Cliff Cardinal is no stranger to playfully misleading titles.
To many Canadian theatregoers, he’s perhaps best known for promising a production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, only to have his delivery of the customary land acknowledgement go on a tad longer than expected. Though it may not have contained any actual Shakespeare, it was not difficult to, in fact, like it. Even the Governor General seemed to agree.
Another of Cardinal’s solo pieces, currently playing in Toronto, appears to have been named with a similar intent. Cliff Cardinal’s CBC Special (directed and dramaturged by longtime collaborator Karin Randoja) may not broadcast on Canadian television, but it is, indeed, quite special. Conceived years before As You Like It, and having already toured across Canada (including a run at the 2019 SummerWorks Performance Festival), its return in the aftermath of Cardinal’s recent accolades tinges the experience with a different set of expectations.
Unlike As You Like It, here Cardinal drops the pretense as early as its opening moments, cheekily informing the audience that he “needed a sexy title, and what’s sexier than the CBC? You’re all here, so I guess it worked.” I’d argue, however, that by 2025, he’s reached a point in his career where he no longer needs to play the trickster to entice an audience into hearing what he has to say. The opening night crowd seemed uninterested in the tantalizing false promise of public broadcasting, motivated instead by an intimate evening with the enfant terrible of Indigenous storytelling.
Produced by VideoCabaret, for whom Cardinal has long been a resident artist, the entire event feels tender, like the performer and producing company are sending each other love letters. Everything about the show creates the sense of being among friends, or even part of a found family.
Though this live experience contains no actual video, there’s no denying that it’s a cabaret. Between semi-autobiographical stories, Cardinal performs songs from Cliff Cardinal & The Sky-Larks’s three studio albums — including fan favourites like “Christmas in Kingston” and “My Sisters and Me” — in stripped-down acoustic versions without the accompaniment of his avian bandmates. Cardinal’s wiry voice is well-suited to the early-2000s alt-rock/pop-punk sensibility of his melodies, elevated by a lyrical intricacy that skilfully fuses the personal and the political.
The stories themselves predominantly feature members of his extended family in traumatic circumstances, laced with his signature fantastical elements — from a roadkill unicorn to a heavenly vision resembling Bob Barker — to temporarily ease the blows of everyday existence before snapping back to their grounded realities.
Wounded psyches prove to be the show’s thematic backbone. Its most impactful moment features Cardinal confronting how he’s built so much of his artistic identity and livelihood on the nightly reenactment of trauma, his own and his peoples’. It’s not enough for him to give himself permission to break that cycle; he needs the paying audience’s consent. He gently asks for their indulgence to set him free, requiring their willingness to forgo consumer demand for traumatic tales so that he may one day be able to let go of his tragically abundant supply. It’s brutal and beautiful; quiet and revolutionary.
It feels a little surprising that no sound or lighting designers are credited, as Randoja employs both of these elements heavily during the narrative episodes. Coloured lights accent key moments in the stories, sometimes as on-the-nose as blue for water and red for fire. This acknowledgement of simplicity needn’t be read as a slight against the design, since it does succeed at modulating coolness and warmth as needed. The sound effects are even more noticeable, with nearly every described action being paired with a prerecorded aural counterpart.
These cues anoint the piece with an air of premeditation that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. Not to make a habit of comparing every musically inflected monologuist to Bo Burnham — who’s been known to use technical cues to strategically burst illusions of authenticity — but Cardinal and Randoja’s decision to scaffold their show with precisely timed lights and sounds reveals a similarly careful deliberateness.
Perhaps what makes this piece work so well is just how modest its ambitions are. It never feels as though it’s striving to radically decenter the Western canon, spark conversations about theatrical protocols, or even win any prestigious awards. It’s just a man with a guitar and a heart full of stories to share. But modesty should not be mistaken for frivolity. This is a serious performance seeped in melancholy, with surprisingly few jokes for a format reminiscent of standup. It’s simultaneously a bundle of contradictions and an unmistakably sincere expression of self.
Pull yourself off the couch and consider spending a night at the theatre with Cardinal. It’s not an actual CBC Special, but it’s a real gem.
Cliff Cardinal’s CBC Special runs at VideoCabaret’s Deanne Taylor Theatre until February 16. Tickets are available here.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Ryan Borochovitz
Ryan Borochovitz (he/him) is a Toronto-based dramaturg, director, playwright, and academic. He is currently a PhD Candidate in the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto, and holds an MA in Theatre Theory and Dramaturgy from the University of Ottawa. He is the founding artistic director of the (essentially defunct) independent production company, Sad Ibsen Theatre. He currently serves as the co-artistic producer – former literary manager – of Cup of Hemlock Theatre, for whom he produces and occasionally hosts the theatre enthusiasm podcast, The Cup.
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