Hallmark movies prime fodder for hilarious happenings

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This article was published 10/12/2024 (676 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg improv troupe Outside Joke recently returned to the lab to conduct some important qualitative research at the exciting intersection of cinematic art and yuletide narrative tradition.

Over the summer, its members were watching, analyzing and falling in love-hate all over again with Hallmark holiday movies.

“We spent the hottest days of the year talking about Christmas, watching and devouring as many holiday movies, Hallmarks and Lifetimes that we could find,” says Chadd Henderson, one-sixth of the Outside Joke formula.

“With these films there’s a structure and a predictability to the story arc, so we spent many months working together to nail those down and to build the scaffolding for a very different type of show.”

For the last three years, Outside Joke has enjoyed a Christmas residency at Prairie Theatre Exchange, where the group has performed its own on-the-spot takes of A Christmas Carol. But this year, the sextet of Henderson, Jane Testar, Andrea del Campo, Robyn Slade, Toby Hughes and Sarah (Mama Cutsworth) Michaelson has turned its attention to Charles Dickens’ heir apparent: the clean-cut holiday film.

While many families since 1951 have gathered round the TV set each year with Alastair Sim’s Scrooge, a quickly expanding faction of home viewers instead warms up with films like Christmas in Tennessee, shot in Stonewall, 2,300 kilometres northwest of Knoxville.

Recognizing this trend, and desiring a new challenge, Outside Joke decided to change candy-cane lanes, ditching the Dickens in favour of an international holiday juggernaut. Outside Joke’s A Christmas Miracle: An Improvised Holiday Rom-Com premières Wednesday and runs until Dec. 22 on PTE’s Cherry Karpyshin Mainstage.

The new improv endeavour was an intriguing concept because the typical Hallmark film is flat, predictable and formulaic, says Henderson.

“And I think that’s why people love them. You know what you’re gonna get every time you watch,” he says.

“And by contrast, people love Outside Joke because they don’t know what they’re going to get,” Slade adds.

That’s only partially true. For more than 20 years, the troupe has developed a peerless onstage repartee built around a shared willingness to push humour beyond standard limits. Outside Joke’s content can’t be predicted, and none of it is pre-written, but the troupe’s reputation for full-fledged improvised theatre precedes them.

In assessing the Hallmark genre, the troupe isolated several regular plot elements.

Exhibit A: The Hate-Cute. In Ernst Lubitsch’s 1938 comedy Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, Gary Cooper met Claudette Colbert in the department store when one needed only a pyjama top and the other needed only the pyjama bottoms. The split purchase is considered by some film scholars as a prime early example of the meet-cute, a creatively contrived romantic path-crossing that unites two disparate narrative trajectories to fit into a single cohesive narrative framework. A + B = C.

But in Hallmark films, Henderson says the romantic leads often begin their courtship from a point of skepticism.

“They’re like, ‘Why is this person talking to me, and why are they in my space? And then it evolves, impossibly, over the course of two-and-a-half to three days where they’re very in love before she abandons her old life to start a new one.”

Henderson says the troupe locked in quickly to the idea of accelerated feelings and accelerated storylines.

“In a lot of other genres we’ve tackled in the past, those stories are grand or sweeping, but in these stories, things just happen on such a tight timeline, and seeing how much joy we can squeeze out of that became a really fun exercise for us when we were workshopping the show.”

While previous Outside Joke performances have been bolstered by the musical stylings of Paul De Gurse, the pianist is currently in Halifax, where he’s serving as musical director for Neptune Theatre’s production of Frozen, the smash Disney film’s first Canadian staging.

In his place is Sarah Michaelson, a DJ and sound designer known professionally as Mama Cutsworth. Slade, who joined Outside Joke in 2005, says Michaelson’s ability to select the perfect track for each moment is uncanny.

Another regular plot element in Hallmark films, according to Slade and Henderson, is the Hometown Return.

“Not always, but often, the characters tend to either go to a small town or go back to their hometown, so the majority of these movies have that small-town feel, where everybody knows eachother.“We’ll call that the Cheers Convention,” says Henderson.

Thus, the cast of characters is immediately familiar to viewers who have visited the inn before.

“In Hallmark films, we have a lead, we have a lover, and each of those people has a bestie who’s there to support and rally for them,” Slade says.

“Then we have an all-knowing sage-like character who not only knows everybody else in the story, but offers some sort of magic, bestowing the lead with a little wink and a smile to push them in the right direction.”

If you want to see a Hallmark film you’ve never seen before, it’s best to consult the experts.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com