REVIEW: Three Men on a Bike scores summer laughs at Guild Park

iPhoto caption: Photo courtesy of Guild Festival Theatre.

Reviews

/By Aisling Murphy / Jul 27, 2024

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It’s hard not to feel a soft spot for Guild Festival Theatre (GFT), Scarborough’s scrappy-but-mighty outdoor theatre company in residence at Guild Park. The company has a lot going for it: a gorgeous amphitheatre framed by kitschy marble columns, for one, and an otherwise untapped market for professional theatre in Toronto’s eastmost end. Three Men on a Bike makes a compelling case for GFT — and the joys of outdoor theatre as a whole — but the production also reveals the perils of presenting sequels to an audience who might not have seen last summer’s show (including folks like me, who visited the company for the first time this July).

If you’re at all familiar with Guild Festival Theatre’s recent programming, the very title of Three Men on a Bike will ring a bell. Hot on the heels of last year’s Three Men on a Boat, playwright Mark Brownell’s farce picks up where 2023’s nautical romp left off — with three Victorian dufuses in search of something to do. Eventually, the group decides to bike across Germany, and of course, chaos ensues. (Fans of Boat will be pleased to know that, yes, Montmorency the dog makes a brief appearance in Bike, in a career-defining performance by stuffed animal Tobias Bamford-Harrington.)

Jack Copland, Suchiththa Wickremsooriya, and Azeem Nathoo reprise their roles as Harris, George, and Jay, respectively, and costumed in pleasant pastels by production designer Ina Kerklaan, the three make a delightful trio of goofy stooges. Their performances aren’t as consistent as one might hope — Nathoo, while charming, repeatedly stumbles over text, and Wickremsooriya’s character is underwritten such that Wickremsooriya often doesn’t have much to do. Copland is a natural at finding the right comic timing for a silly sound effect or stupid non-sequitur; he’s frequently the star of the show.

Sue Miner’s direction is as inventive and whimsical as ever — choreographed, conga-line-looking maneuvers suggest everything from bike rides down steep mountains to larger-than-life chase scenes. The actors aren’t always perfectly in sync — missteps were particularly apparent during the bike-riding sequences on the night I attended the show — but overall, the aesthetic conceit of Three Men on a Bike is just dandy, as relaxed and low-stakes as one might hope for from an outdoor comedy.

For me, Bike’s sticking points mostly emerge from Brownell’s text, which in this production clocks in at about 80 minutes. The script could afford to lose about 10 minutes’ worth of references to Boat — for the opening breaths of Bike, I worried I’d be completely lost, not having seen its predecessor last year. A few in-jokes for GFT regulars would be fine, but at the moment, quite a bit of the show’s exposition relies on folks having been part of last year’s seafaring slapstick; to my eye, there’s a lovely hour-long version of this show embedded in the current iteration of the text.

All that said, on the whole, Three Men on a Bike is everything summer theatre should be — lighthearted, breezy, colourful. The show’s sound design is one of high highs and low lows; when the microphones work, they’re wonderful, and when they don’t, we’re hit with squalls of birdsong and foot noises. Adam Walters’ lights are more consistently successful, subtly suggesting changes in locale without pulling focus from the lovely frame of the crumbling columns. An on-site bake tent further secures the venue’s loveliness — I can think of no better place for a twilight, pre-show picnic.

If you’re in the area, for sure, check out Three Men on a Bike; if you’re not, the company offers a free shuttle service from Guildwood GO station. With further polishing, Guild Festival Theatre could be as much a summer destination for theatre-hungry Torontonians as Dream in High Park — and besides, where else in the city can you enjoy a warm-weather play surrounded by faux Greek ruins?

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Three Men on a Bike runs at Guild Park until August 4. Tickets are available here.

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Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.

WRITTEN BY

Aisling Murphy

Aisling is Intermission's senior editor and an award-winning arts journalist with bylines including the Toronto Star, Globe & Mail, CBC Arts, CTV News Toronto, and Maclean's. She likes British playwright Sarah Kane, most songs by Taylor Swift, and her cats, Fig and June. She was a 2024 fellow at the National Critics Institute in Waterford, CT.

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