4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Savage love story will have you wrestling with all the feels
Geoffrey Owen Hughes has more than 30 years of experience dressing up as wrestling superstar Macho Man Randy Savage, attending his first event as the 'Macho Manitoban' at a screening of Wrestlemania 8 at a restaurant in 1992.
A wrestling ring had been set up in the parking lot; while in the ring with a group of other kids, Hughes attempted Macho's trademark vault exit over the top rope to the ground.
'But I had never done it before,' the Macho Manitoban says prior to the start of his fringe show Randy and Elizabeth: A Savage Love Story.
Geoff Hughes plays Macho Man Randy Savage
in Randy and Elizabeth: A Savage Love Story.
Hughes' foot caught on the top rope, but 'the wrestling gods were merciful on that day and I stuck the landing — oh yeah, dig it!,' he says in his pitch-perfect Savage impression.
The 52-year-old Winnipeg-born 'theatre kid' has been a wrestling fan since the 1970s, when his mom left him in front of a cluster of televisions showing a wrestling match while she was shopping at a department store.
'I had glue in my shoes. I was transfixed by my first-ever look at wrestling on TV,' he says.
Hughes' imagination was captured by the archetypes present at the core of professional wrestling — specifically, the way good will always overcome evil.
'We don't get to see good guys prevail in real life. We seek that in culture, and wrestling offered that,' he says.
One would not expect a lot of emotional vulnerability from professional wrestlers, specifically the Macho Man Randy Savage.
So can macho men cry?
Hughes thinks so, attributing the emotional vulnerability of his generation of men to the 1974 Marlo Thomas record Free to Be You and Me, which featured the song It's All Right to Cry.
'Macho Man was once asked by Arsenio Hall if macho men can cry and his answer will bring you to tears,' Hughes says, referring to a 1992 appearance on Hall's late-night talk show.
'On the show, Savage, in his trademark gravelly voice, said, 'It's all right for macho men to show every emotion. I've cried a thousand times, I'm going to cry some more. There's one guarantee in life and that is there are no guarantees. So if you get knocked down, get back up and fight again.''
MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS
Geoff Hughes plays Macho Man Randy Savage in Randy and Elizabeth: A Savage Love Story.
Tears abounded during the five-year-long World Wrestling Federation storyline involving Randy Savage and his onscreen manager and real-life wife Miss Elizabeth, the focus of Hughes' show.
The WWF saga concluded with a wedding at Summerslam 1991 that saw Miss Elizabeth in a Princess Diana-esque dress and a wedding gift of a cobra from the evil Jake (the Snake) Roberts that ended the night.
But the true heart of Hughes' show is Randy Savage's loss at Wrestlemania 7 in 1991, where, in true Rocky fashion, our hero loses the match but gains the love of his life.
'I love that moment more than any comic book, any song. It was just so romantic and life-affirming. I hope I can make (my audience) feel even a fraction of what I felt when I watched it,' Hughes says.
Randy and Elizabeth: A Savage Love Story runs to July 27 at One88 (Venue 23).
Sonya Ballantyne is a Cree writer-director whose credits include the Chris Jericho-produced wrestling documentary The Death Tour and writing the Acting Good episode Battle in the Bush.
