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by Kristopher Bowman, Leigh Cameron, Kyle Dooley, Devon Hyland, Hayley Kellett and Kirsten Rasmussen, directed by Paul Bates

The Second City, Toronto

November 27, 2014-January 16, 2015

“Second City Wins its Wings – Again”

If you feel like you’ve already overdosed on sugar plums, The Second City has the antidote for seasonal mawkishness with its holiday revue Holidazed & Confused.  The show is a series of punchy sketches with one satirical hit after another and nary a miss.  The revue is focussed less on Christmas itself than on shopping and family in general, but these overarching themes make this one of the tightest of The Second City’s more recent shows.  It is stage by The Second City’s touring company and proves that the troupe is justly renowned.

The show begins and ends with parodic versions of seasonal carols.  In between are deliciously incisive sketches that probe the paradoxes of modern life.  One of the lead-off sketches takes on the ancient topic of a young boy asking his father the truth about Santa Claus.  What gives this topic a twist is the acute awareness of both father (Kyle Dooley) and son (Kristopher Bowman) that having a father who does not tell the truth may inflict psychological harm on the son, while at the same time the father fears that revealing a cultural phenomenon like Santa Claus as a lie may inflict just as much harm.  The father becomes increasingly taxed by the son’s questions about how Santa can be both fit and fat and how reindeer fly, until he hilariously reaches a breaking point.                   

Another sketch explicitly related to Christmas involves the whole cast as employees of Wal-Mart.  They relate, as if in a documentary about a military siege, their anxiety before and the aftermath of the onslaught of shoppers on Black Friday. 

The sketch is funny enough even if you think Krampus is a made-up character, but it’s even funnier if you know it’s real.  In the countries that used to form the Austro-Hungarian Empire the Austrian tradition of Krampus is still widespread.  Unlike the American Santa who gives presents to good children and a lump of coal to the naughty ones, in Austria the duties are split with Santa rewarding the good and Krampus punishing the bad, or at least frightening them into being good in time for Christmas.  The sketch is especially subtle if you know this fact because you see how it pits one Christmas tradition against another, thus undermining the presumed universality of both in the process.

A fourth sketch explicitly related to Christmas is more like a miniature play than a sketch since its focus is more on character than satire.  A young man (Hyland) goes to visit his grandmother (Kirsten Rasmussen) who lives in a retirement home.  The young man is unhappy to see that his grandmother hasn’t decorated her room as usual.  She tells him she just didn’t seem to have the energy this year and dislikes how the staff treat the old folks like kindergarteners when taking them on shopping trips to Wal-Mart.  The young man, who seems to be so into online video games as to be friendless, decides to help out his grandmother and the sketch ends with a warm feeling of mutual understanding which is far from the norm of the short, sharp punch-line.  This sketch, along with the other three Christmas-themed sketches, covers a wider range of the comic spectrum than is usual as Second City and is indicative of what makes Holidazed & Confused so satisfying.      

Other sketches are only tangentially related to Christmas.  Hayley Kellett sings an amusing song about not knowing what to get her online boyfriend from Christmas, but the occasion could just as well have been his birthday.  In another the whole cast gathers as a family having Christmas dinner all clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters imaginable.  The skit, though, is not really about Christmas but about the phase young kids go through of trying out what kind of language is and is not acceptable.  Rasmussen, playing a little girl, is reprimanded by her father (Dooley) for using “bathroom language” at the dinner table.  So the girl excuses herself and goes to the bathroom to unleash all her pent-up bad language.  We find that all she knows are words like “poo” and “bum” and has yet to learn any of the really bad stuff.  The skit ends with an unexpected but clever twist.

Other than these the sketches are not holiday-specific in any way.  We simply respond to how inherently funny they are and how well they fit in with the general scheme of the show.  One of the very best of these, really a classic of its kind, involves a young man (Hyland) who goes to a corner store to by a lime.  The grocer (Leigh Cameron) informs him that her store, and in fact all the grocery stores in Canada have been bought by Rogers.  A lime can only be bought in a bundle with other fruits. In fact, things can only be bought in bundles, and, as it turns, out, the style of service has changed to the familiar Rogers’ style, too.

In the best solo sketch, Hyland plays a version of himself who has proposed to a girl whose parents object.  To convince them, Hyland chooses the only method he know – a PowerPoint presentation.  Not only is the set-up clever but the more Hyland’s character reveals about himself the more he undermines his cause.

Two other solo sketches, unfortunately, don’t fit in at all.  Cameron sings an overlong song about how everything makes her cry all the time.  I thought this might turn into a parody of Tove Lo’s current hit “Habits”, but the main source of humour is that everything inexplicably makes Cameron’s character cry.  It’s a topic that could easily be linked to the holidays but is not.  The other is a long monologue by Kellett about how much she loves her motorcycle.  In itself, Kellett’s detailed description of the grotesque pleasure the machine gives her is quite humorous, but the piece feels like part of different revue that somehow got dropped into this one.

Skits about an office worker (Bowman) having sex dreams about his female boss (Rasmussen) or two wine connoisseurs (Dooley and Cameron) describing the taste of a wine with increasingly sexual double entendres are all quite amusing but are also generic in appeal.  They could be made to relate to the topic of the holidays but stand out as independent of the theme.

Holidazed and Confused follows the usual scheme of presentations at The Second City with a 45-minute-long first act followed by an intermission and a half-hour-long second act.  After a five-minute intermission the cast returns for an improv session.  Given that the show demonstrates the wide spectrum of comedy, it is appropriate that the scripted part of the show also includes improv.  In one sequence, Cameron plays a little girl who has lost her mother in the Dufferin Mall (now stalked by the Krampus just to tie things together) and has decided that she will therefore try to find a new family to live with.  Her interviews with in the patrons are uproarious since the innocent little girl has no sense of when she is being rude.

The second example comes in two parts.  First, Hyland solicits information from a couple in the audience whereupon the cast, who all display an incredible memory for detail, create a typical day in the life of the couple.  But there’s more.  In the second act the cast enacts a parody of the movie It’s a Wonderful Life with Dooley as the George Bailey equivalent, Hyland as the angel Clarence and Kellett as the Mary Hatch equivalent.  This improv section is a fine way for the cast to display their considerable talent while also bringing the sometimes straying show back to its nominal topic of Christmas. 

The level of invention in Holidazed and Confused is so high that it’s a show you could easily see more than once – the first time to be surprised by the clever twists, the second to admire the troupe’s skill, not to mention a third just to enjoy with a group of friends.  If you’re looking for a wealth of holiday cheer, here’s where you’ll find it. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (from top) Kyle Dooley, Hayley Kellett, Kirsten Rasmussen, Devon Hyland, Kristopher Bowman and Leigh Cameron, ©2014 Paul Aihoshi; Krampus postcard, circa 1900; Leigh Cameron and Kirsten Rasmussen. ©2014 Paul Aihoshi.

For tickets, visit www.secondcity.com.