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The Rivoli
The Rivoli is a bar, restaurant and performance space, established in 1982, on Queen Street West in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The club originally earned a reputation as one of Canada's hippest music clubs, and many major Canadian comedy and musical performers have played on its stage, including The Kids in the Hall, Gordon Downie, The Frantics, Sean Cullen and the infamous Dark Shows. ''The Drowsy Chaperone'' premiered at the Rivoli and went on to subsequent productions and eventually a highly successful run on Broadway. Venue layout & design The venue is divided into three main areas, the front, the upstairs and the back. The front of the venue has a bar along most of its west wall. The east side of the front room, separated from the bar by a dividing wall, are tables for dining. Upstairs there is a pool hall with 11 vintage and antique tables. The space is large and sometimes dance nights or private parties are hosted there. The back room of the venue contains a stage at ...
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Toronto
Toronto ( , locally pronounced or ) is the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, most populous city in Canada. It is the capital city of the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian province of Ontario. With a population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the List of North American cities by population, fourth-most populous city in North America. The city is the anchor of the Golden Horseshoe, an urban agglomeration of 9,765,188 people (as of 2021) surrounding the western end of Lake Ontario, while the Greater Toronto Area proper had a 2021 population of 6,712,341. As of 2024, the census metropolitan area had an estimated population of 7,106,379. Toronto is an international centre of business, finance, arts, sports, and culture, and is recognized as one of the most multiculturalism, multicultural and cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitan cities in the world. Indigenous peoples in Canada, Indigenous peoples have travelled through and inhabited the Toronto area, ...
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Bar (establishment)
A bar, also known as a saloon, a tavern or tippling house, or sometimes as a pub or club, is a retail business that serves alcoholic beverages, such as beer, wine, liquor, cocktails, and other beverages such as mineral water and soft drinks. Bars often also sell snack foods, such as chip (snack), chips (crisps) or peanuts, for consumption on their premises. Some types of bars, such as pubs, may also serve food from a restaurant menu. The term "bar" refers both to the countertop where drinks are prepared and served and also metonym, by extension to the entirety of the establishment in which the bar is located. The term derives from the metal or wooden bar (barrier) that is often located along the length of the "bar". Over many years, heights of bars were lowered, and high stools added, and the brass bar remains today. History There have been many different names for public drinking spaces throughout history. In the Thirteen Colonies, a Taverns in North America, tavern was a Me ...
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Television Networks
A television broadcaster or television network is a telecommunications network for the distribution of television show, television content, where a central operation provides programming to many television stations, pay television providers or, in the United States, Multichannel television in the United States, multichannel video programming distributors. Until the mid-1980s, broadcast programming on television in most countries of the world was dominated by a small number of broadcast network, terrestrial networks. Many early television networks such as the BBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, CBC, PBS, People's Television Network, PTV, NBC or ABC American Broadcasting Company, in the US and Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in Australia evolved from earlier radio networks. Overview In countries where most networks broadcast identical, centrally originated content to all of their stations, and where most individual television transmitters therefore operate only as large ...
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Montreal
Montreal is the List of towns in Quebec, largest city in the Provinces and territories of Canada, province of Quebec, the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, second-largest in Canada, and the List of North American cities by population, ninth-largest in North America. It was founded in 1642 as ''Fort Ville-Marie, Ville-Marie'', or "City of Mary", and is now named after Mount Royal, the triple-peaked mountain around which the early settlement was built. The city is centred on the Island of Montreal and a few, much smaller, peripheral islands, the largest of which is Île Bizard. The city is east of the national capital, Ottawa, and southwest of the provincial capital, Quebec City. the city had a population of 1,762,949, and a Census geographic units of Canada#Census metropolitan areas, metropolitan population of 4,291,732, making it the List of census metropolitan areas and agglomerations in Canada, second-largest metropolitan area in Canada. French l ...
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Stand-up Comedy
Stand-up comedy is a performance directed to a live audience, where the performer stands on a stage (theatre), stage and delivers humour, humorous and satire, satirical monologues sometimes incorporating physical comedy, physical acts. These performances are typically composed of Rehearsal, rehearsed screenplay, scripts but often include varying degrees of interactive theatre, live crowd interaction (crowdwork). Stand-up comedy consists of One-line joke, one-liners, stories, observations, or shticks that can employ Theatrical property, props, comedy music, music, impressions, Magic (illusion), magic tricks, or ventriloquism. Performances can take place in various venues, including comedy clubs, comedy festivals, bars, nightclubs, colleges, or theaters. History Stand-up comedy originated in various traditions of popular entertainment in the late 19th century. These include vaudeville, the Stump speech (minstrelsy), stump-speech monologues of minstrel shows, dime museums, co ...
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Improv Comedy
Improvisational theatre, often called improvisation or improv or impro in British English, is the form of theatre, often comedy, in which most or all of what is performed is unplanned or unscripted, created spontaneously by the performers. In its purest form, the dialogue, action, story, and characters are created collaboratively by the players as the improvisation unfolds in present time, without use of an already prepared, written Play (theatre), script. Improvisational theatre exists in performance as a range of styles of improvisational comedy as well as some non-comedic theatrical performances. It is sometimes used in film and television, both to develop characters and scripts and occasionally as part of the final product. Improvisational techniques are often used extensively in drama programs to train actors for stage, film, and television and can be an important part of the rehearsal process. However, the skills and processes of improvisation are also used outside the conte ...
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Sketch Comedy
Sketch comedy comprises a series of short, amusing scenes or vignettes, called "sketches" or, "skits", commonly between one and ten minutes long, performed by a group of comic actors or comedians. While the form developed and became popular in music hall in Britain and vaudeville in North America, today it is used widely in variety shows, as well as in late night talk shows and even some sitcoms. While sketch comedy is now associated mostly with adult entertainment, certain children's television series such have used it, too. The sketches may be improvised live by the performers, developed through improvisation before public performance, or scripted and rehearsed in advance like a play. History Sketch comedy has its origins in music hall and vaudeville, where many brief humorous acts were strung together to form a larger programme. In the 1890s, music hall impresario Fred Karno developed a form of sketch comedy without dialogue, and in 1904 he produced a sketch called ' ...
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Alternative Comedy
Alternative comedy is a term coined in the 1980s for a style of comedy that makes a conscious break with the mainstream comedic style of an era. The phrase has had different connotations in different contexts: in the UK, it was used to describe content that was an "alternative" to the mainstream stand-up of the day which took place in working men's clubs, and was characterised by unoriginal gags often containing elements of sexism and racism. In other contexts, it is the nature of the form that is "alternative", avoiding reliance on a standardised structure of a sequence of jokes with punch lines. Patton Oswalt has defined it as "comedy where the audience has no pre-set expectations about the crowd, and vice versa. In comedy clubs, there tends to be a certain vibe—alternative comedy explores different types of material." In an interview with '' The A.V. Club'' after his performance in the 2011 comedy-drama film '' Young Adult'', Oswalt stated: I had come up out of that who ...
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Saturday Night Live
''Saturday Night Live'' (''SNL'') is an American Late night television in the United States, late-night live television, live sketch comedy variety show created by Lorne Michaels and developed by Michaels and Dick Ebersol that airs on NBC. The show's premiere was hosted by George Carlin on NBC on October 11, 1975, under the original title ''NBC's Saturday Night''. The show's comedy sketches, which often parody popular culture and politics, are performed by a Saturday Night Live cast members, large and varying cast of repertory and newer cast members. Each episode is hosted by a celebrity guest, who usually delivers the opening monologue and performs in sketches with the cast, with featured performances by a musical guest. An episode normally begins with a cold open sketch that is usually based on current events and ends with someone breaking character and proclaiming, "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!, Live from New York, it's ''Saturday Night''!", properly beginning the ...
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Mike Myers (actor)
Michael John Myers, (born May 25, 1963) is a Canadian actor, comedian, and filmmaker. His accolades include seven MTV Movie & TV Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. In 2002, he was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2017, he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada for "his extensive and acclaimed body of comedic work as an actor, writer, and producer". Following a series of appearances on several Canadian television programs, Mike Myers attained recognition during his six seasons as a cast member on the NBC sketch comedy series ''Saturday Night Live'' from 1989 to 1995, which won him the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series. He subsequently earned praise and numerous accolades for playing the title roles in the ''Wayne's World'' (1992–1993), ''Austin Powers'' (1997–2002), and ''Shrek'' (2001–present) franchises, the last of which is the second highest-grossing animated film franchise. Myers als ...
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Queen West
Queen Street is a major east–west thoroughfare in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It extends from Roncesvalles Avenue and King Street in the west to Victoria Park Avenue in the east. Queen Street was the cartographic baseline for the original east–west avenues of Toronto's and York County's grid pattern of major roads. The western section of Queen (sometimes simply referred to as "Queen West") is a centre for Canadian broadcasting, music, fashion, performance, and the visual arts. History Since the original survey in 1793 by Sir Alexander Aitkin, commissioned by Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe, Queen Street has had many names. For its first sixty years, many sections were referred to as Lot Street, section west of Spadina was named Egremont Street until about 1837. East of the Don River to near Coxwell Avenue it was part of Kingston Road (and resuming as Queen Street thereafter), and was the westernmost section of that historic route to Kingston, Ontario, whose w ...
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