Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
✭✭✭✭✩
by Jacob Richmond, directed by Britt Small and Jacob Richmond
Atomic Vaudeville, Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto
April 2-13, 2013
Ezra: “Wrestling is real. It’s the world that’s set up”.
If you like your comedies short and loopy, Jacob Richmond’s Legoland is the show for you. The hour-long show had its world premiere at SummerWorks in 2006 and was last seen in Toronto in 2008. Richmond now says that Legoland is the first part of a trilogy of plays called the Uranium Teen Scream trilogy because the main characters are all from Uranium City, Saskatchewan, and all have disastrous scenes in amusement parks. The wildly popular musical Ride the Cyclone (2009) is the second part. If you loved Ride the Cyclone but somehow missed Legoland, now is the time to see it.
Brother and sister Penny and Ezra Lamb have been extradited to Canada for drug trafficking and viciously attacking an American pop star. As the final part of the hours of community service, the siblings have been told to present the story of their background and crimes to serve as a warning to the high school assembled before them. Thus begins the strange tale of how two innocents came to confront a world entirely new to them.
As we learn from Penny (Celine Stubel) now aged 16, with the odd interjection from Ezra (Amitai Marmorstein) now aged 13, the siblings were born and raised on a utopian farm commune run by a group of ex-hippies on the outskirts of Uranium City. The Lambs’ parents have led them to believe that they are living in paradise, but as is always the case, the siblings long to see the outside world that their parents dismissively call “Legoland”. The two find they can sneak out to see the big city and are overwhelmed by their first sight of places like Wal-Mart. The problem is that, unlike on the commune, people are not friendly. The ingenious Lambs discover they can overcome that obstacle if Ezra feigns a seizure and Penny steps in to save him. Amazed by the miracle, shoppers finally become talkative.
Unfortunately, overdoing this prank leads the police to escort the two back home where they discover the fields of marijuana that have been keeping the commune residents so contented over the years. When their parents are imprisoned and the commune burned down, the two are sent to Saint Cassian’s Catholic School. Fans of Ride the Cyclone will remember that the children killed in the rollercoaster accident were all members of the Saint Cassian School choir. (The school’s name is just one of many of Richmond’s in-jokes since the 4th-century Saint Cassian was martyred when his pupils turned on him and killed him with their styli.)
School is hell for the Lambs. Penny is constantly ostracized as a “lesbian” and Ezra gets in trouble for giving a lecture about the relation of genius to syphilis. Finally, one girl takes pity of Penny and gives her a CD that will instantly make her “in”. The CD is by the latest boy band Seven Up and Penny is immediately smitten with the group’s cutest singer, Billy Moon.
When Seven Up breaks up and Billy launches a solo career as a misogynist rapper (well-imitated by the versatile Ezra), Penny feels she must confront him and so she and Ezra embark on a trek into the US and across the country to Florida where Penny plans to meet Billy and make him change his ways. They fund their trip by selling Ezra’s copious prescription medications for ADHD. And, as Penny tells us right at the start, the confrontation goes horribly wrong.
Jacob Richmond’s company is called Atomic Vaudeville and vaudeville is the genre Legoland most closely resembles. Penny’s narrative is interspersed with slides and ukulele-accompanied song and dance. The ostentatiously caped Ezra, who has decided this evening to speak in a semi-robotic British accent, adds his own puppet shows, gangsta rap and gnomic, Nietzschean observations. As in the 18th-century literary subgenre of supposed letters from a foreign traveller in one’s own land such as Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721) or Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), the main source of humour in Legoland is how the innocent Lambs are overawed by the crass commercial world we take for granted and interpret it from their own unique perspective. Richmond’s keen satire cuts both ways – making fun of the idealistic utopian world that raised the Lambs in such ignorance and of the corrupt materialistic society of the real world where success has little to do with knowledge or merit.
Stubel, who has played this role for so many years, makes the role of Penny seem just as fresh as it was five years ago. The more serious she is about the bizarreries of her past life and the cross-country trek, the funnier she is. Penny is a hilariously conflicted narrator since her impulse is to make her story a plaidoyer for her and Ezra’s behaviour when its formal purpose is just the opposite. Marmorstein is excellent at channelling the attitudes and speech of an intellectually precocious but emotionally childish and willfully eccentric 13-year-old boy.
While Ride the Cyclone takes strangeness to a higher level, Legoland provides the perfect introduction to the Richmond’s neo-absurdist worldview. It is like a rollercoaster ride, but this time no one dies. Take an hour off for some authentically Canadian Monty-Pythonism, and you’ll leave refreshed and ready to face the Legoland around you.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Amitai Marmorstein and Celine Stubel. ©2006 Barbara Pedrick.
For tickets, visit www.passemuraille.on.ca.
2013-04-04
Legoland