Michelle Todd and Cheryl Jameson in Paloma & Joy, Whizgiggling Productions. Photo supplied
Paloma & Joy (Stage 8, Gateway Theatre)
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
The double set of opening sequences, the best part of this very odd new Trevor Schmidt comedy/drama for Whizgiggling Productions, are a kind of performance art. They’re a graphic demo of the idea of desperation, showbiz style.
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On the one hand, there’s the career decline of the magic duo Paloma (Cheryl Jameson) and Joy (Michelle Todd), flamboyant showgirls who once played the big showrooms now reduced to gentlemen’s clubs with two-for-one specials on Jaegermeister shots. The series of choreographed entrances and exits that chronicle this downward spiral is inspired.
At the same time, Magda, an exotic white tiger (Kristin Johnston), delivers a knock-out Kurt Weill-esque number in German (composer Dave Clarke), amidst telling a tragic story of a sister act brought low by drugs. Magda needs a job.
With Paloma’s calculation of rescuing the magic act from the dumpster of time by adding a tiger (below the billing, natch), the tone turns a sharp corner, without signalling. Suddenly we’re watching an exposé of the exclusionary cruelty of showbiz, the immigrant experience, the misidentification of outsiders by stereotypes. “No, where are you from from?” demands Paloma, the aggressive one, unsatisfied by the answer Germany. “Are you here as an illegal?”
The hard-ass Paloma, with the acquiescence of the malleable Joy (the nuances of this dynamic are captured by the actors), gives the desperate Magda a new name, Brenda, a made-up African back story, a humiliating new persona as a wild beast “unpredictable and untamed,” which the tiger argues is “a harmful stereotype.” And reluctantly “Brenda” sings a new lounge-y song about being a bad bad kitty. An unusual allegory about the exploitation of immigrant workers suddenly gets born.
The show re-assembles the three-actor comedy cast that’s brought Whizgiggling Productions such comedy hits as Destination Wedding, Destination Vegas, and The Black Widow Gun Club. And they are excellent here in a much weirder enterprise (and look wonderfully circus in in their splashy Schmidt costumes).
There’s audacity in this experiment in creating a comedy/drama sequentially, first one then the other, rather than as some sort of merger. But Paloma & Joy never quite survives it. The edgy fun of it as a dark comedy vanishes. And perhaps it’s because the sheer force and weight of Johnston’s performance as Magda, lugubrious and dignified, overtake it.
Tigers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.
