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Hamilton bids farewell to Kurt Browning after 30 Stars on Ice tours
| Source: |
The Hamilton Spectator |
| Date: |
May 8, 2023 |
| Author: |
Steve Milton |
Kurt Browning, who reads an audience like a road map, knows exactly
what’s going on in every arena during his Stars on Ice farewell
tour.
“Like a song, you can take people back to when they were younger and
when life was different,” says the quintessential entertainer. “It’s
time travel for them.”
More than three decades worth of time travel. Generations of skating
fans have grown up, and old, with Kurt Browning in Stars as a
touchstone of Our Times. Most of them are repeat attenders, deeply
familiar with his prolific program palette. This is his final go-round
as a Stars cast member, a cultural constant that ends with his
retirement next month from the history-making tour.
“I sense people honouring Kurt, I can feel the energy from the
audience,” Elvis Stojko said at FirstOntario Centre a couple of hours
before he and Browning yanked the crowd to its feet — flash floods of
teary standing ovations followed every Browning appearance — with a
uniquely creative duet featuring more on-mic story-telling than actual
skating.
Almost every night of this touching travelogue, Browning waves goodbye
to a city with which he has a relationship connected to a variety of
memories. Halifax, where the tour kicked off, and where Browning won
the 1990 world championship; skating towns like Ottawa and Kitchener;
six cities in the Western Canada that are so meaningful to the son of
a cowboy. Friday night in Toronto where he lives, and Hamilton, Stars’
oldest continuous tour stop, and where he won a professional skating
title, filmed many of his own TV specials, skated to Gordon Lightfoot
music with the late legend in the audience, and edged Stojko in the
1993 Canadian Championship regarded as the greatest head-to-head men’s
final in domestic history.
“Every night I throw the dice and see what happens,” he told The
Spectator. “A couple of nights I’ve been so distracted I could barely
skate. In Toronto I was crying quite hard in the tunnel onto the
ice. That won’t happen every time. But this one is really intense for
me because I’ve bonded with Hamilton.”
At the end of the show, which was filmed for a Christmas TV special,
Browning told the audience of 9,000 “I love this town” and also
pointed to the spot on the ice where Stojko (in late 1997) landed the
first quadruple-triple jump combination in skating history, and
reminisced about their 1993 duel at then-Copps Coliseum.
Many dedicated fans are saying this is one of the best, if not the
best, Stars on Ice they’ve ever witnessed. The music and choreography
are diverse and evocative, three-time world champion Patrick Chan came
out of retirement for it, and the cast has more international
flavour.
But at the root it’s about Browning, the four-time world champion who
changed skating’s trajectory with the first quadruple jump and became
an even better professional performer, shattering the long-perceived
boundaries of what a human could portray on skates.
Browning diverts that attention, citing a variety of contributing
factors to the tour’s favourable reception, including a collective
sense of relief from pandemic restrictions, but he protesteth too
much. Big crowds are showing up primarily to praise Caesar.
Appropriately, their final glimpse of Browning is not on his own —
that is in the penultimate number, a brilliant retrospective solo
collage of 30 years of Stars, answering the Who classic, “Who Are
You?” — but as part of a team number, surrounded by the cast, with
Browning dressed all in purple, the colour of royalty.
Figure skating has always been a sport of dualities, and Stars’ is
found in the equally-important individual performances and
collaborative acts.
In the first-act finale, he touched every cast member in a way meant
to demonstrate the relationship he had with each of them. The long hug
with Stojko, who was carted off the ice on a stretcher during the 2017
Hamilton show, has driven the fans bonkers in every venue; the final
hug is an embrace with his wife, Alissa Czisny, the Grand Prix Final
champion who performs in the show and choreographed a solo for her
husband. For those few precious moments, the curtain between on-ice
and off-ice dropped.
His last solo is so Browning it hurts. Loaded with little Kurt-isms
from his Stars career, the creative pauses and countermovements, the
outrageous and rapid edge control, still-youthful exuberance married
to middle-aged contemplativeness, and the late backflip ... at nearly
57 years of age.
During their duet, Browning wore an “I Love Elvis” T-shirt and Stojko
wore “I love Kurt” and each imitated the other’s skating style. It was
the kind of quick-witted act which can not be imitated.
“People sense that it is the end of an era,” Stojko told The
Spec. “And I understand that.”
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