The Comeback Kids
Courtesy of the Toronto Sun
Dave Foley on the Hall gang re-grouping
By JIM SLOTEK -- Toronto Sun
Monday, October 11, 1999
It's appropriate that the agreement for Kids In The Hall to reunite and tour was hammered out, as Dave Foley says, "in my ex-wife's house in Cabbagetown."
What better place to annul a divorce? The Kids even had a lawyer fine-tune the details.
"It didn't feel any different than the last time we were together, except that the animosities had died down. We weren't constantly fighting," Foley says of the sitdown that will see him, Bruce McCulloch, Scott Thompson, Kevin McDonald and Mark McKinney on a 20-city tour in January and February. The troupe will play Massey Hall during the tour, date to be announced.
"It was actually more like our Rivoli days, just sitting around throwing ideas at each other." The tour, he says, will be a mix of "greatest hits"(did somebody say, "I crush your head?") and new material. "Kevin and Scott are in L.A., so we'll write some stuff together, and Bruce and Mark will write together on the Internet. It's basically the same combination, the same pattern of writing we had in the old days."
This week, Foley will get his feet wet in front of a crowd again when he hosts the Comedy Network's anniversary party and launch for a new season of Comedy Now. The free show Wednesday at the Masonic Temple -- first come, first served, get there early -- features hot comic Harland Williams (Rocket Man), and local faves Brigitte Gall, The Bobroom, Gavin Crawford, Roman Danylo, James Cunningham and Mike Bullard writer Rob Ross.
COMEDY NETWORK
It's part one of Foley's new relationship with the Comedy Network. The cable net has signed on as Canadian sponsor for the Kids tour, and will tape it for later broadcast.
Foley's admittedly a little rusty in front of crowds -- the studio audiences for the late, lamented sitcom NewsRadio had been his main taste of applause for some time. I joke, grimly, that he didn't take the cancellation of his sitcom as badly as his trouble-prone co-star Andy Dick did (Dick got into an accident and was busted for impaired driving and drug possession the day of the cancellation).
"I don't think Andy was aware of anything that day. I don't think you can blame it on the cancellation," Foley says. "But I saw Andy a few weeks ago, and he looked clean and sober, believe it or not. He kind of has to be."
(In an earlier interview, before Dick's meltdown, he told me after Phil Hartman's death that, "We were shocked it wasn't Andy. Andy was shocked that it wasn't Andy.")
Lingering grievances aside, he says his NewsRadio schedule was probably the biggest stumbling block to a Kids reunion in previous years. "I guess the one with the most problematic schedule now would be Kevin, since he's writing for The Martin Short Show. He'll need to get time off."
The Kids tour clearly won't replace the income he was getting from a network sitcom ("Believe me, we're not doing it for the money," he says). But he has been paying the bills. Last week he finished filming the movie Monkey Bone with his friend Brendan Fraser and Bridget Fonda (a surrealistic film about a cartoonist who ends up interacting with his creation in another dimension), and is in talks with NBC about another sitcom, which he'd write and star in.
"I've also been writing a script for the Fox Network that's basically a parody of a science show. I'm more or less basing it on (The Discovery Channel's) @discovery canada."
Whaddya know? He has been keeping one foot in the hood.
===============================================
Interviews and Articles||Front (No Frames)