Red Green making Brandon stop on final tour

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/09/2019 (2349 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Red Green, the handyman alter-ego of Canadian comedian Steve Smith, is making a stop in Brandon during his last-ever tour.

While the tour is titled “This Could Be It!” and has a tagline of “It might not be his last tour, but why take the chance?”, Smith told The Sun that it represents the definite end of the character’s touring career.

Ahead of his Oct. 8 show at the Western Manitoba Centennial Auditorium, The Sun talked to Smith over the phone from his home in Hamilton, Ont., about his career and stage show.

After The Red Green Show ended in 2006 after 15 years, 305 episodes and a movie, Smith said he tried retiring. He went to Florida that winter and played 161 rounds of golf in 180 days.

It didn’t work. “I turned a game into a job,” Smith said. “I was thinking of things that I thought were amusing and saying them to my friends on a regular basis and they were starting to get annoyed.”

He ended up getting offered the chance to write a book in 2010, which brought him out of retirement. Instead of travelling all over to do book signings, Smith decided to bring Red Green to the stage for the first time.

This tour is his fourth and last time bringing the character to the stage. While Smith has worked on other projects such as Smith & Smith with his wife Morag, his current tour is just based on his most famous work.

“I learned a long time ago, and I probably read this in a book: play your aces,” Smith said. “Don’t play a two or a three and think ‘I’ll play my ace later.’”

Smith has already completed his final tour of the United States, where The Red Green Show gained a cult following from PBS broadcasts. Now, he’s bidding farewell to his home and native land.

“By the time I did a U.S. tour, I did 36 shows in the spring, and it was so great,” Smith said. “Why would I try to top that and why don’t we leave when everyone has a good memory?”

“Let’s just call it a day,” he added.

The Red Green Show had an eclectic cast of characters, but the stage show is just Green.

“I used to do a segment in the show where I would sit at a desk and kinda just give advice to the viewers, mainly men,” Smith said. “And really, the one-man show is predominantly an expansion of that.”

However, fans of the TV show will be gratified to hear that Green’s nephew, Harold, Ranger Gord and Winston Rothschild III will be making appearances in the stage show via phone call.

Also appearing will be the handyman’s ever-present omnitool, duct tape, which will be used in some pre-recorded videos as a nod to the old “Handyman Corner” segment where Green would create complex DIY machinery to complete basic tasks.

This might be the end of Red Green’s public appearances, but Smith said he’s looking to come up with a new creative outlet for his retirement. “I don’t want to do nothing, but I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said.

“This is kinda an opportunity to thank the people and also say goodbye. … I end the show with a wish for them. It’s kinda funny, but I think it’s more poignant than funny and it’s gone over really well.”

For those who want to take this final opportunity to meet Smith or get an autograph, he said he always  meets fans after a show.

Tickets to the show, which starts at 7 p.m., were still available as of Friday afternoon.

» cslark@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @ColinSlark