The Making-Box welcomes the mayor and its new location at monthly showcase
It was an exciting night at The Making-Box on Fri, May 27 as Cam Guthrie, the Mayor of Guelph, took to the stage. Mayor Guthrie was the featured guest as part of The Making-Box’s Royal City Heroes series, which improvises a show based on information they learn about a well-known member of the Guelph community.
“There’s always that old saying that laughter is the best medicine, and so I really wanted to support them anyways, and for them to invite me was just icing on the cake,” Mayor Guthrie told The Ontarion. “They’ve done a lot of great work in Guelph, and I’ve heard of individuals, and even businesses and corporations that incorporate [The Making-Box] in what they do.”
The show began with a request for the audience to shout names of occupations that a resident of Guelph would likely have, and thus, a hilarious song about juicing was improvised by the Making-Box brigade. During the first act of the show, Mayor Guthrie was called to the stage for two brief interviews and discussed his job, his band, his typical breakfast (an iced cappuccino), and his love for the movie Nacho Libre. The members of The Making-Box then performed skits relating to his life, including ones based on a bakery that his family used to own, a politician trying to balance a campaign and a loving friendship, and very excitable city councillors hyped up on iced cappuccinos.
In between acts, there was even more to celebrate. The Making-Box announced their Kickstarter campaign, which is seeking to raise money to fund a permanent home for the popular Guelph organization. Mayor Guthrie helped to cut a ceremonial red ribbon to represent “the last few months at 40 Baker St. and the ceremonial journey to Wyndham Street”, according to one of the show’s hosts, Hayley Kellett.
“We were only supposed to be here for a month,” said The Making-Box co-founder Jay Reid. “And that went really well, and so we stayed for another month, and that went really well, and so we stayed for another month, and now we’ve been here for a year and a half. This space was always meant to be temporary […] and then the community said, ‘We want this. We need a permanent home for comedy.’ So we’ve been actually looking at spaces for the past year and a half, and we’ve finally found a space that seems to work.”
During the second act, the mayor himself was invited up onstage to participate in the popular improv game “Dr. Know-it-All,” where he and three other performers formed a four-headed creature that could only say one word at a time. He even joined some of the cast members in skits based on the life of an audience member, an everyday Guelph hero who sought to help the world by reducing groundwater pollution.
“We are trying to reach out to all kinds of different communities. So the mayor represents a community that we hadn’t tapped into yet. […] For me, it’s not because he’s the mayor,” said Kellett. “We could have anyone from City Hall come in. […] Cam has just been very lovely and generous with his time—very supportive.”
“As we saw at this show, it’s not about politics or partisanship. It’s when the door is open and people are humanized, that’s when we can build a community and build a dialogue,” added Reid. “Often, the improv guests that we have don’t usually play in the improv set, but Cam really wanted to.”
“The great thing about what we do and why improv is so amazing and so universally accessible, is that anybody can do it, and Cam proved that tonight—as the mayor, who has never done improv, got in front a sold-out house and just decided to try it,” said Kellett. “And that’s all we ask. You don’t need to be spectacular; you just need to have confidence. That’s all that really matters. If you look like you’re having fun, we’re not worrying about you.”