INTERLUDE - Thoughts about Eye Candy When At The Wrong Theatre

I’m supposed to be reviewing six shows in two days. Four down, two to go. Eye Candy starts at 7:30 at the Performance Works. I’m on Granville Island at 7:15. Plenty of time. I wander over to the Fringe tent and run into an old friend, Benny. Our dads both worked in the theatre industry. I tell Benny I’m now working as a reviewer. He says I must have a pretty good lay of the land. We laugh. Of course I do.

I bid Benny adieu because they’re letting people in at the theatre and I want to get a good seat. I don’t know much about Eye Candy going into it, only what I read in the small blurb. I think it mentioned that the lead performer is a “world class juggler”. Let’s see what that translates to over the course of one hour.

The show opens with the juggler sitting downstage in a chair, staring up from a blue pool of light. Dramatic opening, I think to myself. Then a woman starts singing offstage. Interesting. Perhaps the juggler has an assistant. She makes her entrance and the two of them launch into banter. It’s Abbot and Costello like, but somewhat more self-involved, I mean, heavy. They’re pretending not to recognize one another. I’m thinking how they’re going to work this into the juggling act. I’m also thinking how to describe the male performer’s jaw line (cartoonish? steep?). About 10 more minutes of banter pass and the juggling act fails to start up. The female performer is now sitting on a plastic crate. I’m thinking to myself, there must be juggling equipment inside there. Why are they teasing us like this? Why is the show called Eye Candy? It was a really bad blurb if it didn’t give me slightest anticipation of this. 

Then it hits me. I want to whisper to the woman next to me, ask her what show we’re in. I feel that would be tasteless, and maybe she’d misinterpret it as my being rude. 

Okay, now they’re launching into another bit onstage. She’s a prostitute, but she’s not. There seems to be a meta-theatrical aspect built into this show. I’m having a hard time paying attention because I keep thinking about the volunteer who ripped my ticket. It clearly said “Eye Candy”. It clearly said “Performance Works”. I realize concretely that I’m in the Waterfront Theatre. 

Maybe I can still sneak out and then sneak in to see Eye Candy. Not that this show is bad (I’m actually becoming more and more settled with it as time goes on) but Eye Candy is the show I was assigned to see. I’m trying to think how maybe I can salvage this. Maybe I’ll write a review based on the idea that what I just saw was “Eye Candy”. Here is that review: 

“How good of a juggler is Matt Henry? His one hour drama Eye Candy opens in the most unpredictable of ways. Plastic crates onstage are replete with juggling equipment, but don’t think that world class juggler Matt Henry is just going to open them and start juggling. You, as an audience, need to work for them, comb through the rich subtext of this well acted scene, and answer for yourself ‘why are we really here?’, and ‘what are we here to see?’. Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll realize that the experience without the juggling will actually have been enough. That’s how good a juggler Matt Henry is.”

[NOTE from the Editor:  The show at the Waterfront is actually Moonlight After Midnight.]