Funny, amiable, and hey, there’s small-town curling: Hurry Hard at the Mayfield, a review

Curling may have snazzy international tentacles, and Olympics cred and all that. But there’s something quintessentially small town, domesticated, and Canuck, about curling.

The camaraderie, the jokey squabbling, the tenacious feuding, the intense competitive spirit (not to mention the limited dating pool) … they’re all part of Kristen Da Silva’s Hurry Hard, a Canadian rom-com with brooms, now hurrying hard on the Mayfield stage in a Kate Ryan production with an all-star cast.

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A big part of the fun is seeing what five top-drawer actors with comic chops — Matt Busby, Kristi Hansen, Jamie Cavanagh, Jenny McKillop, Paul-Ford Manguelle — make of a genial if predictable comedy that takes us backstage at community curling, with a double-takeout of funny one-liners, family friction, and the dark unresolved family secret obligatory in Canadian theatre. It’s (very) carefully constructed, with the exception of a couple of cringe-y cliché scenes. Under Ryan’s direction the actors apply themselves expertly to creating vivid and distinctive, believable characters and making convincing chemistry happen.     

Bill (Mat Busby) and Sandy (Kristi Hansen) met while curling, they got married in the Didsbury Curling Club, and now, d-i-v-o-r-c-e-d (everyone spells it out in Didsbury, AB.), they’re busy trying to avoid each other in that very location. The stakes laid out by the play are high. For one thing, it’s  the last bonspiel at the curling club before it gets torn down, its inglorious probable future, as one character sighs, a frozen yogurt shop. For another, Didsbury is playing arch-enemy Olds for the regional championship. And as Bill’s no-goodnik bro Terry (Jamie Cavanagh) points out, the regional championship means retaining “the banner!” and being on the front page of the paper. As I say, the stakes are cosmically high.

The crisis at hand is that the team is short one member (a freak gravel truck encounter en route to practice) whose fingers are being sewn back in a particularly prairie gothic way. And without female participation, a notion that appalls the blithely sexist Terry — “women aren’t made for sports” — and leaves Bill conflicted for reasons pertaining to his d-i-v-o-r-c-e,  the match will be forfeited. Goodbye Didsbury dreams, especially Terry’s. But wait, Sandy is a kickass curler, hmm.

Mat Busby, Jamie Cavanagh, Kristi Hansen, Paul-Ford Manguelle in Hurry Hard, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Sandy’s friend Darlene (Jenny McKillop), the town hairdresser, is a mere novice at curling, and a reluctant one at that. As Hurry Hard opens Terry is awaiting the arrival via Canada Post of his Hercules platinum ultra-light super-broom. And Sandy is applying an ice pack to Darlene’s backside (“why are we playing such a slippery sport?”). The fifth character, the team’s alluring newest member, is Johnny (Paul-Ford Manguelle), good-natured eye candy, awesomely fit and dumb as a stone.

Speaking as we were about Terry the casual sexist, nothing much can be done about the jarring scenes in which Johnny’s mere presence reduces Darlene and Sandy to nitwits. The former can’t keep her hands off him; she’s all over him like wasps discovering the Gatorade. And Sandy isn’t much more restrained. What? The actors just step up, shed comic nuance, and go for it. And then return to their characters.

Daniel vanHeyst, the reigning monarch of atmospheric, detailed design — consider, as but one example, his Ontario cottage country set for Da Silva’s Where You Are, at Shadow Theatre a season ago — has fashioned a wood-panelled small-town curling clubhouse that feels authentic through and through, a veritable crucible of curling. The general clutter, the photo walls, the double-rack of trophies of every size, the kitchen with the serving window, the lighting fixtures shaped like curling rocks. When Sandy alludes to the old-sock smell of the joint, you know exactly what she’s talking about; it’s coming off the set. The lighting, like the cast and the set, is deluxe, amusingly prosaic and dramatic as required (it’s by Siobhan Sleath).

The sibling rapport between Bill and Terry is amusingly set forth in the play, and smart comic performances from Busby as the mild-mannered ex-husband, a sad-eyed nice guy/ straight man to Cavanagh as the freeloader underachiever bro. Cavanagh is genuinely funny as the aging ladies’ man, with the shrug of the guy perpetually on the rebound from his past. The latter’s off-hand way with escalating outrages of entitled freeloader-dom, unspooled like a shaggy-dog story by Da Silva, will make you laugh.

The chemistry between the women has a similar dynamic, and matching scenes. McKillop is a hoot as Darlene, who’s been around, and whose breezy observations — about food, hair, men, dating, assorted sports — have a kind of practical worldly wisdom about them. “If you ever need anything waxed …” is an exit line McKillop floats as she drags herself off towards the ice. “If you ever need a shoulder, or any other body part, to cry on….” And they play off Hansen as the warm-hearted, reasonable Sandy, an aspirational caterer trying to put her d-i-v-o-r-c-e behind her.

It’s Manguelle’s unselfconscious cheerfulness — it’s unsquelchable — that make Johnny the babe magnet so funny.

Will the assorted domestic and sporting crises be resolved in the course of the sitcom?  Geez Louise, get a grip (and have a “Strawberry Brier”, number 1 on the theme cocktail menu). As you will glean, you need know nothing of curling (I’m guilty) to get a kick out of Hurry Hard, an amiable entertainment executed by likeable actors in a setting that, like the characters, feels lived in. Rock on.

REVIEW

Hurry Hard

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre, 16615 109 Ave.

Written by: Kristen Da Silva

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Mat Busby, Jamie Cavanagh, Kristi Hansen, Paul-Ford Manguelle, Jenny McKillop

Running: through July 26

Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca, 780-483-4051