Heist At The Grand Theatre
Playwright Arun Lakra, whose Heist is enjoying an exuberant production at the Grand Theatre in London, Ontario, is a self-confessed fan of heist movies. His favourite and the apparent inspiration for Heist is Ocean’s Eleven, the star studded caper flick of 2001.
Heist, the stage play, follows the Hollywood formula: a team of colorful characters, each with a criminal specialty, assembled by a mastermind crook to pull off one last big job that will make them obscenely rich, albeit not as rich as Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and other obscenities.
Marvin (Devin Mackinnon), an Irish criminal genius who spends most of Act One narrating, recruits Ryan (the handsome Callan McKenna Potter), Angie (the acrobatic Gillian Moon), Fiona (a geeky Priya Narine) and Kruger (a volatile, gun-toting Emilio Viera) to form a team that becomes a family. Or does it?
Rather than the casino lucre of Ocean’s Eleven, Heist sets its sights on jewels, specifically a mega-carat ruby that is deftly removed from an elaborately booby-trapped museum. But the prize proves to be a phony, presumably switched for the real thing by one of the “family.”
The Heist family breaks up, only to be reunited by Marvin some month later for another big job. This time the target is an immense diamond held in a hidden safe in the wine cellar of The Spider (Belinda Cornish), an evil woman straight out of a Bond flick.
But wait! What about the traitor who absconded with the ruby? To avoid spoilers let’s skip over the details. Suffice it to say that Heist eventually lays out and then unravels an incredibly convoluted plot (and I use the word in both of its senses) that actually seems to make sense – if you can keep up with all the clumsy flashbacks that occupy much of the second act and you don’t think about it too hard on the way home.
Heist is the theatrical equivalent of a Twinkie, light, airy, filled with empty calories and devoid of nutritional content, yet oddly alluring. I scarfed it right down and enjoyed it quite a bit.
The great fun of Heist lies not so much in the script, which has way too much tell and not enough show, but in the imaginatively over the top physical production it gets thanks to director Haysam Kadri and his uber-talented artistic collaborators.
Taking its cue from Heist’s cinematic inspirations the production makes elaborate use of video and other graphic projections. Beyata Hackborn has created a high-tech set that works beautifully. Upstage is dominated by a large screen while a patchwork of smaller screens creates a cinematic proscenium that is constantly active. I sat in the fourth row and found myself wishing I was in the balcony so I could take it all in.
As Marvin introduces the cast of characters, the upstage screen displays their CVs, listing their criminal talents, strengths, and weaknesses. It makes what would otherwise have been a clumsy device rather compelling.
As the heists proceed, video and projection designer Corwin Ferguson, assisted by Alexandra Rizkallah fills that screen with a wide variety of diagrams, video clips, and aerial shots, including a ravishing rendition of Manhattan’s nighttime cityscape. Throughout, the lighting by Siobhán Sleath has great fun with simulated laser beams and other spooky effects.
Heist’s physical production looks like a million bucks and whatever The Grand spent on it, they got their money’s worth.
Also helping us forget how trifling the Heist story really is are the actors, who are uniformly excellent and who invest their parts with an energy and commitment that the material, truth be told, probably does not merit. Here, again, credit must be given to director Kadri.
I found myself reminded of The Lehman Trilogy, which on the page is a fairly mundane history lecture. Yet given an inspired theatrical vision, an immense budget for its physical production, and a trio of brilliant actors it became a major international theatrical event.
In a final (and inspired) nod to those Hollywood heist capers, the play ends with a credit roll on the back screen listing seemingly everyone connected to The Grand. A nice touch that sent me out of the theatre chuckling.
Heist continues at The Grand Theatre through February 1, 2025. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit the Grand Theatre website.
If you miss it at The Grand, you can travel to Edmonton, Alberta, where it will run at the Citadel Theatre from March 22 to April 13, 2025.
Footnote: In addition to enjoying what looks like a burgeoning playwriting career, Arun Lakra is a practicing ophthalmologist and ocular surgeon. I find polymaths like that intensely annoying.
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