It’s a rather unassuming site for an Abbey Road-style photo activation.
To the random observer, no good reason announces itself to explain why tourists from all over Canada and the U.S. would flock to the red-brick facade on Toronto’s bustling Queen Street to take ecstatic selfies beneath an oval sign that reads “Rivoli” in a scribbly font.
The tourists keep showing up anyway.
While the combination restaurant/ pool hall/concert venue has hosted performers like Adele, Amy Winehouse, and Robin Williams across its 45-year history, the Rivoli has only lately become a tourist mecca, thanks to a fictional music act relatively few people have heard of—even if it shares a name with one of the most revered bands of all time. Nirvanna the Band the Show—note the legally significant extra “n”—is the unhinged, long-running comedy project of BlackBerry filmmaker Matt Johnson and musician Jay McCarrol.
Starting as a web series 20 years ago, before culminating in the just-released hit indie film (Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie), the series depicts its two stars as scrappy musicians on a perpetual, doomed quest to book a gig at the Rivoli.
Ironically, the project’s conception of the venue as a gateway to fame and fortune seems to have resulted in a real-life renaissance for the Riv.
According to owner John Christensen, the timing couldn’t have been better.
“Why are people doing that?”
When he took the reins of the Rivoli in 2021, after its earlier owners put it up for sale the previous year, Christensen set out to save the iconic venue from pandemic oblivion.
“If you’ve grown up in the city of Toronto, you know what the Rivoli is, but that has not quite been the same for newer generations,” he says. “I feel like since even before the pandemic, the reputation had kind of waned somewhat.”
Beyond having hosted a deep roster of A-listers during their earliest Canadian tours, the Riv has long been known as part of The Kids in the Hall origin story. The absurdist comedy legends didn’t just perform their first show at the venue in 1984; they did their 10,000 hours of talent incubation there through weekly performances. (Indeed, it was during a show at the Rivoli that Lorne Michaels discovered the troupe, before eventually producing their eponymous TV series.)
As Christensen tells it, though, the folks who grew up catching The Kids in the Hall or Mike Myers at the Rivoli have long since grown up. They don’t necessarily return on a regular basis anymore. Rising comics and bands still darken the Riv’s green room, but it’s been a hot minute since any homegrown Toronto acts have generated buzz for the space.
“When I took over, the challenge was, ‘How can I revitalize this brand in the minds of the younger generation?’” Christensen says. “And that’s something a little movie has now helped out with.”
Prior to taking over the Rivoli, Christensen had no idea the venue played a co-starring role in a web series and then a TV show on the now-defunct Viceland, let alone that it would be central to this year’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. He only found out about the cult hit comedy as its devoted fan base made their presence known.
“We would have people coming to the Rivoli, but they wouldn’t come in. They’d just stand outside gawking at the sign or taking photos,” he says. “So, we would see that sometimes and wonder, ‘Why are people doing that?’”
For the creators of Nirvanna the Band the Show, however, keeping the Rivoli team from knowing what they were up to was part of the recipe from the very beginning.
“The only thing we really had going for us”
There is a simple, mystique-shattering reason why Johnson and McCarrol chose the Rivoli as the subject of their characters’ fixation: geography.
The pair moved into an apartment on Queen West in the mid-aughts, literally a stone’s throw from the venue. It made hilarious sense to focus their Pinky and the Brain-type schemes on a location just down the street.
But there’s another reason why they did so.
“When I was younger, I would always lie to my friends and say I was doing open-mic stand-up at the Rivoli, because it was a known club that had all kinds of comedy shows and The Kids in the Hall,” Johnson tells Fast Company. “I think that wound up infecting our show—the idea that these guys were obsessed with playing the Rivoli seems connected to that somehow.”
For the uninitiated, here’s what that obsession looks like. The show often featured its stars interacting with real staff and real guests in cinéma vérité setups during Rivoli’s business hours. In one episode, for instance, they managed to finagle a copy of the actual staff directory, made prank phone calls to everyone listed in it, and put some of the recordings into the show.
According to Johnson, the only way to ensure any of this would be funny was to keep the Rivoli in the dark.
“Basically, anytime you shoot anything where people are participating or where you have permission, it always comes off as so fake,” he says. “And the only thing we really had going for us was that we had a production model that accommodated for us to shoot illegally, which is what we liked about it. But my intuition is that management didn’t know or care about what we were doing at the time anyway.”
Although the venue’s owners didn’t seem to catch on in those days, comedy nerds certainly did.
After the series started airing on Viceland in 2017, the Toronto-centric project broke containment and reached a whole new audience in the U.S. Soon, Johnson began to hear from fans visiting the city about their plans to get inside the Rivoli. It even became something of a meme among bands and comedians touring Toronto to mention finding a way to play the venue.
That steady trickle of attention turned into a flood, however, with the arrival of the movie.
A generational comedy landmark
Following the universal acclaim for BlackBerry, Johnson’s third directorial effort, the creator had enough cache to adapt his niche comedy curio into a feature film.
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, which hit theaters back in February and releases on Blu-ray today, expands the concept of the series to a surprisingly epic scale. (One stunt involving the CN Tower is a technical marvel that defies easy explanation.) The film quickly became a word-of-mouth sensation, making back more than double its reported $2 million budget.
It also drove people toward the Rivoli in droves.
“When it was in theaters, we would get a lot of people coming in for dinner before or after seeing the movie,” Christensen says. “It really increased traffic a lot, and now after coming into the Rivoli, some of those fans learn what we’re all about and they become regulars.”
The owner has started encouraging staff to watch the series and the movie, so they can be up to speed when customers comment on Nirvanna the Band.
“If you’re going to work here, you gotta know the lore,” he says. “Because everyone’s going to ask you about it anyway.”
As for those who prefer to simply stand outside and take pictures, it’s now the Rivoli’s policy to invite gawkers inside to get a look at the stage Nirvanna the Band is destined never to play. One such recent tour, Christensen says, included a woman who grew up a fan of The Kids in the Hall escorting her daughter, a fan of Johnson and McCarrol, to see the comedy landmark that unites their generations.
The explosion of Rivoli interest since the movie came out has been obvious to Johnson, too. He first had an inkling, he claims, after the premiere at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, when he saw a massive group of people taking photos in front of the Rivoli on the way home.
“Now, it’s ridiculous,” he says. “When Jay and I traveled around America, there seemed to be hundreds of people in every city that asked us about the Rivoli or joked about going there, and we also get sent photos all the time of people getting engaged outside the Rivoli.”
Johnson chalks up the intense interest to the fact that perhaps no other show or movie has ever featured main characters whose white whale is such an easily inhabitable public space. Even though it’s impossible for him to share either his character’s or his fans’ desire to breach the threshold of the Rivoli, it’s something he understands.
“I’m trying to think what I would do in that situation,” he says. “And yeah, I’d probably go to the Rivoli, too.”
