Ronnie Burkett returns to High Performance Rodeo with masterful, melancholy Wonderful Joe

Joe Pickle is the star of Ronnie Burkett's new show Wonderful Joe at the High Performance Rodeo in Calgary (Photo credit: Ian Jackson/High Performance Rodeo)

Old Joe Pickle, the hero of Ronnie Burkett’s wistful Wonderful Joe, is having a day unlike any other and the day just got started -- with a visit from the landlord.

“I’m afraid I’m here on official business, Joe,” he says, before explaining that the apartment building Joe has lived in for years is going to be torn down.

Joe has 30 days to get out.

“I’ll be gone by the end of the day,” says Joe, a queer senior who has retired from running a thriving barbershop on Eileen Street, in a funky downtown neighbourhood of an unnamed city where a collection of city misfits have built themselves a community.

Rather than being bummed out, Joe decides that getting kicked out of his fifth-floor walk-up along with his old dog Mister will be the catalyst for one final magnificent adventure.

Onstage at the Martha Cohen Theatre in Arts Commons, there’s a set that’s a larger version of a puppeteer’s travelling stage around which dangle 23 different puppets designed and built by Burkett and his crew of apprentice marionette-makers.

It’s the same Ronnie Burkett whose Theatre of Marionettes presented a show called Fools Edge in the same theatre 39 years ago, in 1986, perhaps not coincidentally around the same time One Yellow Rabbit presented the first High Performance Rodeo.

Burkett, who has won a Siminovitch Prize, a Governor-General’s Award for Lifetime Achievement, an Obie – and way back in the day, an Emmy, among others – grew up in Medicine Hat and started touring at 14.

He has been beloved in Calgary for five decades, and the Martha Cohen Theatre was full of a bunch of Burkett fans on Tuesday’s opening night who looked as if they may have been in the room in 1986, when Arts Commons was brand new and the Winter Olympics were just up the road and Olympic Plaza was being paved with donor bricks.

As Joe Pickle sets off with Mister in tow, en route to a street theatre production starring a homeless trio of performers, a reunion with a lovestruck butcher who wants to sweep him and Mister off to the suburbs, the daughter of the building owners who is launching the rebuild of Eileen Street, a random meeting on a park bench with a disaffected teen girl named Getti, Wonderful Joe unfolds a bit like a bar story about a dream you had last night.

It all unfolds within the close-knit community of Eileen Street, which is a kind of urban village of broken souls who each look out for each other the best they can.

The only problem is that they are getting older and by turning Eileen Street into a community, they created a place that richer folks want to live and play in – including a fancy new performing arts centre! – which means the local misfits, who earn not-quite-enough money in unconventional ways, have to get out.

There’s an old saying about artists being the ground troops for gentrification and that’s kind of what resonates underneath the storytelling in Wonderful Joe, which alternates between being uproariously funny and as bittersweet and melancholy as an old Carole King tune.

Playing all the characters, and Mister, the beloved old dog, Burkett is a marvel to watch in action.

He has a way of drawing you in, so that for 90 minutes or so, your whole world is Eileen Street and its cast of loveless, but loveable irregulars.

Director Blake Brooker – who wrote Fool’s Edge 39 years ago – directs Wonderful Joe with an eye towards letting us get behind the scene too, using a few well aimed spotlights that isolate some of those 23 marionettes as they hang by their strings offstage, waiting to be summoned back to life by Burkett.

The way Mister dangles in the spotlight as Wonderful Joe winds down is heartbreaking and beautiful for all the old dogs – and old dog owners – who filled the Martha Cohen Tuesday night.