New Kids On The Block

On Saturday, I went to Theatre Passe Muraille for a re-mount of playwright Jacob Richmond's Legoland, An Atomic Vaudeville's production. This was probably due to the successful of the follow-up hit Ride The Cyclone last year.

Before Cyclone, Legoland first introduced us to Uranium. We experience this Saskatchewan town through the eyes of the Lamb siblings, 16-year-old Penny (Celine Stubel) and 13-year-old Ezra (Amitai Marmostein). Having grown up in the nearby hippie, non-conformist commune of Elysium, they found all aspects of the outside world, dubbed Legoland by their elders, to be endlessly fascinating. Even if it was just a local Walmart.

The play was ostensibly Penny's "don't do crime" presentation, a mandated social service sentencing for selling drugs (prescription meds) and attacking a boy-band member turned gangsta rapper (Johnny Moon aka JK 47) in Orlando, Florida. How they got to that point involved a convoluted, often comic and sometimes poignant story acted out in pantomime, puppetry, and even a song or two.

Both Stubel and Marmostein played their role with gusto. Penny was a precocious, deeply passionate teenager who had trouble fitting in at their boarding school. Her bullied life had extra resonance with the recent case of Rehtaeh Parson, a girl from a small town in the Maritimes who committed suicide. Ezra wasn't quite as affected by his outsider status, as he lived in his own world of fake accents, Nietzsche, and dead-panned non sequiturs.

Overall, it was a fun, amusing play that skewered popular culture: over-medicated children, high school cliques, manufactured pop music, and so on. Unfortunately, set against Ride The Cyclone, the richer, more accomplished musical comedy follow-up, it suffered a little in comparison. The laughs are bigger in Cyclone, the pathos deeper. And of course, there are all those toe-tapping numbers.