The Making-Box continues to playfully lampoon local celebrities
Bat venom, a neighbour who stalks you to South America, Neil Young. What sounds like improv sketch’s answer to Halloween was in fact another installment in the monthly series Royal City Heroes, which sees The Making-Box cast creating sketch comedy out of brief on-stage conversations with well-known Guelph residents. On Oct. 28, the honour was bestowed upon dancer and teacher Katie Ewald and her husband Bry Webb, singer and songwriter for Canadian rock band The Constantines, as well as the operations coordinator at U of G’s own CFRU 93.3 FM.
The show began with the cast serenading an audience member on the theme of a career she considered as a child: cheerleading. This format works well for comedy, as the subjects become the stock character from whom the cast play off. Anticipating how the cast will use the information given is what makes the show engaging and keeps its energy up.
After the warm-up, the cast turned their attention to the subjects of the evening: Ewald and Webb. From the initial chat, The Making-Box cast deftly converted the story of the couple’s original high school meeting and their reconnecting 10 years later in Montreal into a teenage argument in which they share a precognitive awareness of their future meeting—one of them prefacing a point with, “While I know it’s likely we’ll meet again in 10 years at some seedy adult bar…”
This transitioned into a depiction of a macabre health food store serving up bat venom and such select products as your dead grandfather’s burial granola. The couple’s recollection of meeting their generous and supportive neighbour Patti after moving to Guelph while seven months pregnant and jobless, inspired a scene in which they decide to hike the Inca trail, only to find the area infested with multiple uncannily friendly and overly generous Pattis, all living “just to the side of that mountain” and offering their hospitality to the newcomers.
While not prying or insensitive like a comedy roast, the format requires the interviewees to play along—which they did—and the inclusion of real stories and relationships from their lives gave the show a solid narrative foundation, only making for better comedic storytelling.
The second act saw the two questioned on their road trip music. Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night became the cast’s inspiration, leading into a scene with Neil and his child riding a Neil Young-themed rollercoaster. What followed included a flamingo wedding and an interrogation at Italian customs.
The final act had the real Patti plucked from the audience for interrogation, followed by the dramatic retelling of a day in her life. What began as her initial account of taking time to shower in the morning as her family gets ready for the day became an exchange of mutual adoration between the shower, Patti, soap scum, and the shower curtain—all while one of her children found their way to the roof with a crossbow, as her husband struggled to retain his reputation for being laid-back. The show came to a close with a nice call-back in the form of “Rockin’ in the Free World” coming over the P.A. as the audience filed out.
While the cast’s ability to jump in synchronised motion from idea to farther out idea is impressive, the most effective skits in the show were the ones which kept closest to their source material, lending credence to the idea, “It’s funny because it’s true.”
Photo by Tristan Crocker.