Before Kim’s Convenience became a hit Netflix series, it was a play on the Toronto fringe. Now, Ins Choi’s comedy drama turned sitcom, about the travails of a Korean Canadian family running a convenience store, returns to theatrical form but feels like a melange of two media.
The cast is not that of the TV show, and Choi himself plays outspoken father, Appa, but the production has the uncanny, slightly confusing, look and feel of a live TV studio recording. It is a smooth machine of a show nonetheless: its comedy works, its acting superb, its story warm but not too mawkish and its characters lovable even when they border on the prejudiced, like Appa. Masterfully directed by Esther Jun, this is popcorn theatre: we could go on watching and watching.
The story crunches strands from across the five series into 80 minutes. Beneath the comedy are themes of immigration, parental sacrifice and the gulf between Appa and his children. There is his daughter, Janet (Jennifer Kim), whom he wants to divert from photography into running the shop, and his estranged son, Jung (Brian Law), who left home years ago.
Janet feels like the focus here, her romance with police officer Alex (Miles Mitchell) lifted from the first series, and Kim plays her with feisty energy. Choi is fantastic as Appa but wife Umma (Namju Go) is shadowy, not nearly as characterful as on screen.
Mona Camille’s set is such an exact replica of a local supermarket, with its lotto card advert, drinks fridge and linoleum-covered aisles, it is its own wonder. The delight is in the detail, right down to the sound of the electric bell as customers enter an invisible door.
For fans of the TV show, there is deja vu in some scenes which are also exact replicas, such as the skit about the Honda parked outside which reveals Appa’s grudge against the Japanese (“In 1904 Japan attacked Korea”), and the “steal or no steal” scene, involving a Black man whom Appa identifies as a thief, and is one example of the show’s edgy race satire. These scenes carry the sense of a show delivering its “best bits” rather than offering something entirely original.
Yet it works, and is still funny the second time around – as a repeat episode of Friends might be. Theatre has increasingly started to adapt television shows or feel episodic in their script. This is the apex of that trend – theatre-vision of sorts, irresistible in its appeal, cannily capturing a theatregoing audience and their couch-bound counterparts.
