✭✭✩✩✩
<b>by Rick Miller and Daniel Brooks,
directed by Daniel Brooks
Necessary Angel/WYRD Productions, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto
April 16-May 9, 2009</b><b>
</b>
“How am I doing?” Arnie asks several times during the show. “It’s not what I expected,” answers Rick Miller playing his fictional twin brother Arnie playing Rick Miller. If this all sounds far too metatheatrical, it is. Rick Miller and Daniel Brooks created the wildly funny, hugely successful multimedia show <i>Bigger Than Jesus</i> in 2003. Anyone expecting something of the same calibre with their new show <i>HARDSELL</i> will be bitterly disappointed. There’s no question that Brooks is a masterful director and Miller an extraordinary performer, but in <i>HARDSELL</i> these two brilliant artists have outsmarted themselves.
Nominally, the show is an exposé of how every aspect of our lives, including the theatre, has become commercialized. It’s mentioned that CIBC sponsors the show and that Soulpepper founder Albert Schultz does commercials for the Herzig Eye Institute. Arnie, Rick Miller’s ultra-cynical alter ego, harps on the fact that Rick Miller himself is the host of ABC’s TV series <i>Just for Laughs</i>, which means that ultimately he is an employee of the Disney Corporation, whose views he despises. In the show’s incessant punning on the words “sell” and “cell,” Arnie puts forth the paranoid view that advertising works like the “memes” in Richard Dawkins’ book <i>The Selfish Gene</i> (1976), catch-phrases working their way subliminally like viruses into our cells where they replicate and destroy independent thought.
Arnie communicates all this through what seems to be a deliberately bad vaudeville act. Looking like a Cirque du Soleil clown with his white-painted face and sounding and moving like George Burns without his cigar, Miller’s Arnie is intentionally off-putting and rarely funny. Brooks direction purposely gives the show has so little momentum it seems in constant danger of falling apart. Miller’s incredible facility with languages, accents, puppetry and impersonations are all on display but never allowed to engage us. The point seems to be that even as Arnie crudely mock Rick Miller’s piety, idealism and fulfilling home life, Arnie’s cynical world-view is revealed as completely empty. Thus, what at first seems to be Miller’s <i>mea culpa</i> for his own indebtedness to consumerism paradoxically turns into a kind of self-justification he is free of the insidious corruption of cynicism. As usual the world of dizzying sights and myriad sounds of designers Ben Chaisson and Beth Kates is a constant marvel. Yet, we long to be rid of the play’s multiple layers of self-absorption and convoluted pretence. If anti-commercialization is the theme, a simple three-minute rant by Lewis Black would accomplish just as much and to greater effect.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in <i>Eye Weekly</i> 2009-04-21.
Photo: Rick Miller as Arnie. ©Michael Cooper.
<b>2009-04-21</b>
<b>HARDSELL</b>