From Lunchbox Theatre’s Complete Works
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Lunchbox Theatre
Monday, March 17 - Saturday, April 5
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Presenting an overview of all the shows Lunchbox Theatre has ever done in its 33-year history may seem an impossible task, but that’s exactly what Lunchbox does in its current retrospective, The Complete Works of Lunchbox Theatre.
Lunchbox founders Margaret and Bartley Bard cover about 300 plays in the pastiche they created for the theatre’s final show in Bow Valley Square. (Next season, Lunchbox will have a new home in The Tower Centre.)
How do they manage it? Well, I’d say they “cheat” a little by including several songs whose lyrics consist solely of play titles. Accompanying the songs is a screen with a rolling title list. Unless you’re interested in keeping score as to how many of the plays you’ve seen, these portions of the production are, quite frankly, boring, and are lost on audience members who don’t have recollections to dip into.
The Complete Works stars David LeReaney (a veteran of more than 40 Lunchbox shows), Grant Linneberg and Barbara Gates Wilson (who both got their starts at Lunchbox) with Tom Doyle on keyboard. The cast members share their personal connections to Lunchbox with the audience, making the show feel even more like a sentimental tribute.
The cast presents excerpts from a number of shows they group together thematically, including plays about religion, hockey, the Martini plays (in recognition of Calgary playwright Clem Martini, who is Lunchbox’s most-produced playwright), chick plays and “dick” plays.
LeReaney, Linneberg and Gates Wilson offer plenty of energy and goofiness onstage, from Linneberg’s elaborate Julius Caesar death scene, to LeReaney hanging upside down while singing, to a scenario where Elvis appears on a screen and gives some advice to the two “middle-aged white guys” about saying sorry.
Though the silliness does run thin after awhile, what’s most tiresome is the self-conscious nature of the retrospective. The actors engage in banter in which they contemplate how they’re going to cover all 300 plays in 50 minutes and waste stage time reminding each other to “get on with it,” so they don’t run out of time. Let the audience do the wondering and the marvelling, rather than have the actors repeatedly highlight the “feat” they’re accomplishing.
Despite these drawbacks, however, the play moves along at a fast pace, and there certainly are a few good laughs. That being said, unless you’re a Lunchbox regular who enjoys a trip down memory lane, I’d give this one a pass.
