After sold out shows at Bad Dog Theatre, Tom Shadow starts new run at Factory
In the opening minutes of The Adventures of Tom Shadow, the titular magical boy swoops in through the nursery window to whisk the young Angeline and Martin Chastain off on a Peter Pan-esque magical journey. Joyfully singing about the power of imagination, they soar off to begin their presumably wonderful adventures.
If that premise sounds dopey, don’t worry. We, the unsuspecting audience, never see those adventures.
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Instead, we see the Chastain parents, tough-as-nails cop Beverly and timid English prof John, hysterically fail to cope with the sudden disappearance of their kids.
And if that premise sounds glum, really, don’t worry.
In his director’s note, Peter Stevens writes that the ensemble, a who’s who of Toronto comedy, “bonded over their love of fantasy and silliness grounded in emotional realism.”
“Grounded” and “emotional realism” are not terms I would use to describe Tom Shadow, which takes the Chastains’s loss as a starting point for a madcap farce.
We watch John (Mark Little of Picnicface fame) desperately distract himself from his anguish by joining the Runaway Boys, a group of Seadoo-riding, bank-robbing 19-year-olds.
Meanwhile, Beverly (Natalie Metcalfe of Second City and The Sketchersons) so fixates on finding their lost children that she doesn’t change her uniform for a year and ultimately apprentices with a Hannibal Lecter-ish maniac to understand the criminal mind.
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The talented ensemble, clad in plain t-shirts on an empty black stage, throw themselves gamely into the slapstick, the spoofs, and the sparsely-choreographed musical numbers. Unfortunately, the script undoes some of their work with bait-and-switch after bait-and-switch.
The characters repeatedly pause the action to quibble over details and editorialize. In one song, a character readies to perform a saxophone solo, laboriously assembles the instrument, then blows a single honk and puts the thing away.
Such moments always get a laugh, but they undercut the more substantial currents of the plot. Late in the play, a character scolds her kid for nitpicking a fairy tale: “Enough poking holes in a perfect story.”Tom Shadow pokes so many holes in its own story that when the big emotional payoffs arrive in the third act, they barely register.Tom Shadow truly shines in those moments when it’s delivering on a premise rather than subverting it.A couple prolonged pieces featuring Mark Little’s gift for physical comedy stand out.
And one of the highlights of the show turns out to be the subplot of Doug and Leslie (standouts Kevin Vidal and Lisa Gilroy), two of the Chastain’s neighbours, who relish John and Bev’s misfortunes. Their story becomes a surprisingly spiky and affecting satire, a portrait of narcissistic middle-class virtuousness, as they go from gamely searching for the children to marching in an angry mob — both of which, they note, keep their Fitbit steps up.
Maybe I’m the one poking holes. Tom Shadow promises big laughs, and delivers them over and over again. I just wish so many of them weren’t at the expense of the show’s emotional impact.
The Adventures of Tom Shadow, presented by Theatre Lab, runs Oct. 11-22 at Factory Theatre in Toronto.
Photo by Samantha Hurley