As of January 7, 2013, this website will serve as an archive site only. For news, reviews and a connection with audience and creators of theatre all over the country, please go to The Charlebois Post - Canada.
Mike Birbiglia
Not just for laughs
Sleepwalk is not just very, very funny it is also scary and profoundly moving.
by Gaëtan L. Charlebois
I like Mike Birbiglia. (See my review of his last presentation in Montreal.)
Birbiglia, simply, looks and talks like a human. In this way he is like three other of favourite comics: Patton Oswalt, Eddie Izzard and Louis CK. What makes him different from Oswalt and CK is the lack of rage and from Izzard is the lack of surrealism. But Izzard understands and likes Birbiglia (as he said in his iTunes session, Live From London) and I think it's because the two men share a comic trait: the tangent. Both start by telling a story (Izzard, say, about the Last Supper and Birbiglia, say, about his girlfriend seeing another man) and before they get to the end of the tale, they have veered all over the place. They're not the only two comics who use the tangent as an integral part of their work (Dane Cook has tried it - as he has tried everything - and still isn't funny) but they are both unerringly hilarious when they do.
WildSide, CharPo and Beyond
by Gaëtan L. Charlebois
What a week it has been!
The WildSide Festival was very, very good to CharPo. Our traffic exploded and our contributors, who were everywhere, heard lots of great reaction to this site. The comment most often made was that we offer an immediacy to the theatre dialogue - reviews come out fast and are spread quickly, shared over and over again via Twitter and Facebook. It's also great that the internet allows us to review shows which run two or three nights (as we did with Hamlet, Match Made in Hell, and Mike Birbiglia's My Girlfriend's Boyfriend) and these reviews seem to be appreciated by the readers and artists. (Birbiglia, for instance, tweeted my review of his show to his 50,000 followers and in the ten minutes following his tweet, we experienced a 500 pageview spike on the site - which normally pulls in 150-250 pageviews per day. The dialogue about the show broadened to people from the US, even after the show moved on to Oceania.) So appreciated that our site doubled it's previous record, this week (and that's even if you remove the statistical anomaly caused by the Birbiglian spike).
What WildSide also caused was a lively exchange amongst the CharPo people about how shows should be handled - profiled, reviewed or both - and who CharPo is for. We decided both profiled and reviewed. Identifying who we are meant for is a bit more complex.
By Gaëtan L. Charlebois
To say I am a fan of Mike Birbiglia is a bit of an understatement.
I love recorded comedy (aside from the Wagner, there's more of it on my iPod than anything else) and I buy and download damn near anything. (That gets me in trouble, sometimes; ie: Dane Cook, the unfunniest fucking man in America.) On a whim, once, I downloaded a recording called My Secret Public Journal and I was absolutely hooked. This became the recording I'd turn to whenever I was sad because Birbiglia's embroidered true stories about his life were also sad—in the hysterically funny sense of the word.
Mike Birbiglia whose My Girlfriend's Boyfriend opens tonight and runs until Saturday at the Gésu. He's had two hit albums and his new book, Sleepwalk With Me, is doing great guns. "It always makes me laugh when people are surprised that their favorite Hollywood stars are gay. I'm quick to point out, 'Remember how sixty-five percent of the drama club in high-school was gay? Well, they graduated.'" (From Sleepwalk With Me)
