With six cast members playing over 20 characters, The Wedding Party took its opening night audience by storm at the National Arts Centre on Feb. 1.
Through a series of improv sessions with fellow cast members, playwright Kristen Thomson developed over two hours of non-stop laugh-out-loud moments vividly brought to life by Jason Cadieux, Virgilia Griffith, Trish Lindström, Moya O’Connell, Tom Rooney and Thomson herself.
The play depicts the wedding reception of Sherry and Jack Jr., both pointedly absent from the show, have what’s supposed to be the best day of their lives ruined by the nuanced family conflict that escalates through the night.
While the wedding reception begins with friendly small talk between family members celebrating the joyous occasion, mother-of-the-bride Maddie eventually overhears father-of-the-groom Jack Sr. speak ill of her daughter, and that’s enough to unleash her protective, maternal rage.
Jack Sr. insists that his son is too good for Maddie’s daughter, who is a librarian in Hamilton, Ont. and will likely never leave her small town.
He even goes on to say that his son ought to settle down with “someone of substance;” someone like Jack Jr.’s best friend/academic, Alice, whom we later find out Jack Sr. is secretly in love with. Things only get more awkward from then on.
The Wedding Party is a brilliant mess of art as the entire cast and crew elegantly runs through scene after scene of messed-up family members all-too-familiar to the rest of us.
It’s one of those you-had-to-be-there shows simply because there was so much going on—each moment more dramatic than the last, and each joke funnier than the one before.
Kristen Thomson set out to create a show that would give people a laugh (or many) for their buck, and The Wedding Party did exactly that.
It wasn’t just funny because the characters were so awkward and dramatic that you couldn’t help but laugh. It was unreservedly entertaining because its humour was built on fully developed characters with an uncanny resemblance to those we know and love in real life.
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