PORK & BEANS: Attorneys at Law (Stage 18, FOH Pro Stage at the Luther Centre

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

PORK & BEANS: Attorneys at Law isn’t the first time the Edmonton musical theatre indie Top Bunk Theatre has gravitated to food as a setting and running gag for their original Fringe comedies — witness Soup & Hogan’s 16th Annual Hotdog Eating Contest in 2025, and  Sam’s Clam & Oyster Bar the Fringe before that.

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Here’s one to add to that oddball archive. The title characters in this scrambly musical by Sam Daly and Ethan Lang are two high-powered lawyers in ‘70s Chicago, city of encased meats. Augustus Pork (Daly) and Lucius Beans (Lang) were law school classmates at Harvard, and best friends bonded in that pork and beans mutual-need way. But by the time they’re facing off in “the trial of the century” — a star soft-ball celebrity (Aidan Laudersmith) has murdered his wife Chartreuse, or not — they’re had a falling out.

In between, the 10-actor production directed by Lauren Boyd assisted by Elizabeth Janzen) is a long flashback that reviews their ever more fractious relationship, and how they met when Beans was a legal beagle student in the Harvard debating society and Port was a Harvard janitor. And it’s crammed with deliberately bad accents, goofball jokes about the best wurst hotdogs, throw-away lines about food courts, food (as opposed to legal) courts , a veritable barrage of  puns. Pork gives the judge, straight out of G&S, a hand (yup, the  very one she somehow lost); there are trial recesses so she can get a shrimp taco.

If this is sounding to you like a satire of the law, forget it. It plays more like an over-extended SNL skit, or something dreamed up at law school skit night after the end of year kegger. The likeable and energetic cast throw themselves into the comedy slammer. But they’re up against sketchy sound. And the singing is variable too. The premise is promising. But at 60 minutes, time feels like it’s being served. That’s a verdict that was decisively not shared with the rest of the cheering jury in the house seats at the performance I saw.