Fresh from his big win at the annual Dora Awards, Gavin Crawford wowed a packed house at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre with his hilarious new one-man show Ménage! Tuesday night.
Playing a host of characters, ranging from a newly out Pride virgin to straight-but-not-narrow revellers to celebrities and politicians, Ménage! uses Pride to skewer the gay community and the straights who coopt gay culture with Crawford’s biting satire.
Arriving onstage in a green wig and a costume made out of cling wrap, Crawford, as Lady Gaga, boasted to his audience, “I wrote “Born This Way” so that gays would finally have an anthem. I thought it up while sitting at the piano inventing originality.”
Even the recent “Beyond Gay” controversy was the centre of a vicious skit where Crawford played the host of a nature show examining the behaviour and mating habits of the “post-mo.”
“The po-mo believes his range stretches the entirety of Greater Toronto, but in reality he rarely leaves the area between Queen and Ossington and Queen and Dufferin,” he explains. ”He prefers straight-acting men but unfortunately has a genetic defect that makes him believe that wearing bow ties is straight-acting.”
There were a few knowing guffaws from the audience when he came out as Rufus Wainwright and acknowledged that he’d just won a Dora for his opera Prima Donna. “I have no idea what a Dora is, but I got one,” he enthused. Crawford won a Dora for his lead performance in The Situationists the night before.
Michael Ignatieff and Chantal Hébert were also targets of Crawford’s satire.
As yet, there are no plans to remount Ménage!, but Crawford says he’d like to do a run of the show in Toronto and a tour across Canada.
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