SCOOBIE DOOSICAL, Dammitammy Productions, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo by BB Collective

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Seven summers ago, Fringe audiences up for a word-of-mouth gamble (and who isn’t?) found themselves at a show smiling at characters who never took off their bathing caps, start to finish.

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The Unsyncables turned out to be a sleeper hit, a funny underdog comedy with its own kooky sense of humour. We saw a ragtag, aspirational amateur synchronized swim team up against a snobby well-heeled swim club with their own fancy pool to rehearse in. There was choreography, of course, in this off-centre theatrical ode to friendship; there was pop music.   

What we didn’t realize at the time, if I may speak for my fellow audience members, is that we were watching an original theatre talent at work, who did what musician/ composer/singer-songwriter turned playwright and director people do in this town. She gravitated to the Fringe.

The Unsyncables, Dammitammy Productions, Fringe 2016. Photo by BB Collective

That would be Rebecca Merkley. And The Unsyncables was our first sighting of her company, Dammitammy Productions. There is something quintessentially Fringe about Dammitammy (starting with its name, Merkley’s amusing penance for exhorting her high school friend Tammy,  to try harder at badminton, dammit Tammy!).

What’s followed that Fringe debut has been a non-stop series of strikingly varied theatrical experiments — musicals, plays, revues, cabarets, circus/cabarets, category-resistant entertainments — a series that even the pandemic couldn’t stop. Witness Letters to No One of 2021 (cold readings by actors from each others’ stash of the letters they didn’t send, to people who pissed them off, or wounded them, or they didn’t get a chance to say sorry to). Or a Nativity radio play (They Wanted To Do Chekhov).

Merk du Solapocalypse was looney and spontaneous showbiz free-association — old-school vaudeville, satire of stand-up comedy, circus acts that end before they start — as a way to capture the insanity of 2021, and re-connect with a shell-shocked audience it could hardly be equalled, the meta of meta.

At The Answer Is Fringe, which might well be the mantra under which Merkley operates, Dammitammy has two shows. The inspiration for SCOOBIE DOOSICAL dates from the Before Times, says Merkley of her new “musical spoof.” Spun from the wacky late-‘60s cartoon, with its teenage characters and talking Great Dane, it’s “an homage to my pandemic buddy, my dog,” she says sadly of the late Smalls. “There are a lot of Scooby Doo parodies. A lot of fan fiction. Lots of plays. But I don’t think anyone’s done a musical.…”

“I loved the cartoon. This is my brand of comedy: so dumb. I love the tackiness of it!” Merkley says. “Silly and ridiculous suits my brain.” And then she sets about exploring (or creating) depth from that springboard.

SCOOBIE DOOSICAL isn’t the first time Merkley has spun a musical from that sort of bouncing ball. Rivercity the Musical in 2017 lifted the  characters from the Archie comics, who never seem to graduate. She gave four inventive comic actors 10 characters, a classic triangle of romantic entanglements, goals, musical theatre songs from wistful ballads through patter songs, choreography.

As for Scoob et al, the cartoon itself invites “California surf music,” says Merkley. “I totally strayed from that,” she says of a score she describes as “musical theatre with a contemporary level of pop and rock…. I love Sondheim. And one song in particular, Lights By A Cat is an intentional soft rip-off of Into The Woods.” In fact, she figures that “the whole thing is a soft parody” of that Sondheim fairy tale for adults musical.

Merkley’s cast, who play “trees, squirrels and ghosts” as well as assorted humans, is led by Bella King (last seen in Teatro Live’s Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s) as Shag the dog. The characters are “real people. We nod and wink, and there are full cartoon gags, but then we leave the cartoon…. I wanted more from the characters, more depth and a back story.”

Merkley the director has been having the actors write diary entries as their characters. “And then we check in with them; it’s almost a therapy session,” she laughs. “How their day was, all that…. It’s just for us.”

Rebecca Merkley, creator and star of Jesus Teaches Us Things, Dammitammy Productions. Photo supplied.

And Jesus is back for the Fringe. In Jesus Teaches Us Things, a cross (so to speak) between stand-up, improv, and musical theatre which premiered in 2022, he’s the substitute teacher in our grade 2 class at Christian Bible Academy. And in Merkley’s exuberant, very funny performance, he’s a showbiz veteran, a charismatic big-hair old-school rocker who knows how to make an entrance (“we will we will save you!”).

The interactions with the audience are hilarious and largely improvised; Merkley is quick on the uptake. “I’m actually a shy person,” she says. “But as a character I’m so safe. So for me it’s really rewarding…. Acting is hard but it’s it’s also simple; it’s not getting in the way of (the character).”

Both SCOOBIE DOOSICAL and Jesus Teaches Us Things have roots in the hair-pin turns of Merkley’s own narrative. Theatre officially happened the moment she auditioned for a Grande Prairie community production of Oklahoma! on a friend’s nudge, and landed the character role of Ado Annie. “I’m a Dodger, I’m the funny side-kick character. Ingenue? Boring!”

She starting writing songs early (“at five, I wrote my first song in pencil crayon. Pretty cute! Embarrassing, but I still have it! And I got better.” Piano lessons didn’t take (“I’m an ear person). Guitar was a much better fit, for performing and composing. Adding stories was a natural.

There’s major gospel music content in her Creston B.C. childhood, in a Christian family near the very locale where her play Bountiful, about the polygamous Mormon fundamentalist encampment nearby, is set. The route to Edmonton and Grant MacEwan’s musical theatre program, includes bible college, a youth ministry, and a falling out with the church. So, hey, she brings a lot of background knowledge to playing a stand-up Jesus who sings Journey songs and is stuck in the ‘80s musically speaking. She credits the enhanced musical content to Christine Lesiak of Small Matters Production (For Science!).

In the show she plays with the audience in a good-natured warm-hearted way (Jesus even takes questions). Hecklers? No problem. At one late-night performance, getting static from someone drunk, she flipped a “hey, Judas, it’s been a while” at him, and the crowd roared. “It’s all about connection, community,” she says.

Which brings us to the Fringe. Merkley’s first Fringe experience was watching, she says. Then she acted in a couple of Fringe shows, Coraline the Musical and Jessy Ardern’s Harold and Vivian Entertain Guests. And now, the winner of this year’s Gerald Osborn Playwriting Award, she’s creating, producing, directing Fringe shows herself.

“For me, the Fringe has been huge. And some of the best theatre I’ve seen has been there. Theatre that doesn’t rely on big sets, big budget, that’s that’s non-pretentious…. Even if I had a lot of money, I’d be doing the Fringe.”

SCOOBIE DOOSICAL runs Aug; 19 to 26 at Walterdale Theatre, Fringe stage 4. Jesus Teaches Us Things runs Aug. 18 to 27 at La Cité Auditorium, Fringe stage 14. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca