It's Just Like Being a Kid Again
Courtesy of the Toronto Sun.
Bruce McCulloch is more than ready to rejoin the Kids and open his show.
By JIM SLOTEK
Tuesday, October 19, 1999
Having directed two movies currently playing in theatres, the standard Hollywood drill for Bruce McCulloch would be lunches at the Polo Lounge or drinks at Bar Marmont, taking pitches for his next project.
Instead, he's exposing his psyche on stages across Canada in a one-man comic monologue called Slightly Bigger Cities, which plays Harbourfront's du Maurier Theatre Centre for two weeks starting tomorrow.
"I've performed 22 shows out West, Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria," McCulloch says. "After Toronto there's Halifax, Montreal and Winnipeg.
"It's something I'm doing for fun, because I'm tired of filmmaking."
TWO YEARS DIRECTING FILMS
Though they were released concurrently, McCulloch's own project Dog Park (with Luke Wilson and Natasha Henstridge) and the Molly Shannon movie Superstar were shot in Toronto a year apart. Still, that was two straight years of directing, "which is kind of like being mayor of a small town -- you have to listen to everybody's problems all the time. Everybody works for you, and you kind of work for everybody."
So now he's married to the stage and live audiences -- both for the run of Slightly Bigger Cities and the upcoming Kids In The Hall reunion tour, which will take him through to March.
"I mean, I hate it when people who do TV or movies say, 'Oh, I'm gonna do some theatre now, the real work'," McCulloch says. "It's all my work, y'know what I mean? But I just don't feel like making another film right now. What I like about my one-man show is it's the kind of work that's most like me. If you see Dog Park or Superstar, you look at parts and say, 'Oh, that's Bruce's stuff'. Other parts, any number of people could have done.'"
Make no mistake, Slightly Bigger Cities is 'Bruce's stuff,' the darker, sometimes mordant material that, as often as not, make you go "Hmmmm." Like his take on finding notes on the street in different cities, and running across a quasi-suicidal memo on the streets of Toronto that almost exactly mirrored the note that Margot Kidder gave a news crew when she suffered a public episode of mental illness a few years back.
"I just sort of find a way of tying up the world by connecting those two notes," McCulloch says. "It's kind of elliptical, just sort of my reminiscences on life, and a couple of things from my record (1995's Shame-Based Man). The title has to do with being from Calgary and moving to Toronto and being in L.A., that's what the angle is, sort of. It's about things that obsess me, like relationships. I do this whole thing about a battle between the Clinique ladies and the Body Shop girls. Given their different approaches on beauty and life, it was a fight that was bound to happen.
"It's all just sort of like 'theatre rock-poetry,' " says McCulloch, who's backed throughout the tour by guitarist Brian Connelly of Kids In The Hall's theme-band Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet. "We call it a one-and-a-half person show."
SIX-WEEK SABBATICAL
Between the end of Slightly Bigger Cities and the start of the Kids tour, McCulloch has six weeks off.
"I may write or rewrite a movie then. I don't know, I'm just sort of tired now. I might just sleep."
In the meantime, he has begun e-mailing ideas back and forth with fellow kid Mark McKinney for said tour.
"We've all been getting together, conference calls on weekends, and stuff. It's almost frightening how well we've been getting along. Of course we still bug each other, it's just what a rock band does, I guess."
A rock band? "We always have thought of ourselves as a rock band. Not like we're rock stars, but in our weird dysfunctional politics. One guy just wants to play, one guy wants to talk about the songs.
"It's a good analogy for us that we always use, that we're a rock band, and that the troupe itself is the sixth member and that it's the dumbest guy."
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