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My Toronto: Kurt Browning

Source: National Post
Date: December 10, 2007
Author: Rob Roberts
Whether he’s taking in the Santa Claus Parade or racing through an uptown park Spider-Man-style with his four-year-old son, Kurt Browning appears to be much like Peter Pan, who he plays in a family musical now running at the Elgin Theatre. It is the first stage performance for the skater, an eight-time Canadian and world figure skating champion. The native of Rocky Mountain House, Alta., spoke with Zosia Bielski about friendly neighbours in Forest Hill and the best guide to the city — his wife Sonia Rodriguez, who is a principal dancer with the National Ballet of Canada.

Car-free, neighbourly elite • I moved to the Beaches when I first came here and then I’ve been bopping around ever since. My wife [Sonia Rodriguez] and I have two sons, Gabriel and Dillon, and we’ve settled into the community of communities north of St. Clair. We’re in Forest Hill. To irritate the people of Forest Hill, you drive through it because the houses are beautiful. We’ve been here for a year and a half. I very quickly met my neighbours which sort of shocked me. I feel very connected to what’s going on around me in the neighbourhood. My wife especially misses the Beaches. She’s Spanish so she misses any beach. We go there for our sand and water and the playgrounds. There’s room to play if you can get a parking spot.

Dad land • Our little one Dillon is only three months, and our older one, Graham, is four years old. The Science Centre is big. The zoo is big. We did the Santa Claus Parade this year. And we go to a couple local parks in the area. We’re not really into organized sports just yet - he’s only four. We walk along the Belt Line. There’ s a park on Lytton near Avenue Road. I take my four-year-old and we go exploring. The other day we pretended we were Spider-Man going through the forest. You have to think like a kid.

Brick city • When you from out west, you immediately notice all the brick buildings. In Alberta, you just don’t have brick. We have siding, aluminum siding or wood siding or stucco. Being an Alberta boy, I still drive around Toronto and I love the big old houses that they have here ... I like the Distillery and I’ve only been there a couple times and it’s something that I wish I had more time on my hands to do. I would take my wife. When you get out of your car, you want to walk around and feel like you’re in old Europe. I wish my house looked like what the inside of most of the restaurants there do: the exposed beam work, the high ceilings, and again, the brick.

Toronto guide • My wife is the one that knows the city and knows when and where to go shopping and how to park, whereas I kind of bumble through the city and get parking tickets. I’m not a very good Torontonian that way. I’ve been taking the subway lately back and forth to work and all the people here in the show just rattle off addresses. I can just tell that everyone utilizes the city better than I do.

Black Monday • We rehearsed long, long hours for almost three and a half weeks, and teching the show with the lights and the sound and the flying and the rigging took a lot of work. We do eight shows a week, Black Monday. In the theatre world, Black Monday means there’s no shows. [Last week], we had a lot of buses come from schools. The kids were very pumped and they didn’t have their parents with them. There was a scene where Peter is in peril and the audience was screaming and warning me with such fervour that we couldn’t keep going with the show.

• Peter Pan is on until Jan. 6 at the Elgin Theatre.