Sex T-Rex III

Sex T­-Rex, Toronto’s hottest comedic theatre company, teams up with the Storefront Theatre for a double bill of old school cinematic entertainment and adventure. Watch out Wildkat! and Swordplay, both award-winning A resident company at Toronto’s Bad Dog Theatre, has wowed audiences across the country since their inception nearly a decade ago. Watch out WildKat! premiered at the Montreal Fringe in 2014, receiving five star reviews from the CBC, The Torontoist, and Halifax’s The Coast, as well as taking home the awards for Best Show and Best Comedy at the Atlantic and Montreal Fringes. Swordplay: A Play Of Swords, the second half of this action-packed double feature, is a love letter to classic Swashbucklers and retro fantasy video games that inverts the genre’s stereotypes while offering a sophisticated parody on more modern offerings like Game of Thrones.

Watch out Wildkat! and Swordplay, both award-winning comedies by Sex T-­Rex, run March 11th ­- 27th.

Sex T-Rex will be presenting three of their award-winning shows at Fringe Festivals across Canada: Watch Out WildKat (Atlantic Fringe Best Comedy), SwordPlay: A Play of Swords (Just for Laughs Best Comedy) and something completely different for Toronto audiences: a puppet show set in the Paddock tavern called Bendy Sign Tavern (Insight Production’s Pilot Week winner).

Twitter: @sextrex
www.sextrexcomedy.com

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Transcript

Welcome to Episode 79 of Stageworthy. I’m your host, Phil Rickaby. Stageworthy features conversations in Canadian theatre with artists of all stripes, from actor to director to playwright and more.

If you want to drop me a line, I would love to hear from you. You can find Stageworthy on Facebook and Twitter at StageworthyPod, and you can find the website at stageworthypodcast.com. My guests this week are Caitlin Morrow and Sean Murray of Sex T-Rex. This is the third time that I’ve had Sex T-Rex on.

I love talking to those guys. Now, Sex T-Rex are headed this summer to Fringe Festivals in Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Vancouver. They just finished a very successful Indiegogo fundraising campaign, and so we talk about that as well as their plans for the summer.

Your Indiegogo has done pretty well. Yeah, we’ve reached our goal. Are we starting? Are we on? I’m just, you know, kind of ready.

It doesn’t work, but like, I like to roll it. Now, you’ve done something that’s kind of rare for a theatre crowdfunding. Oh yeah? Well, most never even come close to their goal.

Oh, I’m not sure what the norm is. It’s pretty rare. Like, a lot of times I see, and also part of it is, I think that a lot of people misunderstand how to do crowdfunding.

Right. Because for a lot of theatre stuff, it’s like, for $10, we’ll thank you online. For $20, we’ll thank you in the program.

You know, it’s like crappy shit like that, but you guys have fun perks that people want. Yeah, like the pixelated profile pic thing. People that don’t even know us have been reaching out, like, how do I get one? Will you donate to our campaign? Cool.

Nice. And it’s been people that aren’t even familiar with… Yeah, a few. A vast majority know us, but my cousin who lives in Vancouver or Victoria bought one, and then a bunch of his nerd friends were like, where did you get that? So we’ve had a few people pop up on our… Yeah, that’s cool.

Yeah, it’s handy because it’s viral, right? Yeah, of course. Because if you buy the pixelated profile pic, then you make it your profile pic, then people are like, what’s that? What is that? Where did you get that? And that wasn’t in the plan. That just was something that as it was happening, we were like, oh yeah, no, that works.

That’s really great. Everyone’s changing their profile picture to these pixelated profiles. Yeah, that was the idea.

Because I mean, it sort of goes along with swordplay. Well, that’s why we did it. That’s what we’re doing for our tour.

We were jamming for so long. It was either you or me that came up with it. It’s hard to trace those things sometimes.

Yeah, it’s the sort of same brain happens when you spend so much time together. How much planning went into, like, before you launched the campaign? Shit ton. Yeah? Yeah, like, it’s so much work to make the… We were originally going to launch it much earlier.

We were going to launch it in mid-May or mid-early, early May. No, sorry, mid-April, early April. And then we noticed that Indiegogo has a limitation on… March, because we launched in April.

Oh, we did launch in April, right. I’m mixing up the dates. I missed my deadline by a day.

But yeah, Indiegogo has a limitation on how long the campaign can run. It can only run for 60 days. Where we were thinking, like, it’s going to be this huge long haul, and we were all getting ready for that.

But then noticed, like, ooh, if we launch this early, it’s going to be so far off from when we actually do the thing that there’s going to be a greater momentum if we wait. Any crowdfunding thing I’ve done, you always find you want that big swell at the beginning, and then you get a bit at the end, and anything in between is sort of like gravy. So you can’t do it too far in advance.

There needs to be an urgency, but that fine line of, like… I know people who were, like, doing their crowdfunding, like, while their show was still going on, which is just, like… Yeah, it’s not the best. So, yeah, it’s so rough. Yeah, we wanted to make sure that we had the money in the pocket, because, of course, all of our expenses, like accommodations and fringe fees that are for our little pocketbooks, a huge, huge burden.

Like, two grand for us is so much money that we wanted to make sure that we had the Indiegogo in before we had it out so that we could pay off our credit cards. It was really important for us to have that done. Also, I didn’t want to be running it while we were doing shows.

No, because there’s so much that goes into it. And we’re such a small company that, like, there’s only so much space you can take up with promotion. And I want to be focusing, as of June, all of my energies on promoting our puppet show that we’re going to be doing at the Toronto Fringe, and I didn’t want to be spending all of the limited amount of time and energy people have to see us in terms of our presence on social media.

I didn’t want to oversaturate people’s attention spans. But, I mean, congratulations on hitting your goal. Now we’re at the stage where, because Indiegogo takes a cut, we’re at the stage now where I’m hoping that we get enough money that we actually get to pocket the five grand.

So now the push is, like, help us achieve enough so that we actually, we’re not taking home $4,500, because our total grand total was five grand, and we’d be taking home approximately $4,500. Yeah. Have you thought about offering it like a stretch goal? Yeah, that’s an option, but I don’t think it makes sense for us with what we’re looking for.

There are all kinds of these things that are associated with Indiegogo. This isn’t actually the first time that SextyRex has done Indiegogo. We did one years and years ago as well.

2012. 2012. And it’s changed so much since then.

Caitlin’s email is associated with the Indiegogo account, and it’s just a flood of all these weird different programs that are like, oh, send us this. Yeah, I know. You get spammed every day.

Yeah. If you’ve got something running, they’re just like, pay us to get your thing funded, and it’s just like… Go away. Who do you think we are that we can pay you? We’ll just take a small cut.

Go away. I mean, we were really lucky that, like you said, you described the arc of it perfectly earlier when you said that you start really strong, and then you dip down. Ours absolutely did that.

We had 20 days in a row without a donation of the two months. But at that point, we were three quarters of the way to our goal, so I wasn’t worried at all. And we actually stopped advertising it all together because we had other shows and other things on the go.

But yeah, it really… When we started, we started so strong out the gate. We were at like three grand in a couple days. That’s a really strong start.

It was a really strong start, and we were starting to question our total of five grand. Maybe we should have asked for more because we do need more. I mean, the approximate upfront cost, this isn’t counting gas, this isn’t counting food, for the tour is $15,000.

So this was a small chunk of our fundraising total. I expect some of the money we will generate with ticket sales, but I cannot expect to cover all of those expenses and buy food. Etc.

So yeah, we really pushed it at first. We were really, really lucky at first that we got such a strong start because then our campaign was featured on a few of their featured sites. Yeah, it was really important to us to be strong in the beginning.

I didn’t really care much about the middle of the campaign. We also had good fortune in terms of our timing of our fundraising efforts here, like physical fundraising efforts, because we had that really strong start with the Indiegogo, and then what would have been like two weeks after the Indiegogo started, we did our fundraiser at Bad Dog. I mean, that was entirely intentional.

Yeah, so like the crest, the waves sort of hit in tandem, and that fundraiser went very, very well for us. Nice. Very, very well.

Yeah, we were expecting to raise a grand, and we raised $2,500 that night. Nice. Nice.

Didn’t hurt. That does not hurt. No, it was like our live fundraiser, we kind of cross-promoted.

We were using the same puppet to promote both to kind of give it the same aesthetic, but my goal was $1,000 that night. We had lined up the most incredible acts that evening, and I was so thrilled, and I thought we could maybe achieve a grand with our silent auction and with door sales and that sort of thing. We had a few other little nuggets of fundraising opportunities, and Julian Frid, who’s a company member, agreed kind of that if we reached $1,000 that he would let us pour a bucket of ice at his pants.

Kind of inspired by the Ice Bucket Challenge, but like more torturous. But that’s kind of extreme. Yeah.

Did he think that he was safe, that there was no chance? He kind of did, and we all sort of thought this is a bit unachievable, like $1,000 at Bad Dog. There’s only 60 seats in that theatre. Even if everyone pays us $10, we’re not going to make $1,000 to come in, and I was like a silent auction maybe.

I underestimated everything by a lot. At intermission, we had an intermission in our show, we had far exceeded our goal. At intermission, we were at $1,800.

That’s really good halfway through. Halfway through, right? We had a number of other initiatives to raise money that were going on in tandem that I hadn’t even accounted for. At this point, I was like, Julian, we have good and bad news.

We are way over our goal. We have this in-joke about this green pointy hat. I won’t go into it right now.

Which I’m going to say, I was torn as to whether or not to get the hat. The pixelated thing or the hat. Just $50, man, and you get a little green hat.

I was like, uh. Sonia, the woman who just left, is making them for us, so you could have had your own handmade hat. We don’t have this.

Oh, we should start promoting that. We have a special note to buy Julian, explaining why this isn’t funny. This is not a real joke.

Anyway, we have this inside joke about this sort of green pointy hat, a la Elf in the movie Elf, I think. It’s pretty much exactly that. It comes from that.

It’s a long story. It’s not that funny a story. Don’t need to go into it.

But the point is, is that we’ve had this long running joke about Julian wearing this green pointy hat. At one point, we actually made him a real green pointy hat. We’re going into the about to do the second half of the show, and I give him the good bad news, and I said, Julian, what are the odds that I can get you to do it in the green pointy hat? He was like, no.

I’m like, how much do I have to raise? He’s like, I had a bucket in my hand, the ice bucket in my hand, and I said, I’m going to get people to put money in this bucket. How much? He said, 100 bucks. If you can get people, which he of course thought was, yeah, of course, what, like people throwing two knees in a bucket.

He’s like, there’s no way they’re going to reach 100 bucks like right now. So I was like, okay, we’ll go for it. We’ll try it.

And I said to the audience, I said, okay, everybody, beginning of intermission, beginning of the second half. I have this bucket. We’ve reached our goal.

Everyone cheers. And I was like, ice is happening. And I said, but if I get 100 bucks in the next minute in this bucket, Julian will do it wearing the green hat.

People were throwing 20 into the bucket. We made in no joke, 30 seconds, $150. Holy shit.

People just were like, over here, like calling us over. And it wasn’t two knees. They were throwing $20 bills.

It happened so fast. I think there were people who wanted to give us money that weren’t able to, because I couldn’t get to them all the time. So Julian had the ice pouring in his pants with the green pointy hat.

Oh, it was a beautiful thing. And there’s some gifts and short videos and boomerangs online now of him. It went really, really well.

We had Connor at the bar, working the bar that night. And we had one bucket that just said tips, a big sign that said tips. And he was donating all of the tips to the campaign.

And we had another bucket that said bad advice from Connor. And it was $5. So people were throwing $5 to get bad advice.

All night long. Between the two, we made 500 bucks. That’s amazing.

Between bad advice from Connor and tips. That’s amazing. 500 bucks, just over, it was like 510.

We had a tab running and that’s because we bought all the acts beers and we all drank as well. After the tab, so it was actually more. So after expenses with Connor, we made $510.

Yeah. And it kind of speaks to two things at once. One, the most important thing is the generosity of the community that’s around Sexty Rex, which blows us away constantly.

And the other thing is sort of what you were saying about, you know, you can, it’s easy to have a fundraiser stagnate because there’s just nothing sort of engaging about it. Like there’s no way for the people, like they can come in and they can hand the money in, but it’s the reason that fundraiser was so successful. And the reason I feel like the Indiegogo has been so successful is because there are these fun little angles that give people a way to engage with it.

Like the bad advice thing is more fun than just like handing over the money into a pay what you can bucket. We were selling off like Mad Libs for the improv set we were going to do at the end. So like you get to write in your little weird thing that’s going to happen.

Blank gets to kiss blank. And it was like Sexy Rex member gets to kiss Sexy Rex member. And so people were able to buy those cards for like two bucks or something.

They’re cheap and they’re fun. And it’s a way for everybody to get involved with like with donating some money and also some other little bit of fun. Yeah.

We had these little Easter eggs because it was around Easter where the plastic eggs, you can open them and put something in it. Yeah. So we were selling those off as like mystery eggs.

Some of them just had candy in them. Right. Some of them had two tickets to a show.

Some of them had a beer, beer ticket. Some of them had Sexy Rex underwear. We put the Sexy Rex underwear in there.

So some of them were like the value was way more than what we were selling them for. And some of them you get candy. So, you know, yeah, we generated a little gambling game.

You can play, you know, a couple hundred dollars with that, just like a little, little tiny opportunities and fun games to engage in throughout the night and achieved my, far exceeded my wildest expectations of that evening. I think that from, you know, your Indiegogo and your in-person fundraiser, one of the things that you’ve latched onto very successfully, I think, is the fact that people want to be a part of something. And that’s often for like crowdfunding.

What I think a lot of people miss is that they want to be part of something in some way. And so instead of like, you know, well, thank you. We’ll give you a thing or whatever.

Your name will be on this list with 45 other people. Yeah. Instead, you know, you can have like this, you know, the pixelated thing, which is part of the show.

Or you can have this. You can get a puppet. You can like.

We tried to make all of the perks personal. None of the perks are unrelated to what we do. Right.

So, and we also all tried to have our own personal perk. So there’s a date with Connor. Good question.

Anybody get the date with Connor? So yes. We’ve also been generating money that is not reflected in the Indiegogo campaign because some people have approached us with some of the larger donations and we’re arranging it outside of Indiegogo. Right.

So someone is going to buy our thousand dollar show. Oh, nice. That’s not reflected in Indiegogo because at this point we’ve achieved our goal and it feels a bit foolish to throw that on there and have Indiegogo take 10%.

But that’s, that’s in the works. But that is also to say that on Indiegogo officially, two perks dates with Connor have been claimed, but unofficially five have been. Okay.

So, you know, his mom is for sure one of them who just desperately wants to spend time with her son and now is contractually, he is obliged to do so. And, and, and like, and the people who have bought them online, one was a couple, like a lovely couple from the, you know, two, like a man and a woman who are married long-term. Sally Smallwood who does people in chairs.

And Cameron Algee who’s, they’re both lovely improvisers and generous human beings. And they donated to our last campaign as well. People in Chairs is a great improv blog.

I recommend anyone checking it out. And, you know, so they bought a date just because of the fun of it. And so they’re planning their date now and there’s another secret date.

I know who these two women are, but there are these two women who bought and they’ve, they’ve called themselves Connor’s Angels and have started a Instagram account. Which would be creepy in other contexts. And I promised Connor, like, no, I know who they are.

They’re super sweet. And, but they’ve been kind of trolling him on the internet, like taking pictures of him at work. He works at Bad Dog at the Bar.

It’s a very public place. And then like posting them on Instagram. And I know them and they’re lovely and it’s all in good fun.

But yeah, so people have bought that perk. People bought, I had that puppet perk for $500. We had one person claim that.

Julian’s is the green pointy hat. We’ve had a few people claim that. And Sean, the biggest surprise was Day in the Dungeon, which was, we have this show that we do called Dungeons and Dragons Live.

We’re going to go do it. You’re doing this in a couple of hours. As soon as we’re done here, we’re going to walk out the door and go do that show.

It’s an improvised show. We’ve been doing it for a year and a half now. Well, way longer technically, but this iteration has been a year and a half.

It’s really fun time. We basically like have created a format that is inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, the NPCs that are people and Dungeon Master that’s on stage with us and heroes. And we also are nerds and play D&D in our own free time as well.

And Sean here’s a brilliant Dungeon Master. So we spoke with a community member who’s a strong supporter of all things improv. And he also has given generously to other Indiegogos.

And we were like, how much would you pay? What can we do? What do you want to give us money for? He was like, I’d love to play Dungeons and Dragons with you. I’m like, how much would you pay for that? He said $250. So we’re like, great.

That seems absurd to us. But if even one person claims it, we’re good to go. $250, that’s all we need for Dungeons and Dragons.

That’s more money than we could have imagined for one night of Dungeons and Dragons. So we put that perk up. Four people claimed it.

Wow. We made $1,000 from Dungeons and Dragons. That’s awesome.

So we played the other night with three of the four donors. One of them lives in Germany. It will be more challenging.

It will be a little bit challenging. But $750 worth of Dungeons and Dragons. Nice.

It was mind-blowing for all of us. It was a good session, too. It was a really good session.

I almost cried at the end. Ah, that is a good session. It was an amazing session.

So that’s also related to what we do as well. So we tried to make all the perks somewhat related to either the tour or who we are as a company or jokes or whatever it is. So speaking of this is all to fund the tour, you’re doing Swordplay in Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Victoria? Vancouver.

The VCs are in British Columbia. I get them confused, too, all the time. Which, of course, will get me lynched.

And because we’re insane, we’re also doing Wildcat in Edmonton. You’re doing both? We’re doing two shows in Edmonton. Yeah.

Separately? Two different venues? Two different venues. Yeah, we’re gonna do two shows in Edmonton for funsies. Have you guys done Edmonton before? No.

Have you been out west to any of the fringes? We did Winnipeg. Okay. Yeah.

It’s a big risk. We’re really sticking our necks out and that’s part of why we decided we needed to do this fundraising campaign. Because this is definitely the biggest bite that Sextirex has ever taken on the tour front.

Like last year we challenged ourselves, we did an east coast tour. We built our own tour outside the fringe circuit. Did the Atlantic fringe and then stopped in a bunch of other cities on the way and sort of just rented our own venues and stuff.

And that was challenging but worked out great. And this tour is just like that, but we’re sticking to the festivals this time but we’re going so much further than we went before. Distance wise, financially, like the upfront costs are for us so daunting.

And you know if we make zero money, we’ll be fucked. If we make, but there is a chance to make money. Yeah, I mean you guys have, in terms of like as groups traveling and as somebody, like there are reputations that people have in the fringe circuit.

Even if they’ve never been to a city, their reputation is to be had. And you guys have been on the fringe circuit for a while doing different in different cities. So Edmonton may be hungry for some Sextirex.

But also let’s be real, they’ve never heard of us. There might be a few people in the improv community. There might be, you know, we have a few friends that are part of Rapid Fire.

We have, that we met throughout the years doing other fringes and just improv festivals and the like. But we’re, we are unknown. Yeah, we are.

I mean, reputation aside, we can put all the stars and laurels that we have and we want on our posters. But I’m not, I’m not fooling myself to think that we don’t have to earn our reputation there as well. Everywhere we’ve gone, we have to earn it.

And even though this show, Storyplay, has been a hit in other cities, I don’t assume it’s going to be a hit. I don’t assume Wildcat’s going to be a hit. You can’t, because every time you go to a fringe, anytime, you’re starting from zero again.

Yeah, first pack of reviews. All it takes is one reviewer to see our show on the first opening night, hate it, write a bad review, and we’re screwed. And so I don’t, I do not ever anticipate us succeeding.

It’s going to be a hustle. I assume we’re going to have to work our asses off. Even though we did Winnipeg in 2014, man, that was 2014.

People have forgotten about us already. There are memories. I mean, people have long memories.

But in terms of sex T-Rex as a brand, they might remember Wildcat, maybe, but they might remember that Western show that was funny or something, if we’re lucky. But Winnipeg is almost entirely an older audience. And they’re probably not as interested in our video game world.

That’s the nice thing about Swordplay, is that it has a very large reach generationally, because we get the classic theatre-going crowd with that Errol Flynn vibe, or this does look like a stage show, the puffy shirts and the monologuing and so on. But then go for the college kids with the Super Nintendo angle. Let’s be real, we’re talking more early career kids at this point.

I don’t think the college kids even, well, let’s see, they’ve probably entered the world in video games with, you know, the GameCube being the oldest, most retro thing. 8-bit games and 16-bit games are still popular nowadays, with the dawn of indie gaming that happened 12 years ago. The dawn of indie gaming.

But yeah, no, I mean, both Winnipeg and, what do you think of that time between Winnipeg and Edmonton? Great question. Okay. Currently the plan is to live in the woods and hunt for our food.

Well, you know that you might not be the first fringe group to attack. No word of a lie. My secret plan, we haven’t actually solidified anything yet, is to find a cabin, rent it or something, and write a show.

We have a show in mind that we want to work on. It’s a bit different from anything else we’ve ever done. And I think that it would be a really cool opportunity to challenge ourselves to write a show in a short period of time.

And yeah, we’re going to be writing the show Crime. Okay. Wow.

That’s my plan. We’ll see if it happens or not. We may just, like, end up spending the two weeks just having a time.

But hopefully we’ll make it a productive time. I’ve seen, you know, when I was on a tour, we weren’t sure because we had that same space. We ended up doing a BYOV in Calgary, but we had considered, like, can we, like, do, like, workshops with people from, like, different, from Winnipeg, from wherever? We thought about that too.

You know, the chances of us getting a workshop are good. We could probably do in both Winnipeg and Edmonton, like, a two-day workshop. But I mean, realistically, spending our time in a city for that amount of time is going to be so costly.

And the workshop might generate a couple hundred bucks, like, at the end of the day. I would love to try to make that happen while we’re in those cities, but I don’t, I don’t really see that as being overly realistic. It’s certainly a helpful thing, but it’s not, it’s not the be-all and end-all, but, and talking about Calgary BYOV, like, we fought tooth and nail to try to get into Calgary and Saskatoon, which are the two fringes that are in between.

But there’s such, it’s such a strange beast, the way the tour is set up now, because you’ve got Winnipeg, which is quite a large fringe. Yeah. And then it gets put through this meat grinder, for lack of a better term, for a little bit, and then you pop back up for the big fringe of Edmonton.

Yeah. And Calgary, like, we were, we were involved in a, like, lottery, like, we submitted to BYOV in Calgary. We submitted to Calgary, fringe didn’t get in.

We submitted to BYOV. Yeah, we submitted to BYOV, but it’s, and it’s not a big fringe. And eventually, like, a space came up that was, like, upstairs at a Mexican restaurant.

I know the restaurant. They’re still going to be eating while you’re performing. There’s only 40 seats, and that’s not including those who just happen to be customers.

I know. And you are- They’re going to keep serving and talking through your show. And you’re going to be, like, in a bucket with 20 other companies that want this fallout, or something like that.

I thought it was 50. It’s just like, wow, that’s the competition for upstairs at the Mexican restaurant. Yeah.

And this stage has no backstage. It’s like, I can reach my arms out and touch the stage right, stage left. It just goes to show how desperate people are to fill that spot in between.

We could, we could easily do an improv show on something. Like, we probably wouldn’t do swordplay there, but we could do, you know. We should just, like, find a clearing in the woods equidistant between Winnipeg and Edmonton and start our own fringe festival.

There is, there is that hunger, because, you know, there are only those two. Yeah. When you’re doing that circuit, you can do one or the other, and they’re not huge.

Yeah. And there’s, people got to do something. Start up the Red Deer fringe.

The Red Deer fringe. Yeah. The This Cabin in the Woods fringe.

Anybody who wants to do a show, come on out. Do the Fort McMurray fringe. It’s kind of a city.

Yeah. But you’re doing something different in Toronto. You’re not doing, you’re not doing a wildcat.

You’re not doing, you’re not doing swordplay. What are you doing? We’re not doing an action-packed physical comedy. We are doing a puppet rom-com set in a tavern.

Okay, you have to, you have to tell me how this came about. It’s kind of a, it’s a show that we technically started. This is a remaking, a total, total rewrite of another show that we produced, sort of, in 2012.

Like, produced is a strong word. We’re saying that the drive for how this came to be was us not getting into Toronto Fringe. And then Toronto Fringe, of course, doesn’t do BYOVs like many other fringes do.

They do the site-specific thing. So if you don’t get drawn in the lottery for Toronto Fringe, your only recourse is something site-specific. Yes.

So with that having come up… Oh, yeah, okay. Yeah, so that, I was devastated not to be part of the Toronto Fringe. I feel like we’ve started to gain some momentum in the community, and it’s so hard as an independent artist to gain anything that I would call momentum.

And by momentum, I just mean people come to our show now. Yeah. Like, people came to Wasteland and that was great.

But when we first started in Toronto Fringe, we were dealing with 20, 30, 40, 50 was a big crowd for us in a 180-seat venue. And we’ve come a long way. Now we can sell out a 200-seat venue, not every night, but most nights.

Like, we’re still not there yet, but we’ve come so far. And I was devastated to have missed out on the momentum of that. And I really wanted to do something as part of the Toronto Fringe.

And my first thought was, well, there is site-specific. And in my closet, I have this puppet show, which originally was thrown together. There used to be this competition at Comedy Bar called Pilot Week.

And Pilot Week was a really, really cool opportunity for comedians in the community. And Comedy Bar teamed up with Insight Productions, which is a big television production company in Toronto. And they were looking to kind of move into doing comedy.

Normally, they do a lot of reality TV. Like, they produced The Great Race, I think. Amazing Race.

And they did a lot of those kind of American-branded shows. And you know, like, Canada’s Got Talent or whatever. But not that, but you know, those kinds of shows.

And basically, you had to submit a pitch for a pilot, a TV pilot. It was like 20 minutes long or something. Like a half-hour TV pilot.

It was a comedy thing. So we submitted, barely got into the deadline. And we submitted for a puppet show set in a cafe called Bendy Sign Coffee.

Which originally was all about, at the time, Caitlin worked as a barista in a cafe. And just, like, basically recorded all of the berserk characters that were associated with this. And that was like, this would make a great comedy show.

Not the specific people, but the archetypes of the characters that come in. You know, the businessman who comes in and is yelling into his phone and then, like, ignores you completely and whispers his order at you. And he keeps talking.

I have questions about what kind of coffee. And that evolved into this show. So we got selected to be part of the competition.

We ultimately won. It was, like, a big deal at the time. It was like $5,000 and we got to go to all these pitch meetings.

We rehearsed for a comedy competition. Yeah, and it was a really cool opportunity for us. And for me, it wasn’t even a Sexty Rec show at the time.

It was sort of my foray into comedy. And it was a really great thing. And, you know, nothing really came of it.

But I learned a lot. We got money. And then the show’s been sitting in the closet ever since.

We produced it once in a cafe for two nights. And it went really well. We packed the house.

It was really fun. But this is, we’re talking, like, a 25-minute piece. Yeah.

Right? That was set in a cafe. So I’m thinking, okay, I have this cafe show, site-specific. Let’s do this.

We can ramp it up. We can ramp it up to an hour. No problem.

Cafes didn’t work out. We wrote out to a number of cafes and nothing was really working for us. But then this tavern worked out.

The Paddock, which is on Bathurst, just south of Queen. Amazing location. And we wanted to, so we thought, well, let’s do it.

And so we thought, no problem. This show can happen in a tavern. We just change a few things.

No. No. Nothing worked.

You can’t have someone come in, order one thing, and leave. Someone come in, order one thing, and leave. Which was kind of the game of the old show.

Right. So we found ourselves in this situation where we had to completely rewrite everything. Like everything.

There’s nothing we can use from the old show. We’re using the same puppets. Maybe the odd lines.

So now we’re like scrambling to write this entirely brand new whole entire show for the Toronto Fringe. You can’t see where we are if you’re listening to this podcast. But Phil has come to our apartment that is a disaster zone because I’ve got this fly that’s half built sitting next to me.

My glue gun that I just unplugged. And just foam everywhere. And we’re still… Yeah, it’s been a lot to bite off.

A lot more than we thought. Well, you’re preparing for like two separate shows. Yeah, I guess three technically if you consider Wildcats happening in Edmonton.

Well, and we’re rehearsing. So we originally were going to go on tour with someone who knows Wildcat and Swordplay intimately. And he dropped out of the tour kind of last minute.

Okay. So not only are we now producing this brand new show, which is a surprise to us. For Toronto Fringe, we are also rehearsing a new comedian into Swordplay and Wildcat at the same time.

Yeah, and he’s got to learn Wildcat and then not do it for one Fringe. And then we’ll go to Edmonton and he’ll be doing both. Maybe you guys can have a refresher while you’re in that cabin in the woods hunting for your own food.

That will be like method acting. Yeah, for Wildcat. It’s true.

We will be out on the plains just like lost without a home. We may as well get a covered wagon and just go full method. Oh, shit.

You know, we’ll put like a sex T-Rex on the side of your covered wagon. I’m like, I’ve stopped in little towns to do little shows. Feed our horses.

I would totally do like an old-timey thing. I can make a tonic that I could sell or something. Oh, shit.

That’d be great. Oh, man. Yeah, it’s turned… We have definitely… I wouldn’t say bitten off more than we can chew, but we sure have a mouthful right now.

In terms of the writing this new show or like rewriting this new show… Yeah, so completely different. Are you finding that the writing process for this is different from the writing process that you’ve used in the past? Yeah, it’s definitely different than previous shows. Like previous… Most of our shows, like our scripted shows, are very clear genre parodies.

So like our scripted shows at this point are Callahan, which is very much like Indiana Jones kind of inspired. Leviathan, which was our sci-fi show that nobody’s seen because it was only produced in Montreal really. And then Wildcat, Swordplay, and Wasteland more recently, where Wildcat is Western, Swordplay is a swashbuckler, and Wasteland is this post-apocalyptic show.

But they all have these like very big genre connections and they’re all also action shows. So Bendy Sign is very different, both in that… Like, well, it is a genre piece, you could say. Like it’s kind of a romantic comedy.

It’s like a sitcom rom-com. Okay. It’s like a sitcom rom-com.

But that is like… A sitcom is not a genre that you can sink your teeth into in the same way that you can sink your teeth into Western or post-apocalyptic. There’s not those things everyone looks for. Like in a Western, it’s like, where’s the tumbleweed? Yes.

You know… Where’s the hangin’? Where’s the hangin’, or whatever. Where’s the quickdraw? Where’s the quickdraw, where it’s like… Rom-com is like… Also, if anyone who’s listening has seen any of our shows, I mean, we’re not the best at romance. We have our strengths.

We tend to avoid it as a subject. We have our strengths and we have our weaknesses. And writing a romance is like… Swordplay… Spoiler.

There is sort of a romance thrown in at the very, very, very end that we have tried to cleverly hint at through the whole show. But it’s not a romance show, right? That… I mean, I guess Callahan, our first show, there’s a bit of a romance in there too. But other than… It’s more love lost.

It’s more love lost, like dead wife, missing my dead wife, than it is the story of two people falling in love. Right. And this time, we’re gonna have a lot… Basically, boring-ass, heteronormative love story, for lack of a better term.

We have these puppets already built. We have these characters already built. Even based on the old narrative, there was like… If the show ever went to air, if it ever… Because it was a pilot episode.

If it ever had a life beyond that pilot, I think that that love story was going to happen anyway. So we thought that that would be a great way to flesh out this story, as it were. So it’s a challenge for us to be like… We’ve been watching.

We watched… What was it? High Fidelity. We’ve been trying to be like, what are these workplace romances like? How do we build this? And what are the beats of that? What are the… That’s sort of our normal process, is that we all get together and we watch, you know, Mad Max and Boy and His Dog and The Quiet Earth and all these post-apocalypse shows. And we’re like, cool.

These are the things that we see all the time. So we have to have this. And what do we think is the next… What’s the spin on this that we can put? And that sort of thing.

But with this show, it’s been harder to have the mountain of source material. I genuinely don’t like rom-coms nine out of ten times. So, I mean, and it’s not… It’s like I also genuinely don’t like sports movies nine out of ten times.

But one of our projects in the future will be a sports movie. And I love… I think I’m going to thoroughly enjoy doing a sports movie. But it’s one of those genres that researching for it is less fun.

And rom-com is the same. I’m going to genuinely enjoy doing a rom-com. But it is harder to research because I have to sit through the notebook.

And I’m like, I don’t wanna. Do you feel like the notebook is one that you absolutely have to watch? I haven’t watched it yet, to be honest. But I’ve been putting it off.

Well, the notebook, I don’t know. What are rom-coms? What are these things that people watch that they… Like, what are good ones? I don’t even know. I’ve googled it.

And I’m like, I haven’t seen or heard of any of these movies. I would much rather watch movies where people are shooting each other than kissing. And… Is there anything that you guys have learned about rom-coms that you didn’t know? Well, there’s these beats that, you know, beating out how… Like the stages of, you know, the initial, like… There’s all kinds of different… Meet cute.

Love stories. And this one is character A is in love with protagonist. Protagonist has no idea.

That’s kind of the… And slowly throughout, he slowly unveils his feelings, right? Right. Which is our spin on the narrative. Normally, it’s the other way around.

Like, dopey man doesn’t know the woman is in love with him. And we thought, like, wouldn’t it be fun if the woman was the total dope? And the man is doing all the emotional supporting. And the man is doing all the, like, sort of… You’ve got this… Where normally it’s the other way around.

So we have this, like, dopey female protagonist who has no idea about anything that’s going on around her. She’s, like, smart and capable and talented. But is just socially and emotionally entirely dopey and oblivious.

We have this… The man who’s, like… There is a scene where he’s just like, I’m in love with you. And she’s like, what? Yeah. Sorry, I didn’t hear you.

Anyway, I’m going to go do that thing I’m talking about. It’s been fun to sort of, like, prod that genre in the same way that we prod the other ones for where the twists are. And basically, the twist… We’re not doing a huge twist.

The big twist is just that, like… They’re puppets, I guess. Well, they’re puppets. And watching puppets kiss is fun.

But it’s also just that they’re, like… The narrative is a bit flipped in terms of who the… The man in the male and female role. Usually, it’s this, like… I’m sure there must be rom-coms that have done this before. Oh, I’m sure.

I have such a shallow understanding of most rom-coms. And we’re also writing some original music. Oh, that’s cool.

Oh, boy. We’re dipping our toes into all things I’m familiar with in this project. The other thing about this is that we want it to have a bit more of a cabaret feel.

Like, most of our shows are pretty, like, story-driven. Like, contained, story-driven. The action starts pretty much right at the get-out.

And you know what the deal is. And we go on this quest through the deal. Whereas Bendy Sign is more about, like, you know… The audience is going to be sitting in this tavern, getting served drinks by a puppet.

Like, you can order a beer from the puppet. And the puppet brings you the beer. There’s puppet sports on the TV.

There’s puppet sports on the TV. Oh, okay. We want it to feel more like you’re just sort of… It’s a day in the life of this weird world of the puppet bar.

So there’s more stuff about, like… Okay, there’s this through-line story. But meanwhile, suddenly we’re going to cut away. And it’s the letters from the set of Sesame Street.

And they’re like, oh god, what a fucking day. X is complaining about how there’s no work for him anymore. And then we have, you know, like, the sandwich… The sandwiches that are, like, Schindler’s List trying to, like… Yeah, that’s a complicated joke.

The sandwiches are like… This is one sandwich is ordering all the sandwiches. So that they can, like, all leave together in this, like, a covert sandwich operation. So there’s all these, like, there’s, you know… There’s a lot of vignettes that are attached to the main story.

That are, like, kind of gags in and of themselves. And we are hoping for every show to feature a different fringe show. Okay.

So we’re hoping for each show to be able to book… Like a walk-on. A walk-on fringe show. So it’s like, oh my gosh, it’s so-and-so from this fringe show.

And do, like, a little mini interview with them. That’s good. That’s fine.

I think it’s going to be much more relaxed than a lot of our fringe shows. Less highly choreographed. But a lot more, you know, like Sean was saying, improvise-y cabaret.

Well, if you’re in a BYOV, you don’t quite have that enforced… Bombast. Yeah. You also don’t have that… We don’t have a tech.

We don’t have someone who’s going to be, like… How many people are going to shut you down if you hit that, if you go over the house? They will. They will. They still will.

Yeah. I think because the fringe audience needs to run to their next show. That’s true, yeah.

Right? And I want to honor that. And I don’t want to go over. Um, but I think this show will be a lot more loose.

Just in its… There will be a puppet serving drinks throughout. It’s not as much of a, like, sit and focus kind of show. Yeah, and so weaving that into this sort of new genre.

And it has led to a very different writing process. Where, like, normally our process is, like I say, we all get together. We, like, dive into the source material, whatever genre it is.

And then we go off. And usually I write the, like, the first take on the script. And then, like, we smash heads together on it again.

And change things. And it gets very, like, chopped to pieces over the course of the process. But this time, because it’s, like, it’s so different in terms of it not being based on the story.

And it being based on all these little vignettes. And, like, you know, I have a mind for absorbing genre. But I don’t know a lot of, like, jokes about working in a bar.

Whereas, like, Caitlin works in a bar. Connor works in a bar. You know, Julian knows what Tinder is.

Like, I’ve been finding myself more outsourcing things of, like, can you guys, like, tell me what the jokes are for, like, the Tinder scene? Or, like, what are the jokes about, like, people watching sports at bars? I don’t go to bars and watch sports. And I can’t just, like, watch that on Netflix. Yeah.

Are you the primary scriptwriter, like, starting off? He is our scriptwriter. There are no primary about it. Sean writes all of our scripts.

It is collaborative insofar as, like, we all have input. And we will all collectively edit Sean’s scripts. And we will all improvise in the room and throw in jokes.

Yeah. And the stories change a lot over the course of the process. The first script is usually me, yeah.

Like, entirely Sean. Always Sean. And do you guys all get together and say, this is going to be our next thing? Like, now we’re going to write this sports play? Or do you say, I think I want to write a post-apocalyptic play? No, it’s more the former than the latter.

I tend to be the one who goes out and comes up with ideas. And, like, guys, we’ve got to do this. And they’re, like, no, Caitlin, you’re an idiot.

And then eventually I convince them. We all, like, Callahan was a long process. Because it was something that we did with improv for a long time.

And then we decided we wanted to write a script after trying to do it as an improvised show at Ottawa Fringe. And just be like, this is a terrible idea. Let’s write a script and make it good.

And then science fiction was a very logical second choice for a genre. Then Caitlin saw Cat by You. What’s it, Cat Baloo? Cat Baloo.

And was like, now we’re doing a Western. I was like, oh, this is, this is, I’ve never seen a female protagonist in a Western. And, I mean, now I have seen a bunch of it.

But at the time, this is way back in 2013. Oh, the old days. In the old days.

And, um. Sometimes something just happens that just spurns us off. And, like, when Mad Max Fury Road came out.

We were all like, yep. We were all just like, well, we’re doing that. Story play was harder.

We all sat around and jammed ideas for the longest time of what genre we were going to do. Um, and nothing was clicking until someone said, we thought, well, what have we, what weapons have we fought with already? You know, we haven’t fought with swords. Someone said, and I wasn’t convinced by Three Musketeers until someone said, uh, Princess Bride.

And I’m like, oh, yeah, something like that. Whimsical and fantasy with swords. And it sort of started from us trying to write something that was more of an ensemble piece than we had done before.

Like, the general formula for most of our shows is that there’s a hero and their buddy. Right. And they kind of go through.

This ended up being Hero and Buddy, too. Yeah, story play wound up going down to that because just our cast size kind of demands what happens. But we started with the idea of, like, maybe we’ll do, like, a superhero team or something like that.

Like, something like the Avengers or something like that. And we’re also talking about, like, let’s do, like, a fantasy thing because we all are doing this Dungeons and Dragons stuff. We all know the world of fantasy.

And Three Musketeers sort of seemed to be the hit that kind of satisfied a lot of things at once. And then Three Musketeers doesn’t sound that cool. So the Princess Bride made it sound kind of more fun, I think.

Yeah. Yeah. And, like, the Western, I had been like, guys, let’s do a Western.

Guys, let’s do a Western. And they’re like, no, no, no, no, no. And then we were being interviewed on a radio show.

And they’re like, what’s your next project? I was like, a Western. She got it. And so it was.

And then we have, like, the same thing with the sports movie. I’ve, every time, we’re like, what are we doing next? I’m like, sports movie. And they’re all like, go to hell, Caitlyn.

But we will. Are you going to do, like, a music biopic? Oh, yeah. Like, a Ray or something? Just follow, what’s that guy’s name who does Princess Bride? He did, uh, he did, uh.

Oh, shit. Rob Reinhardt? No. Uh, uh.

Oh, yeah. Wasn’t that Rob Reinhardt? You’re thinking of Spinal Tap. Yeah, he did Spinal Tap, didn’t he? But, yeah, Spinal Tap.

So, Spinal Tap. Also, uh, Christopher Guest. Oh, yeah, he does Spinal Tap.

That’s who I was thinking of. He’s in my wind, he does the thing. Well, just that Rob Reinhardt did Princess Bride and then did Spinal Tap, which was a bio, music comedy biopic.

Yeah. I feel like, like, yeah, I don’t know. I’m never, not gonna say no.

Because I’ve been, so, been gunning to do this sports movie, but I think that that is the, like, if we ever get a grant kind of project. Like, it’ll be a larger, not necessarily fringe-focused project. It needs a bit of a bigger cast.

Is there a sport that you would focus on? No, I think it would be an imaginary sport. Yeah, I think it would be, like, the name of the show will be Remember the Sports Team. And the sport is not the point.

It’s more about the, like, more about America. America is the metaphor, you guys. Now’s not the time, I guess.

Oh, it’s all the time. I mean, Canada. I mean, it’s about that idea.

It’s all about the Canadian dream. It’s all about the Canadian dream. Every red-blooded Canadian boy wants to, you know.

Yeah, but that’s the joke. And, but the next, I think the next project we’re going to do is Crime. Yeah, we’re looking at doing kind of a, because people have often had a hard time pegging what the style is that we have.

Like, we get called sketch a lot, which is not really what we do. We also, sometimes people call our scripted shows improv, which is wildly inaccurate. We get called, you know, in major publications, not naming any names, our scripted shows have been called improv.

Well, a number of times. I guess because they’re comedy and because they are, I think people mistake them because of the, you know, their genre, their comedy, people mistake it for an improvised Riverdale or whatever. There are moments that are looser and we build it so, you know, this moment is loose, that moment is loose, but it’s tight.

Yeah. It’s tightly choreographed. No one can improvise that stuff.

I mean, oh, we just happened to improvise this complicated dragon sequence. No, like. Come on.

Please God, give us credit enough to say that we choreographed this. I mean, I’m flattered in one way that people think that’s improvised, but it’s not true. It’s not.

A lot of what we do is not improvised. And a lot of what we do is improvised. We do, but those are separate shows.

Yeah. And to call those shows sketch, we can’t get into sketch fests with them because they’re too long. Yeah.

And they don’t actually fit the definition of sketch. They’re this like, they’re plays. Yeah.

They’re hour-long sketch-like plays. And so that’s where the new show comes in. Yeah, we’re just going to do sketch.

Well, kind of. We’re going to basically kind of do like a, I’ve been describing it as like a grindhouse kind of thing. Like our hour-long show will be three separate stories.

Okay. And also we’ll be able to explore genres we’ve always wanted to explore, but not necessarily to the length, to the extent that a full hour-long play would involve. Right.

We don’t necessarily want to do a full hour-long noir, but we really want to try to do noir. Yeah. So we think, we’ve been kind of in love with that genre for a while.

And so this will be an opportunity for us to build three shorter versions of what we do. And so we’ll do a noir, we’ll do a heist, and we’ll do a buddy cop. These are three genres I’m passionate about, but I can’t see it as a full Sex T.R.E.X. show.

Right. And it’ll give us an opportunity to create those shows, play with those genres, and have an option to do them as a 15-minute one-off. Right.

So we could do sketch fest. Right. We can do sketch festivals with one or two of them because they’re shorter requirements.

Yeah. Yeah. Sean, you haven’t been here for any of the other times that I’ve spoken to Sex T.R.E.X. Yeah, I guess we’ve just missed them.

We’ve just missed them. Imaginations of fate. Yes.

I almost said Pokeroo, but… Yeah, right, right. You know, anybody who doesn’t live in Ontario is… Yeah, I’ve heard the reference. Neither of us.

Yeah, exactly. As soon as I said it, I was like, this is not going to work. But what is your… I’ve talked to most of the other members of the group about their background in theatre and where they come from, but I haven’t had the chance to ask you.

What’s your theatre background? When did you start doing it? The basic story is, well, I’m from New Brunswick, and so that’s where I started doing theatre there and just started with high school musicals, as many people do, although I cannot sing. And that was always a problem at the high school musicals, but I enjoyed being a goof. So there was always some place for me.

And then I did theatre in university with TUNB, and particularly with my theatre guru there was a guy named Len Falkenstein, and he’s got a company called Theatre Free Radical that occasionally does the Fringe Circuit and things like that. And a lot of my sensibilities came from that world, where he had minimalistic theatre and a lot of abstract stuff, but very political theatre. So my first Fringe Festivals I was popping out of an oil drum and talking to people about terrorism in Alberta and stuff, and that’s obviously not the kind of theatre that Sexty Rex is.

But some of those elements of how to tell a story certainly still survive in my theatrical imagination, and finding fun ways to loop around your point and things like that. So Theatre Free Radical and university, and then you probably heard from the others that we all went to school together at George Brown College, and so that’s where I sort of looped on in with all these guys. And so you were there at the beginning of Sexty Rex with Callahan? Yeah, certainly by Callahan I was there.

I technically am not a founding member of Sexty Rex. Okay, so they did one improv show. They did like a couple of weeks of Sexty Rex.

And then Sean started performing with them, like very, very, very early on. But this was way back in the baby days of Sexty Rex when we were just doing improv. When it was still Sexual Tyrannosaurus.

It was still Sexual Tyrannosaurus and not Sexty Rex. We hadn’t made that connection yet. Because I remember being in Montreal and seeing you guys at the Fringe for All doing an excerpt from Callahan.

And I’d never seen anything. I think my whole group, we were there with a silent film show, and we saw you guys do it. We were like, holy shit.

We’d never seen that kind of physical work. That would have been like a movie trailer kind of thing. We spent so long working on that movie trailer.

None of those things are in our show. But it didn’t matter because it was slick and it was awesome. We were there and there was a Japanese group, Osaru-su, did you see that? And they’ve since been there.

We’ve seen them do other stuff too. So you guys went to school with everybody from Sexty Rex. But what did they bring you in for? They always wanted to do long form improv.

And I still remember seeing them for the first time, which I think was the first Sexty Rex show that they ever did, which was back when it was Colin Munch and Robin Taller and Julian and Connor. And they did, what did they get? They got a movie as a suggestion. And the movie that they got, which is a thing that we still do in improv, the movie that they got was A League of Their Own.

And so they spitballed on that for a little bit and it became a World War II thing was what they latched onto. It was during World War II, right? So they did this World War II A League of Their Own set. And afterwards, I remember watching that and being like, man, that looks like fun.

I want to do that. And then I forget who it was that approached me. It was probably Julian because he was the one I knew best at the time, who basically said that they wanted to have me on board as kind of like a narrator for the improv stuff because I don’t have an improv background.

I don’t have any formal improv training or anything like that. But I have been playing Dungeons and Dragons for a really long time. There’s a lot that you can take out of Dungeons and Dragons.

There’s so much crossover. Improv, D&D, it’s the same thing without an audience. So I had been playing D&D with Julian for a while at that point, I think.

Nope. No, was that before? Oh, no, you’re right. We did.

We were doing that in theatre school. Yeah, yeah. Oh, we were playing Oglum.

Right, I forgot about that. So Julian knew that I had this sort of story weaving quality from that and he was like, we just want you to basically get in the improv with us and make sure that the story makes some kind of sense, which I feel is still basically my role in the Sexty Rex’s improv stuff. So that was kind of how I was first brought on and probably why I’m the script guy nowadays.

Yeah. Well, you guys have to go soon to do D&D Live. Oh, yeah.

We have to be there in an hour. Yeah. I have a couple of questions about D&D Live.

Yeah, sure. And that is, when you, because I think that I’ve seen D&D Live in a couple of other cities, but when did it come to you guys as something that you wanted to do, like as an improv thing in front of an audience? It wasn’t originally a Sexty Rex show. We took it over.

Yeah, D&D started as a bad dog show. I’m trying to remember how long ago it was now that it would have started, but it was like 2012. Like seven years ago? No, it wasn’t that long ago.

Might have been. Might have been. 2012 is my guess, my guess anyway.

I think longer because we did five, there were four versions before. Oh, yeah, because they weren’t necessarily annually either. Oh, okay, right.

But there were, it started as this show that was pitched by a couple of comedians at Bad Dog, and I was roped into it because people knew that I was a nerd that played D&D. So I got involved in it to be the dungeon master from sort of the ground floor. And I was one of the producers, yeah, as well.

From the first edition. Yeah, yeah. And basically kind of like my involvement in that show grew every time we put on a new show.

And actually, by the time we did our second run of that show, and this was a Bad Dog run, so Bad Dog runs are like, the show is on every Wednesday. This is back in the day when Bad Dog was company in residence at Comedy Bar before they had their own space. So they had a few nights that they could program.

Right. Yeah, so we did like Wednesday night shows and you do four weeks of a run and then it would be gone until maybe if it was good enough, you would get it back. And we got it back the second time.

And pretty much the cast that we have now is very similar to the cast of that second run of the show, which would have been, I think, 2013 that that happened. So four years ago, at least. So we’ve been doing this show for quite a long time, especially in the world of improv, like kind of unheard of that anything lasts that long.

Yeah. Especially in terms of something that’s like a narrative show and not like a game show or something like that. Because Sean and I toured all through this time and we would only be in town for short little spurts.

So the show kind of lived around that. There was one time and they produced it without us. Well, actually, I had nothing to do with it, except that I was sort of a shadow producer and I would make the poster and make the die and make the dice and make the this or that and watch every single show.

I was the biggest fangirl of D&D Live. But yeah, I mean, we had seen shows, the live D&D shows in Winnipeg and stuff like that. That’s because that’s the first time that I came across it was like the late night D&D Live.

There was a producer on the first iteration. I don’t think he worked with any of the other iterations of it. But he was brought on because he was from Winnipeg and had brought in some like it is a very different show from the Winnipeg show because we actually were guests on it in 2014 at the Fringe Festival there.

So we got to see it firsthand. It’s a very different show, but he brought the idea of the giant die and brought the idea of a few elements because he was from Winnipeg and I had some affiliation with that show. Yeah.

So there is some definite crossover from the Winnipeg show. There’s a bunch of D&D shows across Canada and the States. And the States, yeah.

I know like Critical Hit, I think, is the show in Vancouver. And they all seem to do it slightly differently, which is kind of cool. The year that I was in Edmonton, there was a group that was doing, they were in a BYRV at a movie theatre and they were doing, they didn’t know D&D as well as they probably should have, but people had fun.

Yeah. And D&D Live, the Toronto show, is really not buried deep into D&D lore. There are probably, of the jokes that are going on, you’re going to get maybe a dozen D&D-based jokes.

There’s a lot of general fantasy nerd jokes. There’s a lot of, one of our particular twists on the thing that I’ve never seen in other cities is that ours is set in Tirana. In Tirana, yeah.

Tirana. The fantasy realm of Tirana. The realm of Tirana.

Yeah. So there’s kind of like, you’ve got the built-in jokes about the city that are sort of tied into that too. Yeah, like Forthright Eds instead of Honest Eds.

And you have the Sky Dome, which is this dome that floats in the air. And you have Finance Mountains, which is, you know, Bay Street, basically, where the dwarves work to generate, you know, valuable resources out of these mountains. And one of them has like a weird little TD box on the top of the mountains.

The dwarves from the southern hammer town. Yeah, yeah. And then, yeah, there’s the Mists of Saga and the Scarred Burrows and the like outlying regions of the realm of Tirana as well that are incorporated in the show.

And it used to be the town of Ork until it was, the Orks were dominant. Like the Orks lost a great war. So there’s all these like pun games that you can play in there.

You know, there’s this Kahn, who is the leader of the Orks, and his name is Kahn Do. And he is slowly taking back the realm of Tirana for the Orks. And there’s, you know, these ideals.

Now, are these things that sort of just sort of like happened over time as this was going on? Did they improvise? Or did you like plan to do these? A lot of these are written jokes that we like bring into the shows. Some of them are spontaneous and then get written in. Some of them are spontaneous.

And like, but D&D Live, like in its first iteration, there was a lot of like planning that went into it. We had a whole like Bible of like, these are all the locations. And these are all the quests that can happen.

But this was early in my experience working with non-Sexy Rex improvisers. And we’re like, oh, they won’t use any of that. But this was again, like five years ago.

And now we still have that Bible. Um, but it’s a lot looser. Yeah, it’s much, it’s much more of just sort of like a fun improv show now.

And the main lead in is that like, I mean, we’ve got a great cast and these characters are the same characters every month, every monthly show. And the sort of the Dungeons and Dragons hook is that like the characters are persistent and they grow and they have these stories and they have these like backstories and like they can die and come back because it’s magic because it’s Dungeons and Dragons. And it’s got this sort of like soap operatic flow.

But, uh, that being said, like, it’s not a show that’s been running in the same storyline for this, uh, for the four years. No, this, but, but the, this iteration, like, um, when we moved, Bad Dog moved into the new space, we said like, Hey, do you want to co-produce this show or can we produce this show? And they’re like, take it, take it. Yeah, take it.

And the first few times we ran it, it was kind of rough and we had, you know, 10 people in the audience, but we’ve since built, um, a shorthand with the performers who aren’t normal sex directors. And like Sex T.R.E.X largely plays a supporting role in this show. Um, except for Connor and Sean, uh, everyone else just supports like Julian and I support the show.

Um, and it’s since become a Sex T.R.E.X produced show. Yeah. Largely.

Yeah. Yeah, but it’s something that we like, uh, we see continuing to grow from where it is and like every month it tends to get stronger. And it’s the audience has built, the audience has grown.

Now, now it’s got a steady. Are you seeing a lot of regulars are coming back? Yes. More and more.

It’s, and that’s the thing. And we knew it. We knew like the beginning, it was like, we just got to hold out.

This is one of those things that like, it’s a good show and it’s a good format. And it takes a lot to get, like, we all kind of grew up as nerds. Connor will say he didn’t, but whatever.

We, we all grew up as nerds. And there’s something that I understand to be true is that like, it takes a while to earn that trust, but once you have it, it’s loyal. Yeah.

And, and it’s taken us a while to build our audience, but now we have a really great audience. And there’s like, there are about 20 people that come every show. And it’s a 60 seat audience.

And then the rest of it is friends of those people or people who are trying it out for the first time. And we’re, we’re, we’re basically selling out now every month and we don’t even have to try because of that loyalty. Nice.

And, and I think. We’ve got a built in like board game night that happens after every show, which is great. So there’s like a social, social thing.

And hear what they have to say about the show. And it’s, it’s always amazes me how much they know about the plot. Stuff we’ve forgotten.

You gotta really start a like blog. We really do. Yeah.

But like this, the show is not, is entirely made up, but yeah, like Sean was saying, there are aspects that are, are every, every month the same. And one of those things is the map. Like we have this map that is in the book that we hand out to our audience every, every month.

And it’s basically just a map of Toronto with things renamed to be like, all the Dales are there as an Elvin homeland. So Parkdale is Rosedale. And these places are all where the Elves are from, Riverdale are all where the Elves are from.

And, and yeah, and, and that, that is the same. There are things that are always the same, but it’s, it does change. It does change a lot.

Month to month. Still, still an improv show. So very, very, very much an improv show in spite of the like locations being more or less set.

Yeah. Well, I thank you guys so much for talking to me. Yeah, thanks for coming by.