The first time you walk into 40 Baker Street, you’ll probably wonder if you’re in the right place. However, once you follow The Making-Box flyers on the walls up the stairs, the sounds of laughter and song within will make you certain that you are, without a doubt, exactly where you should be.
As the line at the door grows, one thing feels certain: the people on the other side of that door are something special.
Royal City Heroes is one part celebration of Guelph and one part improv comedy show. Hayley Kellet, Educational Director and Improv Instructor at The Making-Box, talked to The Ontarion about what inspired Royal City Heroes.
“This is my favourite improv format. It’s based off something called an Armando; where you’d have a monologist come out, do a monologue, and then we’d improvise based on that. But I wanted to take it one step further, because The Making-Box is all about building community, and this way we can bring someone who represents something else in Guelph, some other magical part of city, and bring them into our community, and have their people meet our people.” This instalment of Royal City Heroes featured Garth Laidlaw, a Guelph-based artist and storyteller.
Hosts Hayley and Jay Reid, co-founders of The Making-Box, introduced Laidlaw to the audience and informally interviewed him on stage.
“What got you into art?” Hayley asked.
“Drawing dinosaurs,” said Laidlaw.
The first part of the show alternated between interviewing Laidlaw, and The Making-Box Brigade guest improvisers Kristopher Bowman and Chris New on the piano improvising together based on Laidlaw’s responses.
The performers improvised scenes that ranged from dinosaurs to charcoal drawings of a devastating smelly markers addiction.
Hayley showed the audience a few of Laidlaw’s illustrations from his children’s book, Sayni and the Windowjet Brothers. The illustrations represented dream sequences that seemed as if they might move off the page and onto a screen at any moment.
Laidlaw explained that he wrote the story over a four-month trip to Africa. The audience reacted warmly to the synopsis of his children’s book, in which children build compasses that will help guide them through their lives.
During the intermission, Laidlaw told The Ontarion what he most enjoyed about the evening.
“I loved seeing how the improvisers worked off of my material so quickly. Like, there was no delay between me talking about the kind of stuff that I do and them immediately making a story. I mean I have to write my stories out and it takes like hours and hours and hours but they can just—they can just go. And that was awesome. Completely different methods but they both work in different mediums, so it was great to see the merging of two mediums.”
The Ontarion also spoke to Tom Brown during the intermission. Brown has been doing improv for the last 16 years and has been with The Making-Box since they started two years ago.
“Being able to incorporate a performance style and the type of comedy like [improv] with something more relatable in some ways is a lot of fun. Having a vehicle to bring a community into a space for comedy is just a blast. It brings a really dynamic audience into our space, and lets us mix improvisers and stand-up comedians, and just members of the community together, and just kind of strengthen their bonds.”
The second part of the show featured a woman introduced as Stella, who works in the building. When Hayley asked her what she wanted to do as a child, Stella said she wanted to do things that would lighten the heart. She then told a story about how the pattern on tortoise shells came to be. The brigade performed another fifteen minutes based on her story.
The show was over too soon, but the performance of building community through improv continued. As people chatted with friends, old and new, and finally dispersed into the night it seemed their hearts were indeed lightened.