No reservations about Fully Committed
Next production at Theatre Aquarius features one actor, three dozen characters and a behind-the-curtain look at high-end dining.
If ever there was a need to laugh it might be now and Theatre Aquarius’s Fully Committed promises to deliver, says comedian Gavin Crawford, who will embody roughly 40 characters in a one-man show set in a high-end restaurant.
He plays Sam Peliczowski, an out-of-work actor struggling with personal issues who is answering the reservation line at New York City’s hottest restaurant. He also plays all the callers – obnoxious socialites, name-dropping wannabes, and fickle celebrities – as well as the arrogant chef and other staffers at Manhattan’s busiest eatery.
According to the play’s notes, he’s met with “coercion, threats, bribes, histrionics from desperate callers will stop at nothing” to get a table.
This is a fun show and in these politically fraught times, “that's the time when just being able to go and laugh at something is almost more important in a weird way. And also, what better time is there to do a whole show that's basically about a poor, hapless person having to suffer at the whims of rich Americans? It's like Sam has now become all of Canada just bouncing back and forth trying to please all these horrible rich people who change their minds every 40 seconds.”
While Sam is not Canadian in the script, Crawford, who is a native of Taber, Alberta gets to use a bit of prairie twang for the character of Sam’s father, who is from the Midwest. He draws on his own father for that.
Hamilton director, playwright and actor Steven Gallagher will take a second directorial turn with Fully Committed when it opens at Theatre Aquarius on March 26. He teamed up with Crawford on the production at London’s Grand Theatre in January 2020.
Crawford’s voice is hoarse during our interview. He’s on day four of rehearsals and it’s all coming back just how demanding this role is.
“It’s a marathon, this show,” he says. Playing Sam requires a ton of talking and movement and Crawford, 53, points out he’s five years older than the last time he took this on.
“My muscles aren’t quite as loyal as they used to be,” he quips.
Crawford is best known for his eight seasons on This Hour Has 22 Minutes and The Gavin Crawford Show and has hosted Because News, a weekly comedic panel show looking at the day’s headlines on CBC Radio One, for 10 years.
“(Fully Committed) is kind of tailor made for my weird, particular skill set. So that's kind of fun and good, and then Steven's great because he's just very precise with everything. This is the kind of a show where, if it works brilliantly, it's sort of magic. And you really do end up coming away feeling like you've seen a full cast of people. My job in this show is to make people forget that they're just watching one person, right?”
Getting there requires a lot of rehearsal and technical precision in how Crawford changes his voice and uses accents, gestures and mannerisms to embody various characters.
His frequent sound cues are all the same – ringing phones and buzzers.
“It's very tricky, because I can't get lost for even a moment, because if I'm lost for a moment, then I could jump nine pages (in the script),” he says.
“So it's this very weird kind of muscle training, where you have to just have these people appear without it being conscious.”
In addition to being in almost-constant motion across the stage, every movement has to make it crystal clear which character is up, so to speak.
“Steven and I work together well, and we have a lot of fun. He laughs a lot. I laugh a lot, but he has a great eye, and he can be just tyrannical enough to keep me exactly where I need to be. He's the Mussolini of directors.”
It’s a deeply humorous play but it has a beating heart, says Gallagher.
“It is one of the funniest things I've ever seen in my life but there's a great message about how to stay true to yourself amid the noise, and how to not let the world, the madness of the world around you, take away from who you are. It’s really a great little show about empowerment, too.”
Both Crawford and Gallagher think Hamilton’s booming restaurant scene means Fully Committed will resonate with local audiences.
Playwrights Becky Mode and Mark Setlock both drew on their own restaurant jobs when writing the play and that’s something that Gallagher has experienced, too.
As a young actor, he worked as a server for about seven years in a restaurant on the Upper East Side, the Carnegie Hill Café at Madison Avenue and 94th Street. It was a busy spot in a wealthy neighbourhood.
“Many of the conversations he has with the entitled folks on the other end (of the phone), I can easily recognize.” Gallagher remembers one regular who demanded the chef cook her a dish of her creation that wasn’t on the menu. When she was served, she sent it back, saying it was terrible.
While he doesn’t have any restaurant work experience, Crawford did toil in the towel department at The Bay in Toronto. “So I do have experience working with vehement ladies where the customer is always right, even when they’re very, very wrong.”
Fully Committed debuted off-Broadway in 1999 and became one of the top 10 most-produced shows in the 2000s. It was then revived on Broadway, earning star Jesse Tyler Ferguson rave reviews in 2016. That has kicked off a whole new wave of popularity.
A subplot of the play, Sam’s pull to go home for Christmas, the first one since the passing of his mother, hits home for Crawford. He lost his mother to dementia in 2022.
“My mom was alive the last time I did this play. She had Alzheimer's, so she never got to see this show last time. But, yeah, as we were going through the script (for this run), I was like, oh yeah, this is hitting really real right now. I had to stop for a second and pull it all together.”
Crawford wrote and recorded a seven-episode podcasted called Let’s Not Be Kidding about his journey alongside his mother as her condition worsened. He began recording it just after she moved into a care home and it also covers the time during the pandemic when he couldn’t visit her. The plan was to make six episodes but he recorded a final one after his mother’s death.
“One of the reasons we wanted to make it was because I wanted something out there that you could listen to while you were in it, because all the stuff about it, it leans so heavily into the drama and the sadness of it,” he says.
Crawford, instead, leans into the funny and the frustrating. He wrote a piece for CBC News about his mother thinking a Christmas tree in his home was the most ingenious invention she’d ever seen.
Fully Committed is Crawford’s debut at Theatre Aquarius, but he’s got plenty of friends here.
Crawford very nearly became a Hamiltonian, in fact. He and his husband, a writer and designer, very seriously considered a move west from Toronto when they sold a house to downsize. After they searched in both cities, they ended up buying another house in Toronto with friends and converting it into two units.
The couple did much of the renovation work themselves. Crawford even learned how to wire a home after learning how much contractors wanted.
“When they told me how much money they wanted, with no dimmers and no pot lights, I was like, well, we're gay. There's gonna be dimmers and pot lights.”
So Crawford studied the code book and watched YouTube videos and his work passed inspection.
The couple has also bought a property in Cape Breton with friends that could eventually be some sort of comedy commune, says Crawford. There is even talk of a reality show about the ongoing building and renovating work.
Crawford is also working on a one-man show of his own.
Gallagher moved to Hamilton with his partner Neil in 2022. He acted in 2023’s The Gig at Aquarius and co-wrote 2024’s Pollyanna The Musical. This is his directorial debut at the theatre.
“I'm so lucky that I'm getting to do this. I mean, I love working in Aquarius, but I'm so lucky that this show came along the way it did. All the stars were aligning again.”
Local audiences are going to love Crawford, he promises.
“He's so charming, he's so funny, he's such a massive, massive Canadian talent. We are so lucky to have someone like him in this show.”
Fully Committed runs at Theatre Aquarius from March 26 to April 12.
