge, we met up with Mr. Will Call to claim our ducats, and went inside the theater. With another full functioning venue above it which we never saw.  The Elgin is part of the last surviving double-decker theater building in the world.

Here is a link which duplicates a lot of the detail about the building that appears in the Not-a-Playbill, including a totally non-justice-doing picture. It gives much of the same history, sharing it with both the text we read and the similar histories of other amazing buildings from that era, in Toronto and elsewhere, which suffered horribly through the multiplexing of North America from the 1950s on. Both theatres in this building were built for vaudeville, with Burns and Allen, Sophie Tucker and Milton Berle being among those passing through. Yet when talkies, then television, took over the audience, the lower Elgin became a slightly fancy, yet neglected, downtown movie house, and the upstairs Winter Garden was left to rot for close to half a century.  When the town came to its senses in the 1980s, it cost $29 million CDN (about $29.08 in USD at the time) to renovate both to their original splendour and beyond. The workers had to remove 28 layers of paint to get to the original contents of the lobby, and the 5,000 real branches hanging from the upper Garden's ceiling had to be replaced.

Our balcony seats were close enough to see the stage and actors and puppets alike, but for stargazing on the gold-painted ceiling, they were even better. I can't imagine seeing even a silly show like this in an econobox of a Downetowne Theater for Ye Artes, built in 1985 and with all the character of a refrigerator crate.  You surround art with art, and you get more art, and a better place in the world to be. Go figure, Jesse Fucking Helms.

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Drove home. No hordes of Yankee fans (they'd won, much earlier, so presumably their fans either left early or were still at the Canadian Ballet), but plenty of night construction keeping us from our beds until well past 1 a.m.  But happy sleep came for all concerned. Still to come: some of the why from the show itself:)

::Blows on 60-millimetre pitchpipe::

What do you do, when you know all the lyrics
But haven't seen the show where they're set?
You know there are puppets,
Resembling Muppets,
But how good can this roadshow get?

You want to hear them say
Their lines just like Broadway,
But still you expect something new (oooh!)

Yet this cast stepped onto
That stage in Toronto
And knew what, exactly, to do!

::gets chased offstage by Oriental Asian-American wife shouting "Get a job!"::

That, for me, was the only doubt going in. I've seen shows before where I knew the Original Soundtrack all forward and back, but I either had no expectations (from, say, a school performance) or the new cast was better than the original, or the new version was a revival or something else different from my memories.  This one, though? Still playing Broadway, and the original performers whose voices I know are not far from that stage if not actually on it.  Could this Kate and this Princeton work as well as their muppety counterparts?

The answer, I'm happy to say, is you betcha:)

Seeing the performances, especially of the main characters (who happen to be about two feet tall with hands up their asses), was the new and wondrous experience for me that trumped knowing all the songs. I've seen Muppet-behind-the-scene videos, which reveal a very different kind of puppetry from what this show presents. In the Henson tradition, the puppeteer is never seen, actually working below stage level in most cases. These puppets are voiced, and animated, by actors holding them out right in front of them, in dark clothes but the most brilliant of stage presences. When Nicky points, his actor (or actress- he usually had two toting him around) points with him. Mouths and emotions, "performer" and "handler," come out as one- although on occasion, one actress wound up voicing two onstage puppets at once while talking to each other. As for the songs, even knowing every word, you're not ready for the blow-away moment coming when a muppet-faced Kate closes out the first act with a number you know that chick in the black dress is really doing the singing but you just don't care.

The soundtrack also doesn't prepare you for some obvious things ( mild and slightly NSFW spoiler )

, but neither does it tip you off to nice little touches like the overhead TV screens. Not only were they used for various intercuts of Sesame-like cartoons and jokes between and sometimes during numbers, but at the end, when the cast did curtain calls, those screens showed a feed of the guys in the pit performing the closing theme, so their hard work, also, got a much-deserved acknowledgement.

As for it being an out-of-country experience, I found it remarkably faithful to the original, and appreciated by the locals. That's not always the case; The Producers bombed up north because the TO-The-Good audience wasn't mean enough to get a lot of the jokes. On other occasions, they'll insert local-colour references into the script, as was done in Lion King with references to "Honest Ed's" that we didn't get but everybody else did. Here, the lines were all quintessentially Noo Yawk, and everybody seemed to react just as we did. The "Canada" song in the score got no more or less interest than I'd expect it to doon in the States, eh? And the fairly famous reference in the closing number to a certain United Statesian head of government? Got as big a laugh, and as long an applause, as I'd heard it to be getting all over our great nation.  Don't worry, Canada; we'll come up with someone else for you to hate next January that will still scan.

The touring cast- same as the one that played Buffalo earlier this year and is now finishing the circuit- is full of Broadway peeps with fabulous stories that the one of you who cares can read the Playbill for when I send it to her cliki the Wiki with all the names. Anika Larsen is the one major lead change from that list and she was especially awesome as Mainly Kate.

That's about it. I suppose I should include the house staff as part of the cast, since they definitely added to the experience. Tim the Sarcastic Usher who showed us to our seats like it was clearly below his pay grade; Irina the Dyslectic Usher who kept trying to seat people to our left even though their actual seats were in the rows either side of us; and the security people outside who were shooing away the Actual Homeless People who probably would've gotten us to cough up the cash if they'd sung the right song from the score. That, though, was secondary to our thorough enjoyment of the night, which was, after all, our Purpose.