REVIEW: In Eldritch’s puppet-packed Call Centre of Cthulhu, coincidence signals apocalyptic doom
iPhoto caption: Eric Woolfe in 'The Call Centre of Cthulhu.' Photo by Jack Woolfe.
An Eldritch Theatre production is always a portal to another, more horrific dimension, and in the Lovecraft-inspired The Call Centre of Cthulhu, it’s a dimension where coincidence signals apocalyptic doom.
At a drab office desk on March 27, 2027, protagonist Irving Irving opens the show by dealing a seemingly shuffled deck of cards and gasps in terror at their sequentiality. In fevered narration, he takes us back four days, when a web of omens began pointing toward the awakening of Lovecraft’s titular cosmic monster. Solo creator-performer Eric Woolfe and designer Melanie McNeill use this pulpy downward spiral of a narrative as a vehicle for a campy-as-ever blend of puppets, character voices, and card tricks — a dose of classic Eldritch excess, timed to the Halloween season.
In the fictional New Bosford, a cost-cutting mayor has consolidated all local customer service lines into one call centre that promises to answer any query. Phone agent Irving receives an eclectic range of callers, from a child with questions about dinosaurs to a sailor lost at sea; all the while, he crushes on the young, soprano-voiced Moxie in the cubicle next door.
But he soon gets a tip about a mysterious briefcase holding a wooden bas-relief carving of Cthulhu, and everything changes.
While the show mostly serves as a lighthearted tribute to Lovecraft, I did find a smidge of larger contemporary resonance in the setting of an all-encompassing call centre. The very 2026 question being: how can having access to endless information sometimes make the universe feel more enigmatic?
The show’s primary draw isn’t thematic, though, or even narrative — it’s Woolfe and his motley band of puppets, designed by his longtime collaborator McNeill. Every supporting character looks as if Cthulhu has already melted off their skin. Moxie’s eyes burst, bloodshot, out of craggy pores hosting too much makeup; Irving describes her as elegant, but her shoulder-length blue locks hang like a teenager’s first mistake with hair dye. Call centre boss Lance shares her bulging eyes and over-wide smile, capping off the grotesque fashion with humongous ears and spiky mad-scientist frizz.
McNeill’s set riffs on the classic image of a tin-can-and-string phone, with cans dangling from the Red Sandcastle Theatre’s ceiling like stalactites. One is outfitted as a camera, to which Woolfe directs his puppeteering as upstage live projections magnify the action. The unflappable showman complements this visual buffet with cartoonish character voices — memorably ridiculous is an inspector with a New York accent right out of 1940s film noir; slang such as “bladders” for “newspapers” completes the caricature. On opening night, there were flickers of technical troubles, and Woolfe capably improvised through a major early prop malfunction that sent him backstage for a canister of zip-ties.
When Woolfe uses surreal stagecraft to conjure the narrative, The Call Centre of Cthulhu casts a spell. McNeill’s sound design is usefully busy and atmospheric, generating a sense of forward momentum that matches the plot’s slide toward monstrosity. But every few minutes, Woolfe halts the action to perform a card trick, and the dynamism fizzles. While each scene of the story is more intense than the last, the same isn’t true of the tricks, which all seemed similarly impressive to me — often revolving around Woolfe guessing an audience member’s card pull. The show’s rhythm is as a whole choppy: there’s the magic on the one hand, the story on the other, and only the aforementioned opening lines about coincidence as connective tissue.
Still, I never regret a trip to Eldritch’s castle of horrors — especially not this time of year, when the post-show wind volleys maple leaves through Jimmie Simpson Park and you can almost hear Cthulhu wailing in the distance.
The Call Centre of Cthulhu runs at the Red Sandcastle Theatre until November 8. More information is available here.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
Liam Donovan
Liam is Intermission’s senior editor. He lives in Toronto. His Substack newsletter is available at loamdonovan.substack.com.
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