Cliff Cardinal’s CBC Special is a stripped-down variety hour that has little to do with this country’s national broadcaster and everything to do with the recent tumult of Cardinal’s livelihood, as well as the lingering pain of his youth. Cardinal poses for a portrait in the administrative office of Mirvish Productions on March 1, 2023.Duane Cole/The Globe and Mail
- Title: Cliff Cardinal’s CBC Special
- Written by: Cliff Cardinal
- Director: Karin Randoja
- Actors: Cliff Cardinal
- Company: Eric Epstein and Imaginary Force
- Venue: VideoCabaret’s Deanne Taylor Theatre
- City: Toronto
- Year: Until Feb. 16, 2025
“Bait-and-switch is the lowest form of entertainment,” cracks a lanky Cliff Cardinal, relishing in the knowing chuckles that follow. He stares at the audience, daring us to laugh harder at the meta-theatrical antics that have propped up the last few years of his career.
The moment passes so quickly you might miss it if you’re not paying attention, or if you’re not intimately familiar with Cardinal’s oeuvre of trickery. But the playwright’s self-referential jab at false advertising forms a fascinating spine for Cliff Cardinal’s CBC Special, a stripped-down variety hour that has little to do with this country’s national broadcaster and everything to do with the recent tumult of Cardinal’s livelihood, as well as the lingering pain of his youth.
In 2021, Cardinal vaulted to the forefront of Canadian theatre discourse with his “radical retelling” of As You Like It, which has since toured the globe to simultaneous acclaim and backlash. The play sees Cardinal, originally from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, take aim at land acknowledgments, with minimal mention of Shakespeare, and theatres across Canada have had to contend with patrons angry at the work’s deceitful title – some companies have played along with the prank, while others have simply renamed the piece The Land Acknowledgement, thereby removing the ruse that made the play so electric in its mid-pandemic premiere.
Before As You Like It, there was Huff, a solo show about solvent abuse and a failing reserve system. That piece sees Cardinal go to deep, dark places, and in CBC Special, he recalls the physical and emotional toll of performing suicide night after night.
“I’m still not okay,” says Cardinal, gesturing toward the trauma of touring Huff as context for omitting more disturbing material from CBC Special. “As much as I love being edgy and transgressive.”
Don’t worry: CBC Special sees Cardinal indulge that penchant for edginess, with jests about everything from hard drugs to ICE raids to Alice Munro. Cardinal’s jagged sense of humour is what’s made him such a rock star of Canadian theatre, with a tight canon of work to complement his irreverent, brash personality. In recent years, Cardinal has balanced his theatrical touring with more lighthearted fare as the lead singer of Cliff Cardinal and the Sky-Larks. While he may no longer be willing to put himself in danger for a show, he’s plenty content to lob out jokes intended to shock, interspersed with thoughtful guitar strums.
CBC Special is familiar fare for Cardinal, with its blend of semi-autobiographical stories and songs belted out on acoustic guitar, but the play spends an intriguing amount of time picking apart Cardinal’s relationship with his own theatricality. Between stories and songs, Cardinal tells us about people he misses: Deanne Taylor, who co-founded VideoCabaret and for whom the company’s performance space on Busy Street is named, exists in Cardinal’s periphery as a fairy, he tells us. After one particularly gruesome story, about a baby left in the care of a distracted aunt, Cardinal breaks the tension with an uneasy wisecrack: “A lot of imperilled kids in this special, huh?”
Though director Karin Randoja’s role in CBC Special isn’t immediately clear beyond a few well-timed sound cues by William Fallon and a handful of elegant lighting shifts, the piece more or less holds its own as a mosaic of storytelling. Cardinal commands the intimate Busy Street space, never allowing the audience to look away – no one’s ever accused the Governor-General award-winning playwright of being boring.
That said, CBC Special lacks the polish that might make it feel more like a play, or even a complete comedy set. On opening night, Cardinal frequently searched for his words, stumbling over his memories and allowing sentences to trail off in mid-air. Sometimes those hesitations make Cliff Cardinal’s CBC Special feel conversational and potent, but more frequently they make the piece feel unfinished, a breath away from completion.
And, of course, the CBC of it all looms large over CBC Special – “what’s sexier and flashier than the CBC?,” asks Cardinal as he tunes his guitar in preparation for a song. In his imagination, he tells us, his show is just that, a ready-made package of banter and bangers that’s ready for broadcast. And with further refining, that version of CBC Special could well come to exist. But for now, the piece, satisfying though it may be for Cardinal’s most devoted fans, is another bait-and-switch.
In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)
