THEATRE REVIEW: HARDSELL
14 OCT'11

JOHN COULBOURN, QMI Agency
R: 3.5/5
Pictured: Rick Miller

TORONTO - When it first premiered at the Berkeley Street Theatre back in ’09, Rick Miller’s HARDSELL was frankly a bit of a tough sell too — a sprawling, often unfocused look at consumerism that suggested, forcefully and none-too-tidily, that humankind might be hardwired for excess and further, that sooner or later, in a society driven by voracious consumption, the consumer must inevitably become the consumed.

Now, two years on, HARDSELL is back on a Toronto stage, completing a three part celebration of Miller’s work that has already embraced revivals of his MacHomer and Bigger Than Jesus, launching the Factory Theatre’s mainstage season. A reworked HARDSELL, produced by WYRD and Necessary Angel, opened a limited run there Friday, where it will play through through Oct. 23.

And while it is clearly a work on which Miller and director Daniel Brooks have lavished a lot of attention in the past two years, one suspects HARDSELL has benefited as much from changing public attitudes as it has from any adjustments its admittedly talented co-creators have made to it. While Brooks and Miller have tightened Miller’s one-man, two-points-of-view rant to pull things into focus, it is still a seat-of-the-pants affair that has its audience pondering the possibility it’s going to go off the rails as often as it has them pondering the seeming inevitability we are buying ourselves into oblivion. But this is an audience far different from only two years ago, thanks to shifts in the public consciousness that have shaken many out of a torpor of self-indulgence long enough to start demanding change, no matter how small. In a world juggling the demands of the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movement, HARDSELL could well become a rallying point for both.

That’s thanks largely to Miller’s skill at playing two characters: Himself — an in-demand, articulate and socially conscious actor determined to at least try to do the right thing — and his own evil-twin Arnie, a cynic who not only embraces the notion we are all headed for hell in a handbasket but thinks it’s going to be a fun ride to boot. Fittingly, it all starts pre-show in the lobby, with Miller (as Miller) hocking a range of artwork, CDs and the like, which of course positions him to launch seamlessly into the show as a natural extension of what he’s been doing.

As Himself, he gives a bit of a personal history that, while it manages to be simultaneously self-deprecating and self-aggrandizing, also underscores just how hard it is to be socially conscious in a modern world where even his show’s sponsor has an questionable environmental track record. Cue Arnie, who takes over Rick’s body and after making it up to resemble some sort of latter-day Joker, takes over the show as well, leading his audience on a dizzying descent into the corporate hell of capitalism, aided and abetted not only by the latest in stage technology — he even uses a microwave to zap one particularly maddening cultural icon — but by a compendium of modern day philosophers and self-help gurus, whose words are used to drive things home.

Miller, ultimately restored to control of his show, seems to have trouble articulating just what it is HARDSELL is trying to say. But an ever-growing number of people, one suspects, will agree he’s said it very well indeed. For in the end, while HARDSELL acknowledges our economic and societal future seems pretty bleak, it arrives at a conclusion many embrace today, mainly that it is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness — even when you’re worried about the carbon footprint of the candle.