Conan O’Brien in Toronto

So a very ridiculously super awesome friend surprised me with the news that he had two tickets to the Conan O’Brien Legally Prohibited from being Funny on Television tour stop in Toronto since he had two tickets and only one him. Woo for me!! The shot on that blog page is awesome but not far enough over for me to point out where I was. Instead, here’s my point of view for the evening:

I realize that the picture does not convey the sense of awesome that was in the air. Man, what a night! I knew that Conan was coming to Toronto when it was announced but promptly forgot about it since I knew I couldn’t afford it and have no luck spamming the refresh key when things like this go on sale. Cue Awesome Friend and away we go! Mostly. Eventually. Cue Adventure Time.

It should have taken ~40 minutes to get from my subway stop to the one right next to Massey Hall. Of course, closing half the line with no notice and a garbled “Get off” (and wait 75min for a shuttle bus and another heaven-knows-what to actually make it across the city on the surface) message put a massive crimp in those plans. Thankfully it wasn’t too hard to backtrack to a car, call people for traffic updates, and then navigate downtown between his GPS and my own knowledge. When I deciphered the subway broadcast and then saw the delay time on my phone, I thought we were pretty boned. Even backtracking to the car we had a narrow window of time to make it close to the city, never mind the theatre and parking and the crazy Gardiner traffic with all the lane reworkings with the bridge reconstruction. It all spelled disaster. Instead, we parked for less than $10, walked a little, had a bathroom break before heading up to the nosebleeds, and sat down just as the lights went down for the opening act. Woo us :)

Unfortunately, I can’t say I was a fan of the opening act. He was clever and had a great singing voice, but a lot of it felt same-y to me and I’m sooooooooooooooooooooooooo sick of pandering. I know it happens at every show around the world but I wish someone would come up with a new way of doing it. Ooh, differences between Canadians and Americans? Never heard THAT before. And I know he was doing it in an ironic and sarcastic way but, yeah, meh.

So, Conan… I hate those people who say “you had to be there, man!” and I do not wish to become one of them. I also can’t speak about a lot of the visual elements since, uh, kinda missed a lot of them. They kicked off the post-opening-act-intermission with some awesome big band numbers that I loved. What can I say? I’m a fan of swing and most high-tempo tunes. These guys were awesome. Yes, LaBamba was there, too. I forgot the name of the guy on trumpet but he was totally sick. Ridiculous air capacity. I was starting to wonder if it was fake, that’s how good he was.

I cannot give people a full rundown of the show since I took no notes and was too busy having fun. Old time fans were exceptionally thrilled to see the transformation of Masturbating Bear to Self-Pleasuring Panda, more Walker: Texas Ranger, any and all Andy Richter is awesome (I loved his sitcoms), and there was lots of music. A Triumph video, of course. Conan did a few videos, himself. My favourite was Conan as a totally unnamed network executive with a cat. Basically the other end of this image that I totally stole from Kelly:

There were a ton of cameras around to make use of the video screen onstage and I hope that they do release a DVD or something at the end of it all with some behind the scenes stuff.

I hate pandering slightly less when Conan does it, but he’s still so much smarter than that. He walked a fine line. You know you need to play to the crowd and not make it the exact same show in every different location. It’s not that kind of show! There were exactly ZERO ‘eh’ jokes, so that’s a first for any visiting comic I have seen. Hint: that’s a lot. Hockey, dropping the Toronto name, Tim Horton’s, poutine, the usuals, eh. The only one I give him points for is the ‘hockey beard’. He said it blew him away how crossing the border magically changed his beard into a ‘hockey beard’. Guess what? It really is a playoff beard! Looks fantastic, too. I wonder if he will keep it until the first day of his new show and symbolically shave it off then.

I can give Conan a break on the pandering since he does have a good connection to the city from the last time he was in town with his tv show. As he said, he should have taken it as a clue from NBC even back then that they sent him to Toronto in February. And this was back when Toronto actually had cold and snowy winters! You could definitely tell, even from the intro video, that he was not over everything that happened. He’s handling it great — money and the new show and a tour will do that — but I kinda liked seeing the bitterness come out to play. There was an edge out there sometimes that the crowd loved. The crowd was amazing. For his encore he ran out and played with all the people in the awesome seats, then disappeared and went to the middle balcony. Man, the place was loud before but people went NUTS when he popped out here.

The show had a ton of music and I’m horrific at song titles so I can’t really share a tracklist, with the exception of his own version with reworked lyrics of the Cake cover of I Will Survive. Good times. It’s 2:30 am right now and, thankfully, the way back was much less of an adventure. Not sure if I’ll remember anything I want to add to this later but it’s good to leave your options open. Conan obviously loves music and I hope his new show can reflect that a little better. He’s just fun to watch :)

two more random notes:

During the intermission we wandered downstairs and, hey look, I just about clipped Mark McKinney on the stairs. I went all wide-eyed but managed not to say anything outside of pausing at the top to point out who that just was to my friend. Woo. Happy to not have bowled him over. I tend to trip over Canadian celebrities a lot. Seriously. Wonder if they have some sort of gravitational pull that only affects me since I really do knock them over or come damn close to it.

After the show we were slowly filing out and one of the guys in a lower row to my right shouts “Jay Onrait rocks my world!”. Now I was totally cool with McKinney and would have been with Conan or Andy, should they have come up to our level, but I have no qualms about pushing people off of a balcony to see Jay Onrait. Alas, it was not to be. He’s an exceptionally tall fellow and I, being rather short, was unable to catch a glimpse of him. Also, that one guy was the only one who mentioned him so he could have just been chirping a random friend and getting my hopes up for naught. Yes, I have a massive crush on a sportscaster. Do not claim to be surprised. You are only lying to yourself.

Tagged as: ridiculous, theatre, toronto