At 20 years young, Victoria’s subversively weird, hilarious and always topical cabaret is anything but all grown up.
By David Lennam
The difficult part of explaining Atomic Vaudeville to anyone who hasn’t experienced one of the Victoria company’s 87 different cabaret shows over the last two decades is putting into words a three-hour circus of sketch comedy, big musical production numbers, monologues, clowning, standup and utter weirdness, connected by a clever story arc that’s relentlessly topical, sharply clever, darkly subversive and so on point you might be confused about whether this is straightforward spit-up-your-beer funny or some sort of mockumentary skewering whatever you saw on the news that afternoon.
The cult of AV began with founders Jacob Richmond and Britt Small in 2004 and celebrates 20 years as the company prepares for its upcoming Halloween show. Richmond jokes that the underlying philosophy may have been, “How are we going to pay our rent?” but was essentially seeing what they could get away with on stage.
“It slowly created a strong community,” says Richmond, “where an actor with Stratford on their resumé could be sharing the stage with someone who never performed in their entire life.”
“It slowly created a strong community where an actor with Stratford on their resumé could be sharing the stage with someone who never performed in their entire life.”
Small suggests AV’s longevity comes down to fulfilling a basic need for both artists and audience.
“It’s a way to play with developing work and especially for artists who really are aligned with the idea of art as resistance to dominant culture … It’s a way for people to wrestle with their own lives and experiences and, in some ways, I think we’ve been really good at bringing the outsides to the middle, whether it’s working with queer people or people with different abilities or people who have newly moved here. We take in a lot of strangers in a sense and people looking for community.”
The big productions, featuring 20 or more cast members, are the reason so many performers originally got into theatre. And these days, those opportunities are too rare.
Andrew Bailey, who joined the AV cast on their fourth cabaret, loves that the process of creating each show has a messy, organic quality, featuring a cast that’s always evolving.
“People come and go, stay, go, come back, go again and come back again. It’s people just out of theatre school, people who’ve been doing it for 20 years and people who’ve never done theatre in their lives working together to create something beyond themselves. At its best, it’s community theatre in the best possible sense.”
AV has also been an incredible incubator, a first step for actors and comedians to realize that however weird their act was, it was accepted as solid gold on this stage. There are hundreds of alumni, including those who have gone on to — or came from — greatness elsewhere: Mike Delamont, Amanda Lisman, Morgan Cranny, Katie-Ellen Humphries, Amitai Marmorstein, Celine Stubel, Jimbo, Hank & Lily, Brooke Maxwell, Karen Brelsford, Meg Braem, Wes Borg, Ingrid Hansen, Trevor Hinton, Chris Vickers, the late great Gina McIntosh, et al.
And from all those shows came bona fide hits that stood on their own, like the musical The Batshits, the play Legoland and the Broadway darling Ride the Cyclone.
I’ve always enjoyed AV’s ability to blindside audiences with comedy that seemingly comes from nowhere, but makes sense. Shocking, but somehow also strangely soothing. Always whip smart, but deliberately low brow. Underfunded, unloved by the establishment, always waving its arms to flag down the mainstream media.
Richmond, who left the show as head writer in 2020 to pursue other opportunities, figures AV never gained mainstream success because — well, maybe it was just too Atomic Vaudeville.
“We tried to figure out a way to make it not so Little Rascals, but the format rejects anything that isn’t a sprawling anarchic mess. That’s the beauty of it, but ‘a sprawling irreverent anarchic mess’ isn’t going to bring Disney to your door,” says Small.
She laughs about her baby not yet being critically baptized.
“I think it’s like we still have the punk esthetic and maybe that’s what makes us not feel too bitter.”
She figures it’s a missed opportunity for Victoria not to get behind AV and give it the sort of credential Second City or The Groundlings have established elsewhere.
“And fuck the man, things need to change and keep resisting against what isn’t working, which is what art can really do is keep us real. We can get so hypnotized by culture and by everything. You kind of have to punch people in the face every once in a while and go, ‘Hey!’ ”
For upcoming performances, visit atomicvaudeville.com.