By Gillian Brunette
Huntsville Forester
They came in droves. The young, old and the curious.
At the end of the night, there were some who loved his music, some were not so sure, but everyone agreed Hawksley Workman (Ryan Corrigan) is one heck of a showman.
It was Hawksley's night to shine among his former peers and as he noted, "some who marked my report cards, some who changed my diapers," and he let nobody down.
At one point a male voice from within the crowd yelled "run for prime minister Ryan." to which Workman replied he was thinking about it, on behalf of the Canadian Alliance party.
With the backing of his band 'The Wolves' which included another Huntsville musician, Wes Scheer-Hennings, Hawksley Workman was on the Festival of the Arts mainstage where ticket prices were up to $25 instead of the $5 people paid to hear him at Chaffey Hall two years ago.
Workman's show attracted the largest audience in this year's Festival. It was also the first show to sell out with people coming from as far away as St. Catharines to see him perform.
Young people stood three rows deep at the front of the stage waving their arms and stamping to the beat, blocking the view of the sponsors and those who had paid for preferred seating. Yet nobody seemed to mind and, as Festival manager Rob Saunders later noted, "the Festival of Arts has never seen anything quite like it."
The power and range of his voice and expertise on a variety of instruments aside, one has to wonder what goes on in Workman's head. In what were sometimes lengthy, albeit amusing, dialogues, he would jump from one unconnected thought to another another with gaping silences in between.
At one point in his show, Workman suddenly yelled out : "Beverley Hawksley's a pornographer," referring to his mother's art and, one has to assume, to a single complaint aired in this newspaper that her depictions of the female form were pornographic.
Workman played to and with the audience for close to two hours, with no intermission at his request.
It was quite a night.