So I haven’t done the promo thing here in a loooooooong time, but this is news it seemed crazy not to share and to offer special discount tickets to my new play which runs May 9-25th at the Granville Island Stage (the theatre formerly known as Prince, I mean The Arts Club Granville Island).

The new play is funnier than my first book Never Shoot a Stampede Queen which won the 2009 Leacock Medal for Humour. It’s called Never Shoot a Stampede Queen. Director dramaturge TJ Dawe has helped me craft a stage version of the story that shares my wild adventures as a naive young journalist in a totally new way and includes a bunch of fun, funny, strange stuff that I didn’t know when I wrote the book (that I’ve been told by some of the people featured in the book). The show stars Zachary Stevenson (the Arts Club’s Buddy Holly) and he’s amazing and much cuter I’ve ever been. Lucky me!

The show is a co-op production and the co-op is me, T.J. And Zach. Since we’re covering this on our Visa cards we considered looking for crowd funding but realized that what we really wanted was a crowd so please join us and tell your friends. We’ve got a special discount code that’ll get you $10 off most tickets – buddyholly. Get it?

If you’d like to attend our preview on May 9th for just $12 — yes, less than a movie ticket, less than a Fringe show — use the special preview code PREVIEW.

I’m planning to be at the show almost every night to sign books. And T.J., Zach and I will be sticking around for talkback sessions after the shows on Wed nights and Saturday afternoons. There’s also going to be a special Philosopher’s Cafe event on Saturday the 18th. For details check stampedequeen.ca or Facebook or #stampedequeen. For tickets visit http://www.vancouvertix.com/

The stage version of Stampede Queen just closed in Kamloops at the Western Canada Theatre where it played to full houses, standing ovations and rave reviews. This version just finished a brief preview run in Duncan — also playing to a couple of packed houses, a standing O and delighted audiences. The show is big fun and 100% Stampede Queen approved (we had Stampede Queens show up and approve it).

I’ve also got a new book out – a prequel of sorts to Stampede Queen.

Free Magic Secrets Revealed (published by Harbour) is about my embarrassing adventures as a teenager producing the greatest rock and roll magic show of all time. You don’t remember the greatest rock and roll magic show of all time? Yeah, that’d be what the book’s about. I think it’s funnier than Stampede Queen and a bunch of past Leacock winners — Ian and Will Ferguson and Terry Fallis agree. Unlike Stampede Queen it’s 100% homicide free — not that I wasn’t tempted to commit a few.

Magic Secrets should be in better bookstores now. The definition of “better bookstores” – any bookstore carrying my books…  I’ve also got a link for online purchases here. And there’s a new website for it coming soon at http://blackmetalfantasy.com/

More news on the book after the show is over!

I’m also doing a special Stampede Queen mailing list that you can subscribe to here. It’ll offer special info about the show, the book, any touring plans and maybe even some stories that aren’t in the book.

Anyway… If you’ve read this far just a note that I’m gonna try to blog more regularly and write about some of my favourite stuff from my interviews — the stuff that’s a little too left field for the stories I’m writing. Coming soon Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols talks about touring with  Duke Ellington, Dennis Quaid talking about… Something cool… And Penn from Penn and Teller on his favourite magic tricks.

Hope to see you at Stampede Queen.

Mark 

Happy Earth Day dear planet… Happy Earth Day to you…

So I was going to write something and then I realized… I wrote a whole show about all things eco that debuted in 2011 at the Edmonton Fringe Festival. And the only reason I’m not performing Greener Than Thou on tour right now is that I figured it was going to be confusing enough for people that I have a new book due out tomorrow — Free Magic Secrets Revealed — and a new play opening (Never Shoot a Stampede Queen — now playing at Western Canada Theatre in Kamloops, running at the Performance Garage in Duncan May 3- and at the Granville Island Stage May 9-5).

Anyway, here’s a taste of Greener Than Thou — directed and dramaturged by TJ Dawe (who is also directing and dramaturging Stampede Queen).

There are other clips for Greener on my Youtube channel if you’re interested.

Meanwhile, enjoy the turkey talk.

Barry Levinson didn’t set out to save the world with his new eco-horror film, but he is hoping to save Chesapeake Bay.

For Levinson’s new movie, The Bay (just released on DVD and online in Canada) the Academy-Award winning director (Rain Man) who’s also a three time nominee for best screenplay (…And Justice for All, Avalon and Diner) decided to make his first horror movie. But Levinson’s goal with The Bay wasn’t just to scare audiences in the theatre, but scare the hell out of them when they left the darkness and returned to the real world since his movie monsters were inspired by genuine environmental horror stories.

“Almost everything said is factual data,” Levinson told me as the two of us sat in a suite at a downtown Toronto hotel just before his movie’s world premiere at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival. “We’re not trying to invent shit just to try to unnerve you or whatever — there are isopods, the Bay is forty percent dead, they are dumping all this shit, pharmaceuticals, chicken manure. All that stuff is real. Not that anyone in the audience needs to know or care but it is, in fact, real.”

It’s also shot like it’s real — a compilation of “found footage” trying to recreate the day everything went wrong in a small seaside community like the one Steven Spielberg had his shark snack on in Jaws.

Levinson’s first foray into horror was inspired by the deteriorating state of his hometown — Baltimore, the setting for so much of his work including the TV series, Homicide.  After being invited to shoot a documentary on the increasingly toxic Chesapeake Bay, “because it’s forty percent dead” Levinson started doing homework. “PBS did a fantastic documentary that I watched, they have a series called Frontline that did a great documentary on the Bay, on pollution. And I thought, “I don’t know if I can do it any better.” And I don’t know anyone up in arms about it. That thing ran, you’d think people would go, “Holy God, we’ve gotta stop this, it’s forty percent dead! What are we going to do?” You know what I mean? Nothing. So I told the people, “I cant’ do better than what Frontline did. It’s a good, good documentary.”

But he couldn’t shake the ideas the research had sparked, or the conviction that attention must be paid. “Then I thought, “maybe what you need to do is put story telling with it. Create characters, create situations, and put the facts in it. And then you put a face on it all. If you scare people they go, “Oh, I’m scared, why am I scared?” Well, this is what happens when you do this and this and this.” And that led to The Bay.

“So then it was like, “So how do we do it?” And then, right away, it occurred to me, if you’re going to do it, why does it happen this particular day? Everyone had cellphones, cameras, people were tweeting, people were emailing, people were texting, etcetera etcetera. All that stuff was confiscated after that day, and now, x number years later, it’s all put together, and you can see what happened on that given day in this fictitious town.”

When I asked him to show his green cards, Levinson said his environmental activist streak was inspired by his research. “Holy God, Chesapeake Bay is like a toxic soup. This is horrific. And we just say, “Okay, that’s good enough.” And what I kept saying to myself is, “it’s not like we don’t know how to fix it. It’s not like certain diseases where we don’t know how to cure it.” We know how to cure it.

“But you say, “Why can’t we? Well, there’s all these economic issues.” You go, “Okay, I understand, this is the real world, I understand the economics of these things, I understand business.” But do you mean to tell me that rational people can’t sit down and find a way to improve the quality of the water in the Bay? It’s beyond what we’re capable of doing?”  We can do it. And economically we can do it. But we just don’t, you know?

“The private interest becomes so overwhelming that things just don’t get done. I’m not an environmentalist running around and doing all these things, but I am concerned. As someone who understands enough about business and economics, I do know if it hits the tipping point and it goes to the other side, there’s going to be all these hotels and all these recreational facilities, and all these sports activities — that whole economy is going to be screwed up. Right now we deal with one versus the other, and at a certain point, they’re going to get screwed completely as well. So let’s figure it out, guys. Why don’t we all sit down and come up with a better answer than, “Push it down the road, push it down the road.””

Mark Leiren-Young and “Kate Upton doppelganger” Ania Korkh. (photo by Tav Rayne)

So just another typical day posing for a photo with Sports Illustrated supermodel, Kate Upton… I mean Ania Korkh, the 22-year-old rhythmic gymnastics coach (and college student) dubbed “Kate Upton’s doppelganger” whose life turned upside down courtesy of a round of super-silliness on the Twittersphere.

Korkh’s friends kept telling her she looked a bit like Upton. So when Korkh saw the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue with the supermodel wearing a parka — a parka that looked a lot like the one Korkh had in her closet — she and a friend decided to have some fun and took their own version of the shot. Then Korkh tweeted the pic to her 78 twitter friends. That’s when the photographer 19-year-old Ariana Sairafi @_asairafi , dared her to DM it to Upton. Korkh hit send.

Then Upton @KateUpton did the same and added the word “amazing” — but Upton has 700,000 plus followers.

Thing is… the Moscow-born Korkh’s joke description of herself — an in-joke for friends — read “mail order bride in training.” So the global tabloid media went into overdrive with the news that Upton had a double and she was a mail order bride. For those of you who haven’t seen or read Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, the Bard played out this plot before…

Now Korkh aka @Huliganjettaa has 7000-plus followers, and that number should jump after she appears on CNN with Anderson Cooper later this week.

My photogapher Tav Rayne @open2om and I sat in the Integral Artists @integral_agency  conference room in Vancouver and watched as a still shell-shocked Korkh joked with her brother, his friend talent agent Nigel Mikoski and Sairafi about the madness, just before she did a Skype interview with ESPN. It’s not often I get to interview a roomful of people with the giggles.

No, she didn’t have a talent agent before this happened — and Mikoski isn’t actually her agent  now — just Korkh’s brother’s ex-roomie and the only person Korkh could think to call when her inbox was flooded with interview requests and marriage proposals.

For a bit more detail here’s the version of the story I did for The Vancouver Sun

And here’s the photo by Sairafi that set this storm in motion.

And my twitter handle https://twitter.com/leirenyoung

BC feature films were shut out of the nominations and other than some well-deserved love for Continuum (although where were the nods for the cast?) the nominations list should be tagged on as an addendum to the Save BC Film petition, which has just shy of 23,000 name on it at the moment.

http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/SAVE_BC_FILM/

If you haven’t already signed, here’s the scoop form the petition:

“The BC film industry, and the families of those 25 thousand employees, are struggling because of a continuous lack of provincial support. Please sign this petition and give our Premier a “compelling case” to change our tax incentives and help save the BC film industry. Lets make our voices be heard and fight to keep our industry alive! We are the many, who believe that this province is greater and stronger for having BC film in it! #savebcfilm”

Here’s the thank you letter I sent to former Minister of Finance, Carole Taylor when she kept credits alive a few years ago.

I just wanted to pass on my thanks for your decision to continue supporting television and film production in BC.

As a British Columbian who had to move to Ontario to follow the work in the television industry, I can tell you that these incentives really do make a difference. Just ask the producers who abandoned Alberta… or the producers who have suddenly decided they want to make movies in New Brunswick or Saskatchewan.

B.C.’s time zone, climate and incredible talent pool do make the province more attractive to the tv/film world than the rest of the country — but not attractive enough for producers to pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars more to shoot here.

Sign, share, tweet, lather, rinse, repeat.

And congrats to everyone — regardless of which province you call home — who did score a nomination.

Mahalo

Mark Leiren-Young

Hey… did someone at the Vancouver Playhouse study my list?

So I’m currently having conversations about how to spread the word about my next play — the stage version of Never Shoot a Stampede Queen (opening soon at a theatre near you if you’re near Kamloops or Vancouver and, hopefully, Williams Lake) and I remembered this column I wrote about doing PR in the days before Al Gore invented the internet for the now defunct Theatrum Magazine.

If you imagine doing a search and replace so that Madonna becomes, say, Lady Gaga, and NHL hockey references are switched to a sport that still exists, most of this still holds true. One reason I’ve decided to run this as it originally appeared is that I’m actually a little stunned at how popular #2 has become in recent years.

How to Get the Publicity You Deserve  (Originally published in Theatrum Magazine, 1997)

The only thing harder than putting on a play in this country is getting the media to notice it. Most Canadian newspapers have a sacred obligation to fill their entertainment section with news of the Friends latest flings, who Madonna has offended and/or slept with this week and reviews of large American movies with 10 million dollar publicity budgets. Meanwhile, CRTC regulations force Canadian TV News programs to spend ten minutes per night catching you up on how many goals Eric Lindros scored yesterday, five minutes on a jovial man or woman who looks outside the window to tell people who don’t have windows whether it’s raining, snowing or post- nuclear and one minute dealing with who Madonna has offended and/or slept with that week. Unfortunately, after our newspapers and TV shows have met those important obligations there just never seems to be much time to deal with frivolous little trifles like art and culture.

Obviously, the only way to escape the ghetto of the Entertainment Section and get some real attention is to make it onto the news pages. So here are some suggestions on how to get the media to pay attention to your theatre.

1.   Run a really HUGE deficit. Small deficits are expected and if you don’t have one yet, get with the program. The country is running a $34 billion dollar deficit — and that’s just this year. The problem is deficits are so common that if you want to make the news, owing a few thousand dollars just won’t do you any good. However, HUGE deficits with lots of zeros in them can still get you into the papers. As far as the newspapers are concerned, anything over a million dollars is real money, so don’t be afraid to think big. It also never hurts to get so deeply in debt that the bank threatens to foreclose. If you make all the requisite pleas to various political bodies and funding agencies, this can keep you in the news for weeks. It may even help with your fund-raising. The only problem is, sometimes the bankers don’t understand their role in this type ofmarketing campaign and actually do foreclose by mistake.

2. Have the Board of Directors suddenly fire your Artistic Director and/or

General Manager. In case you’ve missed this hot new trend which is currently sweeping the country, the next step is to get the Board — most of whom don’t know stage right from stage left and many of whom aren’t even quite sure where the theatre is — to dramatically declare that they are now in charge. And remember, the more arbitrary the firing appears, the more newsworthy.

3.  If you’ve already tried or rejected the possibility of severe mismanagement, here’s another option: Piss somebody off. Or, if you really want coverage, piss a lot of people off. It’s a frightening fact that more people read the letters to the editor than check out the theatre listings. If you piss someone off they may write a nasty letter about you. If you piss a lot of people off and you get really, really lucky, they may picket your theatre. TV cameras may not like the performing arts but they’re crazy about picket signs and the louder and sillier the protesters, the more time you’ll all get on TV.

4.  Hire Madonna. Actually, any celebrity will do — even a Canadian one –but if you can convince Madonna to be in your show, cheer up because you’ll soon be able to afford that dream lunch at Burger King. Reporters are always intrigued by the idea of somebody famous doing something truly incomprehensible — like performing in a play for Equity scale.

5.  Ban the media (or a particular critic). This is sort of a reverse psychology thing where you tell the media they are not invited to an event so they can scream censorship and loudly complain about their god-given right to attend an event they weren’t the slightest bit interested in attending in the first place. Just make sure that you let them know they’re banned because if they don’t notice, it won’t do you any good.

If you’re really desperate, here are a few final possibilities. However, none of these are recommended for beginners.

* Set the theatre on fire. Fires look really pretty on television.

* Close the place down — or at least announce that you’re closing the place down — then all the people who wouldn’t come to your shows will suddenly gather round in this time of need to declare your theatre a vital part of the city’s artistic heritage. They may even donate money. And if you have a really big fund-raiser, with bands and big-shot speakers and comedians and such, they may even attend. Unfortunately, once you start doing plays again, most of these people will immediately forget all about you until the next time you threaten to close.

* Die — preferably on a slow news day. Admittedly it’s a drastic measure, but it does guarantee that you get at least a small notice in the papers.

Unfortunately, this trick only works once, and if you’re a member of the arts community and have never been involved with a Canadian sit-com or had a bit part in a U.S. movie of the week, chances are you still won’t make it onto the TV news.

Colleen Wheeler in a scene from The Initiation Trilogy.

So at the end of June after Maggie Langrick, the Entertainment Editor at The Sun, discovered her theatre critic Peter Birnie was taking a buyout I agreed to do “a few stories” for the paper. Almost 100 stories later I’m kinda shocked at how much fun I’ve had with my return to the madness that is daily journalism, and my first foray into the loopy world of overnight reviewing.

I got to spread the word about some stories it was a treat to spread the word about including the local staged reading of Michael Healey’s powerful political comedy, Proud, Jackson Davies’ remembrances of The Beachcombers and most recently the story of Erin Northcott trying to fulfill her late brother’s dying wish by finishing his movie.

I also had the privilege of writing a couple of obituaries for people I knew and admired. I was lucky enough to work with Winston Rekert on the debut episode of the TV series that launched me as a TV writer — Terminal City. No not the one about cancer. I’ve um… Discovered… A clip of his appearance here. He was a treat to work with. It was an honour and agonizing to say goodbye to my friend and occasional mentor, Ian Caddell.

I also got to see some amazing theatre.

When I first started reviewing I thought… I must be out of practice… Not only was I enjoying almost everything, but I was excited about so many upcoming shows. If I hadn’t been reviewing, I would have been buying season ticket packages — something I’ve almost never done. When I ran this by Colin Thomas at The Georgia Straight he reassured me it wasn’t my imagination, he couldn’t remember a Fall with such an impressive slate of theatre.

Since I’ve only been doing the reviewing thing for half the year — and I don’t get to cover everything or see all the shows I wanted to — it seems weird to do a top ten list, but here were my fave five of the shows I saw in Vancouver in 2012. We’ll go with alphabetical order here because the first one starts with A…

Amaluna. I’ve been a Cirque Du Soleil fan since I covered their first touring show at the Vancouver Children’s festival. Yes, I’m pretty sure that was their FIRST touring show. I’ve seen a lot of their shows, but Amaluna — with its revamped Tempest storyline, the first narrative I can recall that held up throughout as narrative, and sexy style — is my favourite to date. Who’da thought playing puzzle games with palm fronds would be a showstopper?

Blind Date at the Cultch. I’m told this clown show about a first date — where the first date is dragooned from the audience — usually runs 90 minutes. The night I was there it clocked in at two hours and change because the girlfriend of the onstage volunteer seemed to need an intervention of her own. I came away with a huge crush on the clown Mimi  If I could have seen it again I would have. If I can see it again I will. One day I hope I will be Mimi’s onstage date.

Far Side of the Moon. Saw it twice — once with Quebec stage star, Yves Jacques, who now owns the role, the second time with the show’s creator and the original performer of the solo piece, Robert Lepage. I’m not sure if it’s Lepage’s all-time masterpiece — I wish I knew enough of his canon to compare and contrast — but it’s an astonishing piece of theatre and there was a real power in seeing him perform the role himself – something he hadn’t done in eight years. While I enjoyed both performances, Lepage had an ease to his interpretation that was completely charming.

The Electric Company’s The Initiation Trilogy — three unique theatre experiences, one show. I wasn’t reviewing this one, so I didn’t take notes and can’t recall which poet wrote which section. I liked two of the segments, but the  sequence in Chernobyl… Wow. Explosive. Between this and The Penelopiad last year at the Playhouse I think I may be a Colleen Wheeler groupie.

It  was a treat to see the opening night of the final run of The Number 14. For me half the fun was flashing back to the original cast and remembering my initial shock and delight at those routines. A truly special show…

Other fun nights at the theatre, so I guess that makes ‘em “honourable mentions”: Aaron Bushkowsky’s Play With Monsters, Mary Poppins, which I got to check out with my niece, The Flame‘s Christmas special at The Cultch, Touchstone’s mindbender, Eternal Hydra, Dickens’ Women, Bard on the Beach’s King John and the Firehall’s Good Timber. And I was surprised by how much I laughed at two period comedies — the Arts Club’s production of She Stoops to Conquer and Bard’s Merry Wives of Windsor.

I’m currently psyched to see Ride the Cyclone for the first time (I’ve got a preview of it coming out just before PUSH opens), my friend TJ Dawe’s show, Medicine (Firehall Arts Centre), Grim & Fischer (at the Cultch) and Craiglist Cantata (at the Arts Club).

Anyway, glad the Mayans were wrong and wishing everyone a very entertaining 2013.

I’d just been asked by the editor at Theatrum — a now defunct national theatre magazine — to let him know if there was anything in Vancouver that the rest of the country ought to know about. I remember being annoyed at the time that national and international festivals never seemed to look outside Toronto or Montreal for potential productions and, well, The Number Fourteen was something special. My memory is that I missed opening night, showed up on the weekend — I think it was a matinee — and the brilliant Gina Bastone spotted me in the audience and abused me repeatedly from the stage, making it almost impossible to stop laughing.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote. I’ve blacked out the phone numbers — because, hey, the show is no longer looking to tour — but I really did publish them in Theatrum. I haven’t seen the show since that day twenty years ago… On the 25th I’ll be joining the show’s alumni in the audience at The Waterfront to enjoy the final run of this amazing bus ride.

If there’s anyone out there looking for a sample of Vancouver theatre to bring to a national or international festival, call Touchstone Theatre at (604) XXX-XXXX or Axis Mime at (604) XXX©XXXX. The show is called The Number 14 and it’s a delightful showcase for some of the city’s top comic talents

The Number 14 is a mythical bus that cruises through all of Vancouver’s neighbourhoods. It’s also the setting for a series of sometimes silly, sometimes probing (sometimes both) vignettes about life in this city.

Gina Bastone and Colin Heath are both alumni of Cirque de Soleil. Bastone’s a killer clown and the pixie-sized Heath is capable of awesome acrobatics (even with the broken hand he was performing with the day I saw the show). Watching Peter Anderson clown around is always a treat. And the rest of the cast — Beatrice Zeilinger, David Mackay and Axis Mime Artistic Director, Wayne Specht –are all highly skilled performers.
Some of the scenes that stood out for me were Heath as a little old lady doing tumbles on the fast moving bus, Zeilinger as a lost little girl singing about how she’s not scared of all the horrors of the modern world and Anderson’s edgy rap number about Vancouver.
The show sags a few times in the second act when it dips into poignancy, but can’t quite find it’s way back out, especially in a scene with two Canucks fans where one of them reveals he coulda been a contendah but now he’s a bum. It’s played truthfully by Specht and Mackay, but the resolution is awkward and it takes time for the show to regain its momentum.
Although Number 14 is a collective creation, director Roy Surette has pulled this complex piece together with a level of polish and a degree of confidence that reaffirms his status as one of Vancouver’s most exciting and talented directors.

Here’s my preview of the current production in The Vancouver Sun: 

I’ve not only seen some of the world’s top improvisers, I’ve been lucky enough to jam on stage with some of them. Last summer during the Edmonton Fringe I got to briefly join the cast of Edmonton’s legendary improv soap Die Nasty and played a few scenes opposite Mark Meer, a nominee for a 2011 Canadian Comedy Award despite facing pretty much the ultimate handicap in scoring national recognition – he works in freaking Edmonton.   I’ve taken a workshop with the guy who created TheatreSports, Keith Johnstone. But this isn’t about rattling off my improv credentials beyond trying to establish that when it comes to improv I may be easily amused, but I’m not easily impressed.

Almost everyone has suffered through bad improv and Little League level TheatreSports performances where the actors have more fun than the audience.

I’ve also seen spectacular improv where it’s hard to believe ten thousand monkeys working ten thousand years could have banged out funnier scenarios and cleverer quips.

If those ten thousand monkeys want a shot at taking on Rebecca Northan’s Blind Date they’d better start typing now and I think we’ll need to spot them a few extra centuries.

The gag is that Northan — a disciple of Johnstone’s — plays Mimi, a French clown on a blind date. She picks her date from the audience after doing a bit of pre-show scouting in the lobby.

At the show I saw — near the tail end of the run at Vancouver’s legendary Cultch her blind date — a 58-year-old restaurant consultant named Dale, was funny, dry and game. But his “lover’ (his words when asked to describe their relationship) seemed to spend the night worrying that her boyfriend was going to get naked with Northan onstage. One of the conceits of the improvised play is that the partner of the drafted date is allowed to yell “time out” to pause the action, and “bullshit” if they feel Northan’s costar du jour is being untruthful. Any time Dale and Mimi got close, Dale’s lover Jamie hollered “time out.”

Jamie’s clear discomfort put both the audience and her beau on edge. Dale stopped playing with Mimi and started coming up with ways to avoid touching her, even when it was crucial to move the plot forward.  There were moments the show felt like it was veering dangerously close to a train wreck.

The audience was one “time out” or “bullshit” away from booing Jamie out of the theatre — and Dale looked to be an interjection away from stepping offstage to salvage his relationship — when somehow, through a magical mix of comedy and empathy Mimi/Northan smoothed the waters with the audience and the distraught Jamie and turned Dale’s “time-out’ induced reticence into part of a consistently funny, truly touching performance that ran close to two hours and twenty minutes.

According to the publicist at the Cultch — and a couple of friends in the theatre biz who had both seen the show twice — a typical performance runs closer to 90 minutes.

A few months ago Blind Date won “Best Comedic Revue, Play or Series” in the Canadian Comedy Awards and Northan picked up the prize for best female improviser.

I can’t imagine anyone who saw her perform this show not voting for her.

The brave and brilliant premise, her quick thinking, her story-shaping skills and her ability to toss off one-liners were impressive and thoroughly entertaining. Her ability to keep a show on the rails with a couple of participants who didn’t want to play was dazzling.