purpig21 who is lovely and has my undying love. Burnt Toast is a Canadian Comic Opera. Yes, you read right. It's a film made up of shorter films; the stages of love. We have 1: Attraction. 2: Connection. 3: Commitment. 4: Marriage. 5: Consummation. 6: Perseverance. 7: Disintegration. & 8: Starting Over. It's directed by Larry Weinstein, but each film feels like it has a different director, with interesting use of various techniques being explored. The music is by Alexina Louie, and is fantastic.
And the truly amazing thing about this? It has SO many people that I love in it. Really. Wow. Paul Gross, Scott Thompson, Bob Martin, Colin Mochrie, Mark McKinney and Dan Redican. And it has people I know of, like Colm Feore and David Alpay, as well as various people that I don't know the name of but see in a lot of the Canadian things I watch.
Of course, these actors are not actually singing the opera, though I'm sure Paul would have liked to have taken a stab at it. Professional opera singers, many of whom appear in Burnt Toast as other characters, provide the voice as our non-opera singing performers lip-synch.
Okay, if I didn't ♥ Dan Redican before (and I did, because of his work on KitH and Puppets Who Kill), I so totally ♥ him now. The man is an evil genius. Burnt Toast had me dying of laughter, almost literally because I choked - twice. He wrote the whole thing, and he was in it as a scientist showing the 'stages of love' with bread before every film. These were some of the moments where I couldn't breathe very easily.
Paul was wonderful. He looked gorgeous. His lip-synching was some of the best in the entire production. Did I mention he looked gorgeous? He did. I wish I could find a man who looked and acted like him sitting in the park reading. Scott was in Paul's film and he was also great. Good lip-synching and he was awfully fetching in a police uniform.
I want all of Bob Martin's babies. His film was silent, so all you could appreciate was his wonderful comedic expression. I was insanely pleased about this because I was wondering how they could find an opera singer with a voice as amusing as Bob's - and they didn't. Yay.
I was in a pitch of serious hysterics with Colin Mochrie's. Russell Braun, who sang his role, was amazing, completely amazing and deserves all kinds of medals. But Colin was equally amazing, the best physical performance of the bunch, I'd say.
Mark was brilliant as usual. Actually, out of all of them, he's the one who I think actually could sing the opera passably well. All he'd really need are a few weeks of training sessions. Yeah, it was probably easier just to dub him like the others.
I really enjoyed it and I have a feeling I'll be watching it a lot.
