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The 29-year-old Alberta native has become something of a Second City supernova, scoring the Tim Sims Award for most promising new comedy talent after mere months on the boards.
His career continues to soar. He's soon off to Los Angeles to tape segments for the new WB sketch series Hype.
He's got dozens of terrific, thumbs-up press clippings from all over town during this past week or so, so he'll probably not need nor miss this one.
Gavin Crawford is a gifted character actor, slipping seamlessly in and out of an astonishing array of personalities. Many of his characters could have been plucked straight off that nasty Survivor island. These are mainly flawed folk, people you'd tend to avoid rather than embrace.
Often you have to look twice to see if that's really Crawford as the suburban housefrau Betty Bucchan, nerdy high school geek Mark Jackson, or separatist kiddie show host Rene Cancon (nice). Sometimes he even plays opposite himself.
The kid makes Tracy Ullman look one-dimensional.
Having said that, I never laughed once through the entire two hours of tape.
Maybe it's just me. There's a Tom Green meets Kids In The Hall kind of thing happening here. I've got to admit that neither of those post-ironic styles are my cup of tea.
It could be generational. I'm looking for jokes; Crawford specializes in taking keenly observed human behaviour and serving it up almost verbatim.
It's spooky how close he comes to nailing these people, despite their look, race or gender. And while that's fascinating, it's not always funny.
Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas barely looked like Woody Allen and Bob Hope when they did their old SCTV impressions. It didn't matter. They took our expectations of who these people were and they blowed them up good, real good.
Crawford makes me smile the most when he plays it broad, as he does with Rene Cancom as well as a monobrowed, flatulent Russian with a passion for street opera.
I also liked the restaurant bits where he dishes with Jen Irwin, no slouch herself in the disappearing-into-character category.
Bottom line, for me at least: Crawford the performer is definitely one to watch. Crawford the series isn't.