Kitchen ConfidentialA Quiet Moment

What would you do if you found someone dead? Probably not this…

Synopsis (Spoiler Alert!)

Brooke, Alice and Reggie have fled to the office kitchen to contemplate Cake’s demise… and their own place in it.

Brooke feels a little weird about the cake he‘s eating. Alice tries to decide what Cake herself would do. Reggie is worried about telling the boss, Roxanne. They don’t get very far before someone else clues in…

Production Notes:

This is a nice short one, and a quiet moment where we come to know our main guys a little more. The first episode has quite a few differences from the original script, but this one is pretty much word for word.

One of the biggest debates we had with the script was trying to agree how familiar the wider world was with the Jewish custom of ‘sitting Shiva.’ It is a Jewish funeral rite, involving wearing only black and not speaking for a number of days. The writers wanted to include a joke to reveal Cake’s overly sensitive character, where she assumed a dead rat was Jewish and honoured it accordingly. For weeks we were all asking everyone we met, “Have you heard of sitting Shiva?” In the end, the writers agreed to make the joke more explicit. Hopefully the joke still plays without relying the veiwer’s level of knowledge regarding funeral practices.

This episode has two of my personal fav moments. One is the joke about the joke of talking like you are deaf. (I assure you, the height of humour in junior high.) The other is Alice’s caustic HBO reference.

Since this episode focuses so much on our three leads, I started thinking about the process we event through to find them. Brad Cowan (as Reggie) was one of the first people we cast. At the time he was known to us as one member of Truth Horse, a sketch troupe with their own series on the Comedy Network. His audition tape includes a hysterical improvised monologue about hanging out with Brooke on a company retreat. He was Reggie, right from the beginning. I don’t think we even looked at very many people.

But we looked at tons and tons of potential Brookes and Alices. We did our casting out of our director’s apartment on Euclid, near Dundas. We not only saw many people, we had call back after call back, trying different combinations of casting choices. When Ash Catherwood came in to read for Brooke, we were blown away. But he was so much more intense than the Brooke we had in our heads. Would it work? We kept looking, in case we found someone as talented as Ash, but with a little bit more of a laid back groove. In the end, the more that Ash read for us, the more he took over as Brooke in our imaginations. Now, of course, we can‘t imagine anyone else in the role.

And that left Hamilton Alice. (One of the many gags we couldn’t cram into the show was that Alice is her last name.) We were surprised by the level of talent that auditioned for us. But Melanie Kastner is not only talented, but she sparkles. She auditioned for us more than anyone else, making the long commute downtown something like six or seven times over a month or so. She was cast for her charisma as much as for her considerable acting skills. I’m pretty sure she was best friends with every person on the set by the end of the shoot.