A couple of small-town 20something BFFs embark on the gay cruise of a lifetime courtesy of South Coast Repertory in Adam Bock’s hilarious–and unexpectedly touching–World Premiere romantic comedy The Canadians.

Life in Port Allison, Manitoba (population just over 3000 and so far north, even North Dakota and a bit a Minnesota lie to the south) offers few surprises to Gordy (Kyle T. Hester) and Brendan (Daniel Chung).

Gordy’s got his weekly hockey practice with Johnny and Bobby (Linda Gehringer and Corey Brill) and Brendan’s got his pottery class, but that’s about all the excitement there is in Port Allison, that is until Brendan’s uncle offers him tickets for a Caribbean cruise he and Brendan’s other “uncle” have had to cancel, and what makes the surprise gift even more enticing is that it’s a gay cruise populated by a whopping three-thousand gay men aboard an honest-to-goodness gay ship!

Not that either Gordy or Brandon is about to inform the town locals of the precise nature of their upcoming cruise, and definitely not Gordy’s work colleagues Mayor Claudette (Gehringer) or Little Bobby (Corey Dorris), and most especially not his coworkers Trish (Brlll) and Beth (Dorris), whose proposal to make it a shipboard foursome is quickly quashed.

And so off the buddies go, pleased as punch to find deck chairs provided free of charge (and towels too!) though not unfortunately cell phone use, which is why if the twosome get separated, they’ll simply meet back at their cabin or leave each other a note on the door.

And separated they do indeed get when Brendan meets Manchester, England hottie Andy (Brill) and leaves poor Gordy in the lurch with only 60something Illinois couple Wally and Ollie (Dorris and Gehringer) to console a man who’d clearly like to be so much more than Brandon’s BFF, if only he could get up the nerve to speak his heart.

The unrequited (or at the very least unspoken) love of one best friend for another has fueled plenty of movie romcoms at least as far back as Ducky Dale’s hopeless crush on Andie in John Hughes’ Pretty In Pink, but rare is the stage romantic comedy that follows suit. (Not that there are all that many stage romcoms to begin with.)

For this reason alone, The Canadians comes as manna from romcom heaven to those who could never say no to Tom and Meg or to Richard and Julia or to Sandra Bullock and any number of movie costars.

It’s also a gift to gay audiences who’ve been craving the same kind of same-sex comedy romance that straights have been lapping up for years, and a mark of how far we’ve come in the past decade or two that Orange County’s premier regional theater has not only programmed The Canadians, Sunday’s older, presumably mostly hetero audience seemed to be rooting as much as I was for Gordy and Brendan’s first kiss.

Adding to the fun are small-town Canadian idioms and idiosyncracies (our neighbors up north do seem to love their jambusters, poutines, and Blues), and one irresistible performance after another.

Under Jaime Castañeda’s effervescent direction, Hester and Chung could not make for a more appealing pair of leads, while Brill, Dorris, and Gehringer do some of the most delicious (not to mention age-and-gender-bending) work in town.

Not only that, but South Coast Rep manages to deliver what would take Hollywood a multimillion-dollar budget, hundreds of actors and background players, and a multiple-location shoot to match while creating the same magic it would take a behind-the-scenes team numbering in the hundreds to achieve on film thanks to the combined gifts of production designers Lauren Helpern (scenic), Denitsa Bliznakova (costumes), Josh Epstein (lighting), Cricket S. Myers (sound), and Yee Eun Nam (projections).

Andy Knight is dramaturg. Jenny Jacobs is production stage manager and Nikki Heskin is assistant production stage manager. Diversity in casting is thanks to Joanne DeNaut, CSA while Manitoba accents are courtesy of dialect coach Philip D. Thompson.

Don’t let its rather nondescript title put you off from catching South Coast Repertory’s latest. The Canadians is far and away the feel-good theatrical romcom of the year.

South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa.
www.scr.org

–Steven Stanley
October 13, 2019
Photos: Jordan Kubat/SCR

Tags: Adam Bock, Orange County Theater Review, South Coast Repertory