My grandmother wanted me to become a minister.
I grew up attending Kingston Road United Church in the north Beach area of Scarborough. My grandmother — a twinkle-eyed, whip-smart Scottish émigrée widowed when I was just a couple of years old — lived a few blocks from the church in a 10th-floor apartment. She was a fixture of our family Sundays: church, lunch, and dinner. When she later moved to a retirement home, I bused there for Scrabble games and meals with her regular table-mates. Throughout it all, she would periodically circle back to my father, and then to me, about this perfect career.
She saw something in me: perhaps a facility with language, a love of discussing ideas, or the way I read the New Testament from cover to cover at age 8. Whatever her reasons, they were never as clear, specific and generationally magnified as those facing a young Ins Choi. As he recounts in Son of a Preacherman, his solo show new to Toronto (which sold out so quickly that Pacific Theatre added additional, now also sold-out performances), the lauded creator of Kim’s Convenience is the son of a father who was head pastor of a Toronto-based Korean church, and whose father was a preacher in Korea. Choi also has an uncle, an aunt, and seven cousins who are preachers.
It was not difficult for me to fend off a beloved grandmother with a fanciful faith-based wish for my future. Choi had a different and much bigger challenge. The show brings to life his sincere and loving wrestling match to reconcile his culture, his faith in God, his creativity — and the destiny to become another generation of preacherman. Surprisingly, the show opens with a song: Choi, accompanied by musical director Haneul Yi and musicians Belinda Corpuz and Yunike Soedarmasto, sings “Birkenstock Jesus” — a Barenaked Ladies-esque musing on what Jesus would make of society today, what he would do … and what various of us might make of him, and do as a result. Choi sings well, and the song is witty and a little silly … wise, and yet light.
This is the balancing act the show — and songs like “I Wish I Was Bruce Lee’s Best Friend” (in which he explores the dearth of Korean media role models in his childhood) — will manage throughout. Yi, Corpuz and Soedarmasto do more than provide musical texture through their harmonies and precise instrumentation: they leap into brief skits alongside Choi, bringing an infectious energy that keeps the evening buoyant even as the material deepens.
Kim’s Convenience, as Choi recalls, first took flight at the Toronto Fringe festival. In a real sense, he returns to these roots with Son of a Preacherman. As directed by Pacific Theatre’s Kaitlin Williams, who guides Choi’s storytelling with a deft, unshowy hand that honours both the intimacy and the scope of his material, the show has the feel and trappings of a biographical first-person Fringe show. It is part confessional, part coming-of-age tale, part exposé and primer on Korean geography and culture, and part “message” delivery … dotted with photos of family members and childhood heroes like wrestler Ricky the Dragon Steamboat, which are projected onto the walls of Timothy Eaton Memorial Church. The high-end parallel might be something like Bruce Springsteen’s Broadway show, but to me there’s a more unpretentious, Fringey feel to Son of a Preacherman.
That’s not a knock: the show is endearing in its informality, and feels utterly at home, nestled snugly along with its audience in the church chancel (the area at the front, normally reserved for the clergy and the choir). But it does mean that, unlike Kim’s Convenience, Son of a Preacherman will not scale readily into a storytelling property for other actors. No one else can play Choi because every word, every reflection, every photo, every exhortation is literally his story. He tells it cleanly but non-linearly, by cycling back and forth in time between his childhood, his father’s and his grandfather’s, and sketching their maturations and how they discovered their destinies. Making regular nods to Jesus, pictured on the massive stained glass window at the church front, Choi shows us — with love, appreciation, and humour — how they came to create that expectation that he would follow in their footsteps.
He wrestles mightily with his faith and fate … and goes much further down the preacher path than I ever did (which was only as far as confirmation classes). And ultimately, this Fringey show becomes the beautiful story of how he squares the circle of his desire to serve God AND be a compulsive creator of art (of which Kim’s Convenience is only the biggest, best-known example.) At first, the last quarter of the show felt to me like a swerve … until I saw that, in reality, the show ends the only way it could: by showing us that yes, Choi most certainly can preach, as he shares his gospel of creation … and exhorts us to live it.
Son of a Preacherman is an unpretentious, quietly magical show that uses sweet songs and a sly sense of humour, to tell a life-affirming story about finding your fate by embracing your faith.
For me — but especially for her — I wish my grandmother could have seen it.
Son of a Preacherman runs until October 18, 2026 at Timothy Eaton Memorial Church, 230 St. Clair Avenue West. Alas, all performances are sold out. For more information, visit pacifictheatre.org.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
