Gordon’s Big Bald Head (Mark Meer, Ron Pederson, Jacob Banigan) in Clusterflick at the Mayfield Dinner Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Something historic, and riotously funny, is happening at the Mayfield.

For the first time ever at this adventurous dinner theatre, a blockbuster movie is premiering on the Mayfield stage. In itself this pretty much nails high-grade extreme improbability. And there’s this: three suave guys in suits arrive onstage. What they have is a first-rate DJ, three chairs, an upper level, and sexy lighting. What they do not have is a script. Or any idea in advance of what movie is going to happen.

Gordon’s Big Bald Head in Clusterflick at the Mayfield. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

In Clusterflick, the elite trio of maker-uppers called Gordon’s Big Bald Head — Jacob Banigan, Mark Meer, Ron Pederson — improvise an entire movie on the spot, in all its complications, a new one every night. Western, sci fi, psycho-thriller, historical romance, film noir, romantic comedy. …  And this they do using the cues and prompts they get from the audience. “Thank goodness you’re here,” they say to us at the outset.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

Audience participation, the casually funny two-way bantering kind that improv demands, at the Mayfield? It’s a bold experiment. On opening night Friday, the collective ‘we’ provided an impossibly mis-matched assortment. The engaging improvisers asked someone from a table of patrons what their dad did for a living. The answer stopped all three in their tracks.: “he sold Barbies.” You couldn’t make that up. “Door to door?” wondered Meer.  “Wholesale?” asked Banigan. “That’s almost too interesting,” said Pederson.

Another table got asked “what did your next door neighbour do for a living?” The answer was considerably less startling: “grade school teacher.” A personality trait? “Shy and bashful,” suggested someone in the crowd. A location? La Ronde at the Chateau Lacombe. A celebrity cameo? Tom Cruise. A physical trait? A hairy chest.

What on earth could be assembled from the above? We all wondered, the way you do when a virtuoso juggler adds plate after plate. Meer, Banigan, and Pederson were affable, amused, unfazed, clearly enjoying off-the-cuff comic badinage.

All the cues were fed into AI, and what came out was a title, and a plot synopsis. So, that’s how the blockbuster Hairy Love —  complete with cinematic underscoring moment to moment by the remarkably inventive DJ Ashley Ball — came to be. On the spot. In 85 highly entertaining minutes.

A plot of dizzying intricacy and a romantic heart unfolds, with subplots involving miscellaneous recurring characters, dramatic encounters, comic interludes, escalating misunderstandings, exits in a huff, flashbacks, running gags, scenes in which Banigan and Pederson actually play two different couples on a date, simultaneously. Ah yes, and a cameo by Tom Cruise who gets mentioned in the same sentence as … Leduc.  And it’s all turned out with precise comic detail and expert physicality.

The concentration must be ferocious in that big bald head of Gordon, but the delivery is unhesitating and easeful. There’s uncanny comic chemistry at work. Which is something Fringe audiences know from Gordon’s Big Bald Head sold-out runs at the summer festival, where they improvise an entire Fringe show, randomly chosen from the hundreds in the program, armed with the title and the brief program description.

Inside Gordon’s Big Bald Head beats a single comedy brain. And it fires, impromptu and fast, on a frequency from old-school quips of the Catskills comic variety through pop culture references to more highbrow allusions tossed off lightly. The sense of humour includes the satirical and the goofball. In Hairy Love the teacher’s name is Miss Havisham, for heaven’s sake, and she was left at the altar, à la Great Expectations. Charles Dickens, O. Henry, Scientology, Mattel’s Barbie (played with droll gravitas by Meer) somehow find their way into the story.

There’s a weird kind of brilliance about this, and the undeniable live-ness of it all is part of the shine. Pederson, Banigan and Meer are all smart, quick on the uptake, and funny. And they’re experts at user-friendly audience engagement. I have to admit I had my doubts whether this could work in the dinner theatre context. Full marks to the Mayfield for their experimental spirit, because it does, and wonderfully well.

Edmonton, we have the best in the world ready to improvise for us, in a new venture at the Mayfield.  Don’t miss the chance to be there.

REVIEW

Clusterflick

Gordon’s Big Bald Head

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre

Running: through July 23

Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca