The Catalogue of Sexual Anxieties, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo suppliedall

The Catalogue of Sexual Anxieties (Stage 8, Old Strathcona Performing Arts Centre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If the Andrews Sisters had sung about masturbation or genital warts, they might have ended up with a musical like The Catalogue of Sexual Anxieties.

“Are you sex deprived?” One of the trio of the bright, disarming young women onstage asks us at the start of of this sprightly boogie-woogie musical by Marion Poli, Aniqa Charania, and Charlotte Szabo. In an audience pretty much equally divided between men and women, one lone guy in a nearly full house bravely puts up his hand. And we are full of admiration for him.

It’s one thing to sidle up to sex obliquely, via characters or metaphors or allegories. But there’s probably no subject in the world more fraught, alarming, anxiety-producing when it’s addressed directly, personally, in public, with strangers. And no subject that kills the confessional instinct, or can make you feel lonelier or more uncertain when you suspect you’re an outlier.

Is it just me? It’s a universal question. And the spirit of this inclusive show, devised by three actors when they met at musical theatre school in Glasgow, is reassuring. When it comes to sex, if everyone is weird, no one’s weird. What can rules mean under the circumstances?

In the Victorian period (when, as they point out, the vibrator was invented), women talking about sex, much less keen to have it, were labelled “hysterical.” So, as latter day “hysterical ladies” this trio have licence to share stories (and songs) about everything from their own sexual awakening, their first time, their fears about under-performing or over-performing, to condoms and niche questions like “can you get tetanus from braces?”   

They’re funny and candid, and their show has lightness to it, not least because it relies on the musical theatre stagecraft of director Kate Ryan of Plain Jane Theatre. The performers are in constant motion, grouping and regrouping as they consult a big impressively antique-looking volume, a bible of blasphemy as one says, from chapter to chapter.

There are cultural differences in sexual attitudes to be explored: Szabo is from England, Poli is from France, Charania from France, with ethnic variations too. And their choice of musical style for original songs by Patrice Peyrieras — they’re strong singers — has a kooky charm to it: Andrews Sisters’ tight harmonies, with choreography to match.

What drives this playful show is sparkle, chemistry, and the musical chops of the likeable performers, who sing songs, and share stories, and feel free to disagree the way women friends do over coffee. It starts to unravel a bit three-quarters of the way through its 75-minute duration; perhaps the show casts its net a little too wide, once the actors start addressing motherhood, the biological clock, careers…. Until then, it’s a bold original.