"Skippy's Rangers"

This is my favorite picture of Jonathan Crombie. He has such soulfull eyes.
Even here he has that signiture Gilbert hair on the top.
I am sure looking through my homepage you have seen this picture
all over my pages. I have put the whole review on this page.
It is a wonderful review. Sorry it is so long though. But a
wonderful things need much praise.

If you would like to see the Review.

Comedy Troupe Too Good For Own Good
By Jim Slotek   Toronto Sun
The "big TV break" looms at last, but Skippy's Rangers have come close to breaking up a number of times in their 10-year history. Which only shows you can be overqualified to make it as a sketch comedy troupe.

Indeed, in a city full of college-kid sketch troupes doing skits about joblessness, the thirtysomethings in Skippy's have the longest list of credentials in town - from Second City mainstage guys Bob Martin and Paul O'Sullivan to movie/TV songwriter Lisa Lambert (Blue, Highway 61) to Jonathan Crombie - a Stratford vet known to millions of adoring Japanese schoolgirls as Anne of Green Gables' boyfriend Gilbert.

"Jonathan's our Elvis," says Lambert.

But there's the rub. The troupe - which plays (gasp) two dates this week, at The Rivoli tonight as part of Alt.COMedy Lounge and at Second City Thursday - has become a rare bird because of everyone's schedule.

"It's difficult for all of us to be available at the same time," Martin says. "From the beginning, Paul got into Second City mainstage, and Jonathan was always at the Vatican having an audience with the Pope or something."

And if they get a TV offer this year, they'll have to work around Crombie playing Romeo at Stratford.

The troupe rides on its writing and polish, evidenced in smart, thought-out bits like Agnostic Wedding, in which a minister gives a brilliantly ambivalent sermon on the maybe-sacred-maybe-not institution of marriage, or Barley Sandwich, wherein O'Sullivan plays a Sudburian ordering beer from a perplexed waiter ("I want a fistful of yeast, a pitcher of lather"). And Lambert's songs can verge on the demented, like her set of Christmas carols, including a gynecologically-explicit country ditty, The Virgin Mary Suffered At The Birthin' Of The Lord.

"We get compared to Sid Caesar because our stuff is heavily written," Lambert says. "It means we're retro, but I hate the term. We write what we think is funny."

Martin and Lambert met at Lawrence Park Collegiate at age 17, and they hooked up with another friend, actor Don McKellar, to form a children's theatre troupe. "We did that for two years, and Jonathan joined," she says.

"The comedy came from hanging out. We had an apartment at Yonge and St. Clair where various people lived. We'd hang out 'til 4 a.m. and videotape silly stuff. For weddings, we'd give tapes of skits based on their lives."

Eventually, they took their act to the Fringe Of Toronto Festival, where, still nameless, they created the 1990 comedy revue Mirth. O'Sullivan joined soon after.

It's only lately, however, that the greenlighters have begun to notice Skippy's Rangers. John Buchan, head of casting at Alliance, has become their mentor/adviser. The gig Thursday is one of those shows for "the suits." And there's also a VIP-ish New York booking next month.

At the end of the rainbow may lie a TV development deal. And if all goes well, they may finally be more successful as a group than they are individually.

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