MACHOMER, BIGGER THAN JESUS AND HARDSELL written and performed by Rick Miller, MacHomer directed by Sean Lynch, Bigger and Hardsell directed by Daniel Brooks (WYRD/Necessary Angel/Factory, 125 Bathurst). MacHomer runs through September 25, Bigger runs September 29-October 9, Hardsell runs October 13-23, Tuesday-Saturday 8 pm, matinee Sunday 2 pm. $20-$45. 416-504-9971. See listings.
In solo shows Machomer, Bigger Than Jesus and Hardsell, writer/performer Rick Miller proves he’s a chameleon of a performer.
Credit designers Ben Chaisson and Beth Kates with helping to create the many faces Miller presents to the audience, from a cartoony Macbeth populated with Simpsons characters to a Christ both earthly and spiritual and a salesman who points out the come-on behind every tempting sales pitch.
The three shows open the season at Factory Theatre.
Kates first met Miller in the mid-90s when she was marketing director at Markham Theatre, where MacHomer was set to appear a year later. A series of fortuitous circumstances and six degrees of separation brought them back together in 1998 in Montreal, where Kates and her husband Chaisson had moved.
“I redesigned the show, which then went on to the Edinburgh Festival,” recalls Kates, whose terrific design work includes Yichud. “I later became its stage manager, and Ben came in to do some other revisions. One, included the last time we played Edinburgh, was Ben’s discovery of a black kilt that replaced Rick’s broken-down jeans.”
“Some new characters have appeared over the years,” adds the talented Chaisson, who designed projections for Theatrefront’s The Mill. “After all, The Simpsons is 25 years old, and with the loss of Phil Hartman, some new characters and voices were added to the TV show.”
Now President Obama gets a nod, as does Disco Stu, a character for whom Miller had lots of requests the design is more like a Simpsons episode than a weirdly theatrical Macbeth.
Bigger Than Jesus, which brilliantly uses the form of traditional church liturgy to explore the story and history of Christ over the past two millennia, was the couple’s second collaboration and remains the best piece of multimedia theatre I’ve ever seen.
“We started working on it for a premiere Easter 2003 in Winnipeg,” smiles Kates. “I remember tearing up pieces of paper on an airplane tray, trying to come up with some ideas. All I knew was that we needed a big screen for a surprising reveal and a flying camera that could be worked from overhead.”
Miller, Kates, Chaisson and director Daniel Brooks developed both script and design collectively. Chaisson calls it a cyclical style of creation, with everyone playing around in turn with text and visuals.
While MacHomer and Bigger have stayed recognizably the same over the years, look for some major reworking of Hardsell, the third solo show. There’s been a shift to a lecture-based play, says Kates.
“Rick wants to be able to perform it in a non-theatrical context like a classroom or a gym where its presentation isn’t dependent on the infrastructure of a theatre,” nods Chaisson. “It’s something that would be appropriate for public events like ideacity or TED Talks.”
“That way a little bit of entertainment is absorbed in something that’s not a straight lecture,” continues Kates. “In theatre, entertainment comes first. Our job as designers is to keep it simple but interesting, with a level of design integrity that supports the new focus.”
After more than a decade, the design couple still love working together. They feel they complement each other – Kates’s focus is lights, set and costume, Chaisson’s sound – and mutually feed the final design, which emerges as a single shared aesthetic. That aesthetic is apparent not only onstage but also in The ToyBox, an audience-interactive multimedia concept first developed in SummerWorks 2010 that just won the pair an award from the Canadian Institute for Theatre Technology.
As with all their joint projects, it came about in part through the shorthand they’ve developed over the years they understand each other’s boundaries but always feel free to share ideas.
“And we’ve only fired each other a couple of times,” laughs Kates.
Additional Interview Clips
Collaborating with Rick Miller:
How their design grows:
jonkap@nowtoronto.com
