Zadie's Shoes To Place In the 6th

Before heading off to Factory Theatre on Bathurst to see Zadie's Shoes on Saturday, I dropped by Porcetta and Co. to grab a bite to eat. This tiny place on Dundas near Bathurst serves only 1 kind of food: a pork sandwich. I had never been there before, but was tempted by that day's tweeted special: the lobster po boy. But they were out of it by the time I dropped by.

The pork sandwich was all right, but I expected more fatty juiciness given the pork cuts; some of the slices were white with fat. The crunchy pork skin was a nice touch. But the store is a little stingy with the toppings: only the hot sauce and mustard were free. That might have explained why my sandwich with mushrooms tasted a bit bland. Also, stick to the dijon mustard, the grainy mustard added nothing to the meal.

Zadie's Shoes is a funny drama about Benjamin (Joe Cobden), an inveterate gambler who finally hit bottom, owing $7000 to a bookie. He steals his girlfriend Ruth's (Patricia Fagan) money to make that one big bet to win it all back. That money was set aside by her for an alternative cancer treatment program in Mexico. Benjamin's sorry state of affairs has him scheming with a fellow addict named Bear (William MacDonald). As a lapsed Jew, he also returns to his synagogue for some solace. There he finds unsolicited advice, and a horse racing tip, from gregarious Eli (Harry Nelken), an old Jewish man given to nosy questions, funny quips, and Yiddish quotes. Meanwhile, Ruth has familiar, and familial, conflict with her sisters: New Age Lily (Shannon Perreault) and control-freak Beth (Lisa Ryder - Beka Valentine from Andromeda). Rounding out the cast is Beth's horn-dog husband Sean (Geoffrey Pounset).

The large Jewish audience loved Eli with his stories and advice, all given in that recognizable Yiddish-influenced English. Bear also got a lot of love for his filthy language and blunt talk; the man is incapable of refraining from dropping 4-letter bombs every other word. But I thought that Benjamin and Ruth were thin characterization: gambling addict and worried patient. Why are they together? Why should we care about their problems? The flaky sister versus the uptight one was also a cliché. So it was a funny play but does not have much emotional impact.

I think a better story would have concentrated on Benjamin, the hapless underachiever, Eli and Bear. Who should Benjamin listen to: the elder scholar with his learned wisdom or the realist who learned his lessons from the school of hard knocks.