The second Tapestry show this week which played Wednesday night at Theatre Passe Muraille was Jennifer Tung’s Iron Chef d’Orchestre.  Knowing Jennifer’s kitchen prowess I expected this to be at least as food inspired as the previous night’s Le Kitchen Party but it wasn’t.

We did get to hear Jennifer sing as well as play piano and we heard a lot about her journey as a conductor.  But that aside, mostly it felt like the Keith Klassen Show.  There was Keith with (actually without) his ventriloquist’s dummy Randy egging the audience on to provide themes for a short piece by Donna-Michelle St.Bernard and Ivan Barbotin (à la LibLab) that Krisztina Szabó performed at the end of the show.  There was Keith and Randy doing “knock knock” jokes.  There was Keith with a tortuous panel game vaguely reminiscent of that old Monty Python sketch with Lenin, Marx and Mao Zedong.  There was Keith and Krisztina playing a weird version of “Chinese Whispers” with an apparently dragooned Peter McGillivray.

And there was more Keith with a fake AI based film/adventure game based on the “artificial artificial intelligence” agent ShatGPT.  Also Keith on film in a strange wig riding around with someone in his car trunk largely failing to find cookies (the only food reference I caught all night).

Now I like Keith’s weird, surreal humour well enough in small doses but I’m not sure it really stretches to a 75 minute show and I’m not sure I got the “Iron Chef” thing at all.  It was quite fun in its way but not at all what I was expecting and not nearly as much fun as Le Kitchen Party.

Photo credits: Dahlia Katz