Brit-hit Blackadder provides fodder for laughs

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SPOTLIGHT FEATURE

F YOU came of age during
the 1970s and hankered
ior humor other than that
‘ peddled by, say, Three's
» Company, Mork and Mindy
and M.A.S.H., you invari-
ably made the trek from
couch to Quasar in those
‘years B.C. (before comman-
ders) and flipped to PBS.

There, on that heady, dry tun-
dra somewhere between Nova
and Masterpiece Theatre, was an

_ Oasis of comedy that we in the
.. Commonwealth refer to as
; “British humor": Monty Pythan’s
~ Flying Circus, Fawlty Towers,
Red Dwarf, etc.
«> It was challenging, sometimes
bizarre and always off-centre.
 Well-conceived and brilliantly
: executed, the meticulous scripts
‘relied as heavily on word-play as
on physical action — in glaring
contrast to the ba-duim-bum one-
: liners and facile facial contor-
‘tions of Norman Fell, Don Knotts
“and Alan Alda.
> Sure, it was elitist end not
everybody got it, But that was the
point: to walk into physics class
2 the following morning and sneer
“down your nose at the Philistines
«who had squandered their
evening cackling along with John
» Ritter.

“Cults developed around
those shows, is what happened,”
says comedian/actor Ray Soden,
one third of the trio behind the
Comedy Company, which will

‘ be presenting three episodes of
another great Brit-hit,
‘Blackadder, onstage at the Deep
“Cove Shaw. Theatre, opening
tonight, Jan, 19, and running
‘until Feb. 5.0 - .
~~: “In the case of Adder, it com-
‘bined British history, intellectual
humor and school-boy rugby
humor. The whole thing is com:
pletely off the wall.”

photo Mike Wakefield

THE COMEDY Company bring three episodes of the great

British comedy Blackadder

That particular aspect of the
production fits in just dandily
with the sensibilities of Saden,
50, and his ComCo partner Paul
Kloegman, “not 50,” who is
directing and also performing the
Blackadder role.’

(Soden plays Adder’s lowest-
common-denominaior sidekick,
Baldrick, while the company’s
third member, Dave Turner,
plays Perkins.)

Both British born, Saden and
Kloegman have been exercising
their comic muses with the com-
pany for the past 15 years.
Hailing fron theatre troupes such
as the Actors Company and the
Pacific Gas and Light Opera
(“Serious theatre is comecly gone
wrong,” says Soden), the pair put
together in 1986 and again in
1989 an entire cast to tackle a
stage version of the John Cleese

Ga BE ES EO OS net Bee

Peraens

to Deep Cove’s Shaw Theatre.

tour-de-force, Fawlty Towers.

“I came back from England
with the scripts, and we got the
idea that we'd like to do a few of

* them live,” says Soden. “So we
wrote to Cleese through his agent
and he wrote back that he liked
the idea and to go ahead and do
it with his blessing.”

Though quite a compliment
and a coup, the concept had its
inherent complications. How, for
example, do you improve on per-
fection?

“That was the scary part,” says
Soden, “It wasn’t like a play. We
were presenting something live
that people knew inside and out.

The team knew from experi-
ence to expect the same with
Blackadder.

“It can’t be someone clse’s

See Adder page 26

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