Just For Laughs journal --- Mario Cantone heads to Broadway via Montreal

To say that actor/comedian Mario Cantone is a spitfire, a whirling dervish and a walking dynamo is indeed quite an understatement.

But he was all that and even more last night, as I caught the premiere of his solo show during Just For Laughs in the friendly, saintly confines of the Gesu Theatre (it's located underneath a church in downtown Montreal).

But with Cantone, nothing was sacred. This bundle of nervous energy used his razor sharp tongue to slice and dice (not to mention julienne) old Hollywood, current Hollywood, the state of the U.S.A. and a lot of general hypocrisy. And he accomplished all of this through dead-on celebrity impersonations, loud, screeching rants, as well as a few Broadway-style musical numbers.

Cantone's show (which has no title) is basically a work in progress for a solo show that he plans to bring to Broadway in the near future, and Montreal audiences were indeed privileged to catch a sneak peek during its development stages. However, based on what Cantone presented and the wild response given to him by the packed crowd at the Gesu, this show in progress has the makings of a smash Broadway hit.

Let me give you a few examples. Cantone did some great impersonations of the three stages of Bette Davis ("Dark Victory", "All About Eve" and "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?"), Shelley Winters in "The Poseidon Adventure", Lauren Bacall and Kathleen Turner doing voice overs for the Turner Classic Movies channel and the one that got me laughing so hard 'till I cried, his impersonation of Bob Dylan singing Christmas carols for a holiday album; then there was his story of when he hosted an off-the-wall kids' TV show for a local New York City station (in which one of the games he did for the show was called "Find Sammy Davis, Jr.'s Eye in the Pie"); and for a fan of Alfred Hitchcock like myself, I howled at his bit about why the famed Master of Suspense decided to film the school children attack scene in "The Birds". He also gave a personal message about how he rose above the constant bullying he got when he was in high school because of his homosexuality (in which, miraculously, he never contemplated suicide or going on a shooting rampage).

The show ended with a "duet" between Liza Minnelli and Judy Garland (similar to what Natalie Cole did with "Unforgettable" 20 years ago); once again, Cantone was right on with the voices and nuances of both performers. The end result: a lot of laughs and a thunderous standing ovation by the time the show ended.

Mario Cantone might have been a little nervous at first for doing this bold experiment in developing a show. But  the reaction he got from the crowd at the Gesu could give him the needed boost to build this show that could make him a future toast of Broadway. It continues at the Gesu at 9:30 p.m. every night until July 28.