Bruce McCulloch Returns Home with Show
Courtesy of the Edmonton Sun
By JEFF CRAIG
Wednesday, April 16, 1997
Bruce McCulloch played the silent husband as his wife (Scott Thompson) chatted with the audience compassionately about her gay son (Dave Foley) and his friends (Kevin McDonald and Mark McKinney), who are prancing about the stage with a bucket labelled "AIDS," throwing confetti everywhere.
McCulloch and McKinney had worked as writers on Saturday Night Live, but this was the first paying gig for the Kids in the Hall and they were nearly booed from the stage and run on to the streets outside a New York cafe.
That was 1988, and one year later the Canadian comedy troupe would begin one of the most successful runs in domestic TV history, cresting with last April's release of a feature film, Brain Candy.
Even Rolling Stone went on to describe the troupe as heirs to the Monty Python mantle.
Officially on hiatus, they remained controversial, and even today reruns of The Kids in the Hall are censored on both CBC and Comedy Central, where the show airs in the States.
And we get the chance to see if McCulloch has tamed with age as the Edmonton-born comic brings his new one-man show, Slightly Bigger Cities, to the Horowitz Theatre May 8.
McCulloch debuted the show in Calgary earlier this year, where he got his showbiz start in Loose Moose Theatre and Theatresports, and has been fine-tuning it for the home-town crowd.
"It's a theatre/poetry/comedy show," McCulloch said yesterday over the phone from his Toronto office.
"I'd done improv and stand-up and stuff before and during the (TV) show, and then we did the movie and I just kind of wanted to get back to some performing.
"I'm not a very good actor (laughs). I like to work with a crowd."
The most musical of the Kids, McCulloch says Slightly Bigger Cities will incorporate original music (with a Shadowy Men accompanist) with an autobiographical tale of his career so far.
"I'm from Edmonton, spent a lot of time in Calgary and then went on to New York and Los Angeles and Chicago," McCulloch says. "So there's a lot of those absurdities in the show. I'm the only one who's still in Canada, though I lived for five months in L.A. when we made Brain Candy. There's a bit of that in the show.
"I don't know what the show's about! I find it really difficult to describe what it is I'm doing."
And with the plethora of reruns, there's lots of opportunities to see what he has done.
"I don't watch," McCulloch says. "I never did. Every time I see a clip of the show I see four good-looking guys who are really funny and this other guy."
But McCulloch says the reruns are still relevant.
"In five years it might bug me more. But right now, we're all the same as we were when we did that stuff. Our brains are the same.
"We don't feel like, say, Martin Short might feel about old SCTV sketches."
The Slightly Bigger Cities performance is a one-shot deal, McCulloch says, because he's off for his directorial debut, a comedy called Dog Park.
"It's a savage but hopeful romantic comedy," he says, explaining that his buddy Janeane Garofalo will take part.
And the Kids?
"We never broke up," McCulloch says. "We just haven't done anything for a while. I try to talk to everyone every so often, and Scott and I get together and get drunk and sometimes Dave will be there.
"We're thinking of doing some live shows or even another movie, but because we're scattered all over the place, just getting us all on the phone as the same time is a major military manoeuvre."
Tickets for Slightly Bigger Cities are still available through Ticketmaster. The cost is $20 plus service charges.
Some kids do better than others when they grow up. Since the Kids in the Hall comedy troupe packed in its TV show nearly three years ago, a couple of careers have soared and a couple have, well, stalled.
Here's what the former Kids are up to:
Dave Foley: Starred in the ill-fated It's Pat movie and is currently appearing in the NBC sitcom NewsRadio. Although a critical smash, NewsRadio has struggled in the ratings and is in danger of cancellation.
Mark McKinney: The former Chicken Lady is still a comedy troupe member, working with Saturday Night Live as it attempts to restore its reputation.
Scott Thompson: The only openly gay member of the Kids scored the coolest job of all with a part as Hank's openly gay assistant on The Larry Sanders Show. Thompson was also recently profiled on CTV's W5.
Kevin McDonald: This could be the Kid with the stalled career. McDonald made his film debut in National Lampoon's Senior Trip, but that's not going to pay for a down payment on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
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