Mal: crude and silly but a fun way to get rid of bad thoughts!!
Crowning Monkey, with Rachelle Elie. Stand-up Comedy clown solo
Reviewed by Ryan Pepper
MAL helps us all feel the magic, with the help of corny dance numbers and a lot of butt jokes. A world premiere by Rachelle Elie, MAL is a solo show that tries to bring magic into people’s lives. The magic is definitely there, coming to us through raucous, irreverent comedy from the New Age, overbearing, mostly insane, approaching-old-age Susan, and her bitter, clownish new boyfriend Joe.
As Susan explains, the world has too much bad in it already, and over the course of the show, she tries to take that bad—the mal—out of the world and replace it with a little magic. Or as she puts it, get us out of our personal circuses. Susan takes pointed aim at the Trump media circus, the social media circus, the Ford media circus. But, as Susan says, if the world is sick, so are we, and so she hopes to get us our of our sickness and the bad things holding us back through music, dance, and, well, healing our chapped anuses. This one-woman comedy circus could bill itself as a self-help show, but her ways of “helping” the audience are where most of the comedy comes from. After leading the audience in a karaoke version of “Last Christmas,” she reads love advice written on slips of paper that audience members gave her before the show, dances with ribbons to upbeat music, and then attempts to “clean Ottawa’s karmic baggage,” before bringing two audience members on stage for a upbeat dance party.
Elie’s character she has adopted in this solo show spouts the kind of New Age self-help you’d expect from some Los Angeles yoga instructor. She talks of finding her third eye, birthing her inner child, and cleansing the karmic baggage of every city she’s toured. After diagnosing Ottawa as sick based on the answers provided by the audience to two questions (for example, would you help the mother of a crying baby on a plane, or voodoo curse her and her child), she brought two audience members on stage and healed their chapped anuses, thus doing her part to take away the stress and unhealthy things we’ve been holding on to in our lives. Her reasoning is sound—when we consume bad things, bad thoughts, bad feelings, it must come out somewhere.
In the final third of the show, Elie transitions from the crazy aunt character of Susan to the bitter, angrier, amateur stage magician Joe, Susan’s boyfriend. It’s her interest in Joe that inspired to change MAL from a show about feeling bad to a show about love. After the effervescence and positivity of Susan, Joe is a big change. Despite his grumpier appearance, the clownish silliness of the show picks up a notch, as Joe performs basic magic tricks—making a cane appear, pulling handkerchiefs out of his mouth or a hat—and on the kazoo.
Most of the show tries to solve the secret to love, with help from the audience. But Susan also wants to make us all feel better for at least 60 minutes, leaving our personal circuses and baggage behind to replace it with magic. Some of the jokes might be crude and the performance silly, but MAL is a fun way to step out of our inner circuses for an hour.