Bob Shivery Show: David Sealy, Lunchbox Theatre

The Bob Shivery Show: graphic from the program guide 

Regina playwright David Sealy's new play, The Bob Shivery Show, successfully launched the season at Calgary's Lunchbox Theatre this week.

I saw Sealy's highly entertaining one-act at noon September 10, 2012 — the first show of Shivery's world première run. (You can catch this comedy from now through September 29, 2012.)

Huge congrats to David Sealy, director Mike Kennard, and cast Karen Johnson-Diamond, Esther Purves-Smith, David Lereaney, and Trevor Rueger (who plays Bob Shivery).

Congrats, also, to everyone else involved in making this production come so delightfully to life.

Kennard explains in the program guide that when he was offered the chance to direct The Bob Shivery Show — a play he calls "wonderfully quirky" — he thought, "I've got to do it!"

Kennard continues:

I love to go where the fear is... It gets my blood going and creates that wonderful feeling of not knowing!

We are all faced with crazy decisions every day of our lives and eventually cajoled into what is right. Bob Shivery faces a big choice and jumps at the opportunity of playing the game. 

David Sealy (right) with Anne McDonald (left)
at Monday's showing of The Bob Shivery Show

Also in the guide, Sealy says:

Bob Shivery poses an age-long question in his blog: "There - woman. Here - man.

Don't look now, but there's a chasm the size of the Grand Canyon yawning at your feet. What does it take to bridge that gap?"

When a rival appears for the woman of Bob Shivery's dreams, Sealy says Bob "embarks on his perilous quest because he can no longer be a bystander in his own life."

The quest is indeed perilous  —  and also very funny (it is a comedy after all), and Shivery faces arrest and more.

(But no more plot spoilers — go and see the play!)

I've been lucky enough to have heard Dave read a few extracts from the Bob Shivery Show while it was still a work in progress, and so I have been looking forward to seeing the full production for some time. It was great! Worth the wait! (Yeah, Dave!)

The Bob Shivery Show, the Lunchbox Theatre's season opener, runs in Calgary through September 29, 2012.

Here's hoping that other theatres soon pick up the Show, so that a wider audience can enjoy the fun. (A production right here in Regina would be amazing!)

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