MICHAEL RAULT as part of Open Roof Festival at Corus Entertainment (25 Dockside), Thursday, June 27. Rating: NNN
Open Roof Festival has a great concept: bringing musicians and movie types together for summer evenings that begin with a musical performance and end with a film – all outside, in plain view of Toronto’s postcard-perfect nighttime skyline.
Unfortunately, weather moved this week’s event, which featured Toronto via Edmonton rocker Michael Rault followed by The Secret Disco Revolution, from The Moonview Lot – a parking lot near George Brown’s new waterfront campus – to inside of Corus Entertainment. This was a bummer and made for echoey sound, but on the bright side, patrons got an up-close look at Corus’s fabled indoor tube slide (it does exist!).
Rault and his band’s poppy three-minute love songs owe a lot to classic rock, The Kinks and 50s doo-wop. It was a weird venue for the band, who I’d rather see in a sweaty rock ‘n’ roll bar, but their tunes had a catchy, nostalgic and sophisticated groove to them and Rault, who played almost the entire set with his hair in his eyes, proved to be a strong lead guitarist as well as a shyly charismatic front man.
The flick, which was introduced by writer/producer/director Jamie Kastner, is an experimental blend of documentary and satiric comedy, based on the revisionist premise that disco was actually a secret revolutionary movement to liberate blacks, gays and women. Quietly funny but not laugh-out-loud hilarious, its weakest parts featured fictional James Bond-style reenactments of the revolutionaries’ activities while its strongest ones came during off-kilter interviews with real disco stars (including the Village People and Robert “Kool” Bell) responding to Kastner’s theories.
Open Roof Festival continues weekly until August 22.