Elderly patrons and kindergarten children, thugs, businessmen, tripping hippies and a whole other wild cast of characters came to life on the stage of the Great Canadian Theatre Company (GCTC) on the evening of Nov. 29. It was the opening night of Axis Theatre’s The Number 14, a Canadian classic currently on its milestone 20th anniversary run.
The Number 14 is a comedic production that depicts the daily comings and goings of passengers on a real bus that used to run a route through the streets of Vancouver. The play runs approximately 120 minutes and features six actors who collectively play over 60 different characters in a series of sketches.
The sketches feature the use of masks in the style of commedia del’arte, the 16th century Italian theatre form that used masks, as well as vaudeville slapstick humour. The onstage antics call to mind both Monty Python and Mr. Bean.
The play, though written in the ‘90s, has not become outdated. Instead, jokes continue to be updated in select sketches to ensure that the show stays modern. “Dalton McGuinty’s wife must be disappointed now that he’s lost his caucus,” a loudmouth character quipped in one such scene.
“I sometimes want to sit there and count laughs,” said actor Stefano Giulianetti. “I have performed at 40 shows in a previous tour and 50 shows in this tour and I can’t wait to hit the stage again.”
Giulianetti said he himself first saw the show as a student.
“I remember coming home and thinking . . . ‘what did I just see?’” he said.
“Whimsical, irreverent, and wacky . . . a true love story to Vancouver,” audience member John Doucet said. “The school scene was my favourite. That’s the one that sticks in my mind. Unreal.”
The scene in question was a crowd favourite in which an irascible, liquor-drinking kindergarten teacher on stilts (played by actor Scott Walters), brings his entire kindergarten class onto the bus filled with five senior citizens. To the audience’s amazement, as the scene progresses those five seniors turn into the five members of the kindergarten class in an impressively subtle series of onstage costume changes.
“It’s one of my favourites to do and one of the audiences favorites,” performer Chris Adams said. “Most people don’t notice it happening. It’s the magic of theatre – by the fourth or fifth kid . . . the majority of people start to think more people are entering the stage . . . but there’s still just five of us.”
Scott Walters said he has come to love his character in the scene as much as the audience does.
Walters said one of the greatest challenges of performing The Number 14 is the impossibly fast costume changes.
“In the finale while we change four times each into different characters its just bananas backstage. It’s absolute bedlam,” he said.
Absolute bedlam isn’t such a bad description of the action onstage either. The Number 14 is a wild circus of a show — but one that actor Giulianetti said “tells us much about ourselves.”
The stiff businessmen, sleeping old ladies, irritating loudmouths and vandalizing punks who populate The Number 14 are characters audience members could recognize.
Everyone enjoyed seeing the exaggerations brought to life, and they showed it with a standing ovation.
“It’s almost guilty how much fun we have. I feel sometimes we have more fun than the audience — I think it’s an even race,” Giulianetti said.
The Number 14 runs until Dec. 16 at the Great Canadian Theatre Company.
