Is Toronto really just a smaller version of New York? Forget Sept. 11 for a moment, if you can. Turn your attention instead to the two cities' values and appetites. Observers are forever going on about the similarities between NYC and TO: They are vibrant, intellectually driven, multi-ethnic, media-fixated, culture-obsessed cultures. (At least, Torontonians are always going on about this. New Yorkers are always going on about . . . well, about New York.) But are the cities, in fact, so alike? Certainly, the conviction that they share similar tastes in theatre has led legions of foolhardy producers to their doom.
New York is forever giving birth to off-beat plays that start in some raw East or West Village experimental space and, through word of mouth, run for a year before franchising themselves into entire industries in cities around North America. These might be fluffy ventures such as Forbidden Broadway or the more challenging Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Time and again, however, the shows arrive in Toronto on a wave of direct-from-New-York hype, only to crash and burn.
With the appearance this week of Fully Committed, Toronto gets another shot to assert its Big Apple obsession. Not only was the play a hit in New York (it ran for 18 months in the tiny Cherry Lane Theatre), it is as much about the city's culture as can possibly be. A one-man comedy set in the reservation office of a fashionable Manhattan restaurant, it satirizes vexatious Upper East Side matrons, narcissistic chefs, Naomi Campbell's personal assistant: in fact, the whole ego-ridden universe of (pre-Sept. 11) New York.
Popular as the show was, normally there might not be much reason to hold out hope for a long commercial run. (See above.) However, the Toronto producers of Fully Committed have committed some pretty canny casting and brought in Mark McKinney, a heavy crossover hitter with a huge following among people who wouldn't necessarily troop down to the Winter Garden Theatre.
McKinney is an ideal choice to bridge the gap between the two cities, as they are the twin sites of his professional success. In Canada, he is best known as one-fifth of the extinct comedy troupe Kids in the Hall as well as a former cast member of Saturday Night Live. Below the border, in a wrinkle that lends Committed an air of theatrical legitimacy, he has spent the four years since departing SNL living in New York, forging a reputation as a legitimate actor.
"I want to push myself a bit," said McKinney the other day, munching on pizza in a theatre-district restaurant. "I want to do Shakespeare. I want to do a lot of stuff. . . .
"This play is bigger and scarier than what I'd done. Alone on stage is pretty scary in my books."
It's a logical next step, though. His post-Kids, post- SNL stage career began in 1998 with a well-respected role in the Feydeau farce A Flea in Her Ear. Most recently, in the manic off-Broadway comedy Fuddy Meers, McKinney earned the approbation of many critics, including the theatre columnist of The New York Times, who declared, "no one in the seriously loopy Fuddy Meers is righter or lighter than Mr. McKinney, who is emerging as one of the top-flight comic actors on the New York stage."
He'll have his work cut out for him with Fully Committed, a 75-minute solo piece that presents a daunting challenge: almost 40 characters, some engaged in dialogue with each other, who sometimes flit into a scene for only a few seconds. It is a grueling actor's marathon run built from a series of furious sprints. "I like it because it virtually guarantees that it could never be absolutely perfect," said McKinney, absently rolling the left sleeve of his slate-grey sweater up and down his arm like a curtain. "You'll never come off-stage thinking, 'Oh, I hit every beat tonight.' That's the Grail."
The play centres on Sam, an out-of-work actor manning the reservation line at a restaurant during a particularly busy lunch time. Using the basic tools of his acting trade -- voice work, strong physical mannerisms -- McKinney brings to life Sam and the 36 other characters who seem to have been born merely to make Sam's life hell. Among them are his unctuous supervisor, moneyed matrons who simply must have a table for Friday at 8 p.m., his acting agent's bitchy assistant and a despotic chef. (The show was a smash among the megalomaniacal New York chefs it satirizes.)
"The magic of it is, it's one guy, a table, some telephones," said McKinney, who saw the show twice when it ran in New York. "You're kind of aware of that for five or six minutes. It's like, 'Wait a minute, hold on, you're going to entertain me for an hour and a half?' And then gradually the voices start happening and suddenly, whomph, you're through the mirror."
Fully Committed was written by Becky Mode with her friend Mark Setlock, who performed the show in New York. The two spent their fair share of time working in the trenches of New York restaurants, including a stint that Setlock did taking reservations at the exclusive Bouley. That is, he answered someone else's phone while waiting for his own to ring.
"You never stop relating to Sam if you're an actor: Is that phone ever going to fucking ring again?" said McKinney, who in relaxed conversation sounds almost eerily like Canadian-born news anchor Peter Jennings. "You're constantly unemployed as an actor. Constantly, constantly, constantly. And the stakes go up as you go on later. I have kids now. I've got school and an apartment in New York. That's enough for most people."
McKinney lives on the Upper West Side with his two young children and wife Marina Gharabegian, a pastry chef who once worked with Toronto chef Greg Couillard. The closest he came to working in the restaurant industry was a year-long stint he did at a Second Cup in Toronto in the early eighties, while spending his nights with the Kids in the Hall doing comedy at the Rivoli. He left the Kids for a year to write for SNL.
"That's the way it happens in the States, but you don't think of it in Canada," McKinney said. "I was working at the Second Cup, doing shows at the Rivoli, and two weeks later I'm sitting opposite from Madonna going, 'She's not doing the joke right, can I give her a line reading?' " The next summer, Lorne Michaels flew up to Toronto to check out the Kids and signed them to a development deal that eventually saw them land on both CBC and HBO.
Dug in now in New York, McKinney keeps his hands in what's going on at home by working in the occasional Canadian film such as fellow Kids kid Bruce McCulloch's Dog Park, for which he won a Genie, and New Waterford Girl. He's also co-writing a six-part miniseries for Toronto-based Rhombus Media with Susan Coyne and Bob Martin.
For the moment, he wants to stay in New York to see how far he can go in theatre. He says that moving back to Toronto, "wouldn't be awful," then catches himself when he realizes how that might sound in print. "Hey, I can sue you for inflection," he says.
"I'm sort of set up here, so it would be throwing it all over to start anew in Toronto," he clarifies.
"The only thing I hate about New York is that everything gets overdone, there's nothing charming left any more. When I first came here, someone took me to the inflating the balloons [the night before the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade] It was crowded, but you were still allowed to walk around," he recalls. "And then I took my kid last year and it had become such a cultural event that there were like 100,000 people squeezing in. I mean, you're just supposed to watch these misshapen Snoopys come to life. You couldn't see anything."