Saturday night, live Monday Magazine, p. 15, Nothing like tweaking your program to keep things fresh. After years of establishing Movie Monday as the city’s leading cinematic showcase for mental illness awareness, MM honcho Bruce Saunders has decided to take a step in a slightly different direction by hosting their premiere live performance this weekend. First up? Local funnyman Andrew Bailey and his award-winning comic monologue Scrupulosity. |
Bailey, who picked up the Best Solo Show award at last year’s Fringe Festival, was also invited to perform Scrupulosity in a special post-Fringe showcase at Metro Studio back in September. As well as being a former member of the 30 Cent Players—with whom he’ll actually be appearing this Friday night as part of their one-year anniversary show—Bailey has been writing and performing with Atomic Vaudeville since September, 2004. (In fact, Bailey is also directing this month’s AV episode, Redneck Revival, running January 25 & 26. Busy month!) But is Scrupulosity a logical choice to appear at Movie Monday (or, more to the point, Solo Saturday)? Bailey thinks yes. “A number of people who saw the show did have mental illnesses,” he notes. “Some people, it hit too close to home for, but others like having a laugh.” And given Scrupulosity’s self-described “trials of religious-based obsessive-compulsive disorder [or OCD],” it’d be hard to think of a more appropriate show. “There’s a lot of mental illnesses that have people thinking they’re Jesus,” he chuckles. “But with OCD, there’s always a primary core obsession—and one of them is often moral or religious obsession. It’s not | necessarily good versus evil, it’s just about being so focussed on doing the right thing that it pulls you off whatever path you’re supposed to be on.” Most often cinematically associated with the Jack Nicholson film As Good As It Gets (“It’s really difficult to be cool with OCD, but Jack Nicholson was cool,” he laughs), Bailey says his own experience with OCD has been a bit different. “OCD, people think of scrubbing your hands,” he explains. “This is more like scrubbing your soul.” (Indeed, Bailey points out that the term “scrupulosity” comes from the root of the word “scruples.”) “Think of someone being excessively scrupulous—to the point of becoming obsessive-compulsive about it.” Wrap that into a 70-odd minute religio-comic monologue with a post-show Q&A and you’ve got Scrupulosity in a nutshell—and a great chance to catch this remount before it travels to both the Edmonton and Vancouver Fringe festivals this summer. And now that he’s got Scrupulosity out of his system, has Bailey moved on to a new obsession? “No, not really,” he laughs. “Strangely enough, it’s a lot less scary now. I mean, it’s different when you’re obsessing for a purpose. Now, it’s more theatrical.” |