On Monday night, Rachelle and I went to the Masonic Temple to see a taping of the Bravo show Live at the Rehearsal Hall. Montreal’s Patrick Watson was to be performing, but before that, the stage manager of the show took the floor. Used to being unloved, it was her job to suck all the spontaneity out of the event and make sure that what took place would fit neatly within the rigid protocols of TV. Primarily this involved getting the audience to do lots of enthusiastic applauding whenever she demanded it, (“Imagine 30 days in a row of sun!” She shouted at one point.), and ensuring that none of us were chewing gum.
Patrick Watson and his band are an array of hairy, Montreal hipsters whose affable and relaxed attitude belied their self-conscious projection of “cool.” Seamus O’Regan, who hosted the show and conducted two “interview packs” with the band, although hardly cool, was also self-conscious about his presentation.
Dressed in an inappropriately formal black suit with a saucy, little handkerchief poking out of the pocket, O’Regan looked like he came out of the same CTV factory that proudly considers Ben Mulroney to be the gold standard. However, somewhere, buried deep within O’Regan, you could sense a trace of native intelligence hoping to break free, but the formula of the show wouldn’t allow such a thing. And even if it had, O’Regan’s vanity kept emerging and sabotaging him. Imaging himself to be the star of the Patrick Watson performance, O’Regan needlessly brought attention to himself, reminding the viewing audience in a hammy way, that he normally interviewed politicians and that he had to be up early in the morning to host his show, Canada AM. I think he might have been trying to pull of self-effacing, but the evident truth was that it was an instinctive lurch toward self-promotion, an impulse to which he seemingly had no control.
Patrick Watson strove to separate himself from the culture of TV he found himself lost in, and quickly made an enemy of the stage manager with his insoucience. In an effort to maintain his Indie cred, and let us know that for him, it was all about the music, he feigned confusion and mystification by the frustrating conventions of TV. This made the stage manager sigh, her job getting just a little bit harder, but she’d seen this sort of thing before, and wouldn’t let it get in the way of completing her assigned task. It was kind of like watching the interplay between a teacher and a spirited and precocious child.
The taping took about 2 and a half hours, and although the band played 7 or 8 wonderful songs, I felt trapped and manipulated. In short order, I found my attention flagging, and instead of watching the band, I was looking at everybody else in the crowd. Upstairs in the balcony, I noticed a tall and slender security guard. She moved along the back row, pretending to be rigorously checking the perimeter, but clearly she was just drinking in one of the few perks of her job. After making that display of herself, she would stand in the shadows by a pillar, a little smile on her face as the lights from the stage animated her shadow against the wall.