At first glance, what is most noticeable about illusionist and comedian Murray SawChuck is his wild, platinum blonde hair and dark-rimmed glasses – the uniform of someone who doesn’t take themselves too seriously....

But beyond that eccentric persona and the purposefully goofy-looking exterior, there’s something about Murray – a charm, a charisma, a quirky quality you can’t quite categorize.

But it works. He’s got your attention.

Murray is one-part prankster, one-part mastermind and one-part entertainer (if you are only counting three parts), which might explain how a five-year-old Vancouverite went from playing accordion and performing Ukrainian dance (it’s true!) to becoming a fixture in Las Vegas where he performs live and films his YouTube web series (found at murraymagic.com).

As he tells it, he picked up magic at the age of seven when he got a magic kit for his birthday.

“It was another form of getting attention,” he says. But, he got good. Really good. Before long he was working the kids’ birthday party circuit in Vancouver and, wearing a “little tux,” he’d perform for kids only a few years his junior.

He kept that up for several years, and eventually advanced to gigs on cruise ships. He went to school in the meantime and studied broadcast journalism, but knew the stage was his calling.

Now he’s playing five nights a week at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas and making appearances on popular TV shows, such as Pawn Stars, Last Comic Standing and America’s Got Talent, where he amazed audiences by making a 1918 steam locomotive vanish and turning his assistant into a 450-pound tiger.

He has even more surprises up his sleeve (so to speak), and he plans to bring them to life when he performs at the Rose Theatre as Murray: Celebrity Magician – his first Canadian date in five years. It’s also his only stop in Canada on a two-date “tour” he plans to take in mid-April.

“I’ve always loved touring,” he says. “Before Las Vegas, I toured all over the world.”

So what can we expect for this special performance? A lot of real-time magic, mixed in with some comedy, pranks and a lot of audience interaction.

He’s not into tricks with technology, or using “plants” in his show. It’s all real, all the time, he says.

But what makes for a great show is the audience – and how they react.

“I love meeting each and every audience member that comes onstage,” says Murray. “I never know what it’s going to bring, I never know how they are going to react.

“And yes, I tease them, but I can get away with it because I’m ridiculous looking myself,” he jokes. And, that’s what makes him stand out as a performer.

“I just don’t take myself seriously. I’m very much the ‘Dennis the Menace’ of magic,” he says.

As for the magic itself, well, he won’t be able to haul in a steam train for the show, but he does promise to bring some big moves with him. He’ll cut his assistant in half – and though he acknowledges that this sounds very “cliché,” he says the way he executes the trick is much more modern, more like a puzzle.

Most of the time, Murray says, audiences want to see him perform live what they’ve seen him do on TV – and he’s happy to do that.

As for the one-night performance at The Rose, he encourages people to come with their families and have a fun night out.

“I think it’s a cool way to be entertained, and that’s why I stuck with it as a kid. I loved making people laugh and taking them out of the world for an hour,” he said.

Besides, he says, those who get tickets for the Brampton show are getting a steal.

“It’s a lot cheaper than flying out to Vegas to see me,” he laughs.

For more information on Murray please click HERE

Written by Nick Krewen

Tom Green has been many things over the years: talk show host, prankster, actor and comedian … but brewmaster?

True enough, through a partnership with close-to-Ottawa Beau’s Brewery, Mr. Green has had his own milk stout out on the market for the past three years – called, ironically enough, The Tom Green Beer!

According to the 44-year-old Green, it’s the best beer ever.

“The beer is delicious,” says Green over the phone from a recent stopover at his Ottawa home. “It has a really amazing flavour to it. They use a milk stout because it’s lactose sugar. When you brew beer with sugar, you usually don’t have any of that flavour or sweetness left in the beer. With lactose sugar, the sugars don’t break down the same way, so it leaves this coffee sweetness to it that’s very, very tasty.”

Why a milk stout?  Green says the origins came in tribute to his earlier days “when I used to squirt milk bags all over my guests on my TV show. They (Beau’s) suggested it.”

Ah yes, The Tom Green Show. It first appeared on basic cable locally on Rogers in Ottawa, and Green’s propensity for staging pranks – sometimes at the expense of his parents – brought him national notoriety.

Some of the more shocking, extreme and bizarre stunts involved roadkill and sucking on a cow’s udder – and eventually helped pave the way to his own internationally popular MTV show called … The New Tom Green Show.

That notoriety also made Hollywood sit up and take notice, offering him a chance to write and star in his own Razzie Award-winning comedy Freddy Got Fingered and roles in the comedies Road Trip and Stealing Harvard, as well as a cameo performance on the hit blockbuster Charlie’s Angels, starring his future wife, Drew Barrymore. (They’ve since divorced.)

Nowadays, however, Green has left the video pranks behind.

“Am I going out on the street and shooting pranks on video anymore?” he asks. “No, I’m not. It’s not like I’m trying to get away from it. I did it for 20 years, and now we’re in a world where everybody has a video camera in their cellphone, and an editing system in their laptop computer or their phone.

“There are millions of people doing it on YouTube. And I’ve always tried to be somebody who stands out from what everyone else is doing. Stand-up is the place right now where I’m able to do that best. There are so many people doing pranks now I feel like I’d just be following the herd if I kept doing them.”

Green has also turned to the Net for some of his more recent successes: from 2006-2011, he hosted Tom Green’s House Tonight in Los Angeles – literally from his living room – and later a weekly talk show called Tom Green Live On AXS TV.

Currently, you can find more stuff on the TomGreen.com website, which includes several videos and his podcast of the Tom Green Radio Show.

As much as some observers may think of his current stand-up comedy tour as a new platform of expression for Green, it’s actually a return to his roots.

“I was doing stand-up long before I was doing that other stuff,” he admits. “I was at Yuk Yuk’s here in Ottawa as a teenager. And a lot of the roots of The Tom Green Show were based in stand-up. I modelled the show after (Late Night with) David Letterman in a lot of ways.

“I was always into outrageous comedy, so I’m trying to incorporate my sensibilities into my stand-up show. I’m standing at a microphone. I don’t use props. I’m telling jokes. I’m telling stories. I’m throwing myself into the world of social commentary, talking about how we’re living in 2016 and all the absurdities and things I find ridiculous.

“Hopefully, people will leave thinking about the world differently than when they walked in.”

“I want my stand-up show to be the most outrageous and ridiculous night of comedy that you’ve ever been to.”

He then makes an interesting point: with the current fragmentation of TV audiences and the fact that US news outlets are worried about ratings to the point where they lobby softball questions at potential presidential candidates, Green has no such worries of being censored on the stage.

“Stand-up comedy is one of the last podiums where you can speak your mind and not fear getting cancelled,” he explains. “I have no boss, no executive producer, and no network head telling me what I have to say in order not to offend anyone.”

For more information on Tom Green, please click HERE

Written by Alison Broverman. (Odeum Magazine February 2016)

It’s not every performer who gets to cycle through the grand dames of the musical stage and screen every night but, for Quinn Lemley, that’s business as usual in Burlesque To Broadway.

The production is a showcase of Lemley’s musical theatre talents – she portrays everyone from Gypsy Rose Lee to Fanny Brice, performing a variety of songs from Broadway classics like “Don’t Rain On My Parade” to newer fare like “When You’ve Got It, Flaunt It” from the 2001 musical The Producers.

This isn’t Lemley’s first time embodying the “golden age” of entertainment – in the first show she created, she played Rita Hayworth, and loved it so much she decided to research more female icons from that era.

“It’s really fun, there’s a lot of thought into it,” says Lemley. “We wanted to show this journey of how women came from the 1930s into the present.”

Lemley’s interest in classic Hollywood and the American Songbook started in early childhood. “My best friend growing up was my grandma,” she says. “She lived behind me and she would play old records, the big band artists, and we’d watch all the movies and read all the biographies. So I really had an appreciation, which was unusual for people in my age group – they were listening to heavy metal, and I was loving the American Songbook!”

She still does, and it’s tough for her to pick a favourite moment from the show. “Every number is a highlight for me,” she says. “The whole concept of the show is about going after your dreams. I get to sing “Don’t Rain On My Parade” from Funny Girl, so I love doing that and the audience loves it, it’s about them.”

Another highlight is an elaborate fan dance, which required the work of a burlesque professional to learn. “We studied with Jo Weldon at the New York Burlesque School,” says Lemley. “There’s a real art to handling the fans – they’re heavy!”

The show is a crowd-pleaser, and Lemley’s favourite thing is to interact with the audience afterwards, still in one of her glamorous onstage outfits. “People stay for hours taking pics with me and the girls. [The show] lets people get in touch with their sense of humour,” she says. “Women celebrate themselves, and the men celebrate the women. It’s a great date night, but we’ve also had tons of women come in groups. They get all dressed up and it’s a night out for them.”

Lemley is so confident that audiences will love the show partly because, as she was developing Burlesque To Broadway, she showed many versions of it to audiences, and tweaked it according to their reactions. “We saw what resonated most and what touched them,” she says. “Our audiences have been incredible. You can just feel their energy, so we really shifted the numbers in the beginning, we could see what they preferred, so now we have all the best stuff.”

And she’s excited to be bringing her “best stuff” to Brampton. “I hope everyone comes out, grabs their guy and girl and boas,” she says. “We cannot wait to come to Brampton. The Rose Theatre is so beautiful, it’s a jewel. The theatre itself is going to be a great backdrop to the show.”

For more information and to purchase tickets for the show "Burlesque to Broadway" visit The Rose Theatre.