DON’T YOU FORGET ABOUT JOHN HUGHES directed by Darryl Pring, with Pat Thornton, Jason DeRosse and Julie Dumais. Saturday (September 5). Ferris Bueller’s Day Off at 8 pm, Planes, Trains And Automobiles at 9:15 pm, and The Breakfast Club at 10:30 pm. Comedy Bar (945 Bloor West). $10-?$12, three shows $20-?$25. 647-?898-?5324. See listing.
The first thing director Darryl Pring wants you to know about his John Hughes tribute is that it wasn’t supposed to be a memorial.
In fact, Pring, who started staging improvised versions of Hughes’s iconic 80s films at the Comedy Bar back in February, confides that the original plan was to invite Hughes to the night, on the off chance that the reclusive writer/director/producer would be in town for the Film Fest.
Then fate intervened on August 6, when Hughes died of a heart attack while walking his dog on West 55th Street in Manhattan.
The man who brought the problems of suburban Chicago to the world in brat-pack teen dramas Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Pretty In Pink was only 59 years old. Besides his coming-of-age flicks, Hughes helmed culturally ?important comedies like Planes, Trains And Automobiles, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and the Home Alone series.
“I want people to remember his influence on pop culture but also on culture as a whole,” says Pring. “He changed people’s minds about youth in the 80s, brought attention to their thoughts and emotions. Before that time, teens were seen more as a nuisance than as real people with real problems.”
Having already staged five Don’t You Forget About John Hughes improvs in the Comedy Bar’s cozy basement theatre, Pring decided to resurrect the three most popular for this final tribute.
“We’re going for the spectrum of Hughes’s filmmaking,” he says. “The Breakfast Club is a high school drama about teenage angst, while Planes, Trains And Automobiles is about family, adulthood and marriage, and Ferris Bueller is just campy fun.”
But don’t expect straight renderings. After all, this is improv. Each film serves only as starting point and rough guide for the performers. Pring’s job as director was to assemble casts – made up of Toronto’s top comedic talent – and distill each movie down to a series of important moments needed to tell the story.
“There’s no script, but it’s a prerequisite that the casts know the movies really well,” says Pring. “That lets them drop in all those tiny references for hardcore fans.”
But they also strive to create new, funny moments by straying from the originals. Each show begins with the improv tradition of the “get,” which Pring explains is “a suggestion from the audience for each character that influences him or her throughout the course of the show.”
I ask cast member Pat Thornton (star of Comedy Network sketch show Hotbox), who’s playing John Candy’s lovable but feckless salesman Del Griffith in Planes, Trains And Automobiles, if the unpredictable nature of the “get” could interfere with the plot.
“It doesn’t matter,” says Thornton, who then adds quasi-philosophically, “You get what you get, that’s why they call it a get.”
Apart from a quick scene-to-scene to make sure each show transitions smoothly, there are no rehearsals.
“If you rehearse, then you get that scare of ‘Oh, I said that really funny thing in rehearsal, now I have to remember to say that onstage,’ and that kills the live magic,” says Jason DeRosse, who plays opposite Thornton as straitlaced businessman Neal Page.
And will they incorporate part of the original actor’s performance in their styles?
“We don’t do impersonations,” says DeRosse bluntly. “We just find the game that’s happening in each scene and explode the crap out if it.”
For Pring, the project has become a balance of comedy and tragedy.
“I don’t think we’re going to spoof John Hughes movies again after this, but we might turn it into Don’t You Forget About Stephen Spielberg or James Cameron.”[rssbreak]
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