Women Fully Clothed a hot commodity in Hamilton

Comedic veterans Jayne Eastwood, Robin Duke, Kathryn Greenwood and Teresa Pavlinek have sold out theatres all over North America, including two upcoming shows at Theatre Aquarius. Tickets remain for a third performance. 

When the quartet who make up Women Fully Clothed talked about getting back to the stage after a several-year pause for the pandemic, Jayne Eastwood hesitated.

“I was thinking, do I really want to go back on stage again? I don't know. I’m 78 years old. I could fall down any minute,” the comedian and actor told HAMILTON CITY Magazine.

“And then we started rehearsing again. We all went up to Robin (Duke)'s cottage and just spent the weekend just running lines, laughing, eating, swimming, right? And it was really good to get back, you know. And then when I got back on stage, I went, ‘Oh yeah, this is great.’”

What is really great is that Eastwood, along with fellow comedic actors Duke, Kathryn Greenwood and Teresa Pavlinek, are heading to Theatre Aquarius for three shows (March 27, April 3 and April 10). It was supposed to be a one-night-only thing but that show sold out fast. A second was added and that was also a quick sellout.

After tours across Ontario and the U.S., Eastwood will have a 10-minute drive to Theatre Aquarius from her North End home. It’s the first time the show has been performed in Hamilton and it will be a best-of compilation of three runs of Women Fully Clothed over the past 21 years.

Eastwood, a 50-year film and TV veteran, moved to Hamilton from Toronto in 2018 after the death of her husband David Flaherty. They had previously lived in Dundas, Ancaster and Flamborough over the years.

She is unabashed about her pride in her adopted hometown. “I want all my friends to move here. I just love this place.”

This round of Women Fully Clothed, dubbed their “first farewell tour,” started last fall in Oakville. Over the years, the four women have hashed out experiences together, finding threads in the stress, minutia and absurdity of modern female life to build scenes and songs around.

In this show, Greenwood does a song called “I Hate the Cottage,” while Duke takes a turn as a pretentious shop owner fawning over a customer. Eastwood doesn’t want to give too much away, but she delivers a dirty poem. Each scene really is a mini-play, she says.

The show will close with a Q&A.

Duke, who is a familiar face to Saturday Night Live, SCTV, and Schitt’s Creek fans, was the impetus for Women Fully Clothed when she returned to Canada. Duke was born in St. Catharines and now lives in the west end of Toronto.

“Robin called me up and said, ‘Let’s just doing something,’” Eastwood says. “It was so long ago that I didn’t have email. I mean, doesn’t that sound like the dark ages? Isn’t that hysterical?”

Duke initially pitched that they rework old scripts from Second City to turn them into all-female sketches. Eastwood, Duke, Greenwood and Pavlinek, were initially joined by Debra McGrath, who no longer performs with the group.

As they got to know each other, the women spent time together sitting around, talking, laughing and always eating, says Eastwood.

“The four of them are all heavy duty writers, like really strong writers in Second City, right? Me, not so much, not so much. And I wasn't a very good improviser either. I'm a good actress, not a very good improviser. The improvisers have the writers’ mind, because they're creating on the stage.”

Eastwood was determined from the outset about what Women Fully Clothed wouldn’t be.

“I remember when we first started getting together, I said, no male bashing, OK? It's not that show. And we're not going to talk about periods at all,” she chuckles.

“It's kind of like the slings and arrows of everyday life. And men love our show. They're afraid to come, but when they do, they love it. They're howling.”

Women Fully Clothed first performed at a Second City fundraiser and it was received really well. From there, they wrote a full-scale show and came to the Sanderson Centre in Brantford for a sold-out performance.

“I was a nervous wreck … And I remember my stage manager talking to me, and I said, ‘I can only see your lips moving. I have no idea what you're saying. I want to die. I want to go home now.’”

But she went on and the show was a hit.

“It was like, oh, man, they really like us.”

From there, the bookings poured in and Women Fully Clothed travelled all across Ontario to sold-out theatres. A cross-Canada tour followed.

“And then we started getting big for our britches, because we would say, ‘Well, I'm sure the mayor is going to want to have a party for us.’ So every time we go to pack, we weren't even telling each other this, we'd all pack a little black dress, just in case. But we never got an invitation. We’d end up at Kelsey’s after the show.”

Over the years, they’ve done residencies at Toronto theatres and played the 2006 Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal. They were also nominated for best sketch troupe at the 6th Annual Canadian Comedy Awards in 2005.

Eugene Levy called them "the five funniest women in Canada."

They’ve played the Edinburgh Festival, too. That was memorable because Tom Hanks was in the audience. They could hear him laughing, mostly because the rest of the audience was quiet. The comedians thought they were bombed, but they learned afterward that laughing out loud is considered rude for older Scottish people.

The four partners in Women Fully Clothed have many hundreds of credits between them.

Duke was a writer and cast member on the iconic SCTV and on SNL from 1981 to 1984. She’s had a recurring role on Schitt’s Creek and appeared in a number of films, including Club Paradise, Groundhog Day, Stuart Saves His Family and Portrait of a Serial Monogamist. She was also a professor in the comedy program at Humber College for 19 years.

She is completing a memoir My Funny Life and Improvising Through It for release in 2025.

Greenwood is highly accomplished, too. She was the first winner of the Canadian Comedy Award for female improviser of the year and won a Dora Mavor Moore Award for her work with Second City, where she spent five years writing and performing. She can be seen in the critically acclaimed film The King Tide and two CBS smash hit comedies: Ghosts and So Help Me Todd.

She’s appeared on Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Wind at My Back, The Handmaid’s Tale, 8-Bit Christmas, Unless, Poltergeist, Run This Town, The Exchange, and The Kids In The Hall’s Brain Candy.

Pavlinek is a writer, actor and producer who began her career as a member of The Second City Toronto. She’s been nominated for a Canadian Comedy Award and a Writer’s Guild Award, and has TV and film credits that include My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, American Gothic, Mrs. America, Y: The Last Man, Accused, and Workin’ Moms. She also wrote, produced and starred in two seasons of her original series, The Jane Show, for Global Television. She was also a writer and consulting producer on the Emmy-winning CBC hit Schitt’s Creek.

Rounding out the foursome, Eastwood’s resumé includes more than 150 films and TV shows since she got her start in the iconic Canadian film Going Down The Road in 1970. She’s been working ever since in everything from all three movies in the My Big Fat Greek Wedding franchise, to Chicago and Hairspray, and Dawn of The Dead and plenty of voice work in animated movies. Eastwood was even in the cast of the original legendary Godspell with Hamilton natives Martin Short and Eugene Levy, alongside Andrea Martin and Gilda Radner.

She is the winner of the Earle Grey Award for lifetime achievement and the recipient of the Dave Broadfoot Award at the Canadian Comedy Awards. Eastwood has been a staple in Canadian movies and TV, including King of Kensington, Street Legal, Murdoch Mysteries, Anne of Green Gables, Degrassi: Next Generation, Little Mosque on the Prairie, Orphan Black and Mr. D.

And now she’s just finished a Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent episode, which stars Hamilton native Kathleen Munroe.

“It's joyful for Canadians to walk onto a Canadian set. We have a joke on Women Fully Clothed, when we do American movies. We just show up: ‘Hi. I'm your Canadian tax credit.’”

There are still tickets for Women Fully Clothed on March 27. They promise not a dry seat in the house.