Rachel Bowron. Jenny McKillop, Mhairi Berg, Oscar Derkx in Bright Lights, Barney Productions. Photo by Brianne Jang.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Fringe is back, starting Thursday, in the town where the continent’s fringe phenom began. Yup, the biggest and oldest Fringe festival on the continent is a bona fide grassroots Edmonton invention, crazy, improbable, irresistible. And things here are about to get a whole lot livelier and more exciting.

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In this its 43rd summer, the 216-show Fringe show universe, with its contingent of 1,600-plus artists from 11 countries, is your wonderland. Do not be daunted by size; instead, be curious. Experiment: that’s what artists have been doing to get here. And, after all, there’s no wrong way to Fringe — except to not see a show.

So, what looks promising? Intriguing? Just too weird to resist?

Just for starters, here’s a quick preliminary survey of a dozen shows that caught my eye — for the premise or the playwright, the play or the company, the director, the cast, or the extreme probability that you’ll never have seen anything like it. I haven’t seen any of these either, so we’re on the Finding mission together. Stay tuned for companion pieces and more suggestions)

Mhairi Berg in Bright Lights, a Blarney production. Photo by Ryan Parker.

Bright Lights. Actor/educator Luc Tellier has assembled an all-star cast — Rachel Bowron, Jenny McKillop, Oscar Derkx, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Mhairi Berg,  — for the return of Blarney Productions and his own return to directing after Legoland in 2017. More about this anon, but the comedy is by Kat Sandler, who in 2019 at the Citadel put the running back into running time with a logistical challenge it hadn’t seen before or since in The Candidate and The Party  — and not coincidentally put the running back into running time, in a big way. Anyhow, this Sandler comedy, at hit at the 2016 Toronto Fringe, is set in a support group for people who have had alien encounters. She’s a witty, smart writer, so I’m up for this.

 SeaMAN. Portland’s Amica Hunter gets a gold star for unconventional entrance of the festival at the 2023 Fringe. In Anatomica, a weird solo performance art comedy (for want of a better term), they entered scooching backwards, legs only no arms, and the evolutionary spiral goes down from there. Hunter is back with a Florida artist of similar weirdness quotient, Bruce Ryan Costella, in a “1-man show – by 2.” It’s a “revenge-fuelled venture” as billed, and both performers play the old salt. How could this possibly work onstage? Intriguing.   

Jenny McKillop and Garett Ross in Rob and Chris (Bobby + Tina – a new musical, Plain Jane Theatre. Photo by Ryan Parker.

Rob and Chris (Bobby +Tina) – A New Musical. It’s been a decade since Collin Doyle’s Let The Light of Day Through, the Alberta Playwriting Competition winner of 2012, premiered at Theatre Network. A couple with a great burden of sorrow and guilt have fashioned themselves a comedy to be in. And somehow, with the  assistance of Plain Jane artistic director Kate Ryan, this memorably complex, funny, and heartbreaking play, is in the process of becoming a musical More about this exciting (and ongoing) experiment in musical theatre writing in an upcoming 12thnight.ca post. It’s a collaboration between the playwright and the superlative young composer/lyricist Matt Graham.

Accidental Beach: A Previously Improvised Musical, Grindstone Theatre. Photo supplied.

Accidental Beach: A Previously Improvised Musical. You can’t get more local than this new musical from Grindstone, the theatre that unleashed the musical satire Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer on the world. Like “Edmonton’s hot new beach” itself, there’s a big splash of the fortuitous that’s gone into Accidental Beach. It was the “Life’s A Beach “episode of The 11 O’Clock Number, Grindstone’s weekly all-improvised musicals (which are an amazing achievement in improv, needless to say). “We recorded it, and it’s here verbatim,” laughs artistic director Byron Martin.

Ingi’s Fingies. If you were mesmerized by Epidermis Circus last year, you will have been struck by the ingenuity, precision physicality  and macabre sense of humour attached to Ingrid Hansen’s original kind of puppetry. It’s a hands-on affair if ever there was one. Fingers, mirror images, tiny found objects…. one of the lingering images is a sinister baby, Baby Tyler, who paid homage to vintage vaudeville by taking a bath onstage. Oh-oh, Tyler, that worldly infant with the sly look, is back (trailing Off-Broadway raves) to star in a new, this time all-ages, show from Victoria-based SNAFU Society of Unexpected Spectacle. SNAFU manager Lauren Ball calls it “less spicy than Epidermis Circus, “but just as weird.”

Baby Tyler in Ingi’s Fingies, SNAFU. Photo supplied.

Mass Debating. Trevor Schmidt, whose coming-of-age girl-bonding comedy Robot Girls was one of the delights of this past season, has written highly unusual musicals before now, with an array of creative collaborators (among them, Two-Headed/ Half-Hearted with Kaeley Jade Wiebe, Klondykes with Darrin Hagen). This new one, music by Mason Snelgrove, heads for Catholic school, and takes us to “the 1973 Catholic Mass Debating Championship Finals.” Will the St Sebastian’s School For Privileged Boys retain their grip on the Heart of Jesus Trophy Cup. Schmidt himself is in the production he directs, along with five other top-drawer comic actor/singers (Michelle Todd, Jason Hardwick, Cheryl Jameson, Kristin Johnston, Jake Tkaczyk). The company? 100% More Girls. Take that Sister Act, and hang on to your rosary.

Jayce McKenzie, Center of the Universe. Photo supplied.

Center of the Universe.  Her crackling darkly comic performances as off-centre kids, disturbed or prescient, troubled or smart (Candy & The Beast, Robot Girls) have made her an Edmonton theatre star. Now Jayce McKenzie has turned playwright, tapping her own experience for a solo comedy, in which she plays a 13-year-old undiagnosed ADHD’er.

Local Diva: the Danielle Smith Diaries. In a political climate where  “freedom” has come to mean, increasingly, the “freedom” to curtail other people’s human rights — and plays with a sharp, specific political edge are not thick upon the ground — here’s a bold one. The protagonist of Liam Salmon’s solo play, which started life as a podcast in the 2020 Alberta Queer Calendar Project, is a drag diva with a story to tell. Growing up gay on the prairies is a traumatizing experience for starters: Catholic school, the drag circuit where queerness is highly visible, two UCP elections … no shortage of dramatic conflict, to put it mildly. “Drag is political; it just is,” says Salmon (Subscribe Or Like, Fags In Space). They describe their  protagonist Tragidean as “a really flawed, difficult character,” dimensionally human. “Queerness has been here forever,” but it’s increasingly under attack. Statuesque Zachary Parsons-Lozinski aka Lilith Fair, a magnetic performer (The Pansy Cabaret, With Bells On), stars; Owen Holloway co-produces and directs.   

Tara Travis in Erika The Red, Monster Theatre. Photo supplied

Erika The Red. Vancouver’s much-travelled Monster Theatre, history junkies who’ve turned their wits to such modest little projects as “every story ever told,” the complete history Canada in 60 minutes, War and Peace got fascinated by … Vikings. The star of this “epic one-woman Viking saga,” charismatic Tara Travis (half the creative/performing team of The Spinsters), is back at the Edmonton Fringe for the first time since her solo murder mystery Who Killed Gertrude Crump?. Travis, a Monster associate since 1999, explains that DNA testing on an impressive Viking grave proved that its occupant, intriguingly, was a woman. “This is our imagining of who she was and who she came to be,” says Travis of our heroine, bent on revenge when her village is burned to the ground. “It’s the most technically ambitious Fringe show we’ve ever done,” co-written with Monster’s Ryan Gladstone. Expect complicated projections. Travis, meanwhile, is crossing the Rockies in a car full of Viking weapons. Check out the droll mockumentary on the Monster website.

LeTabby Lexington in Golden Grind, House of Hush. Photo by Brennan Roy.

Golden Grind: A Hollywood Burlesque Show. Burlesque, with its playful humour and presentational pizzaz, and theatre have long had a flexible open marriage in Edmonton (think of those Send in the Girls shows wth Henry VIII’s wives or the Bronte sisters). Intriguingly House of Hush Burlesque has enlisted actor/ improviser Kristi Hansen to write, and host, this homage to Golden Age of Hollywood stars like Dorothy Dandridge, Marilyn Monroe, Mae West…. “I was inspired by Violette (Violette Coquette who co-directs with Delia Barnett), who’s doing her PhD in burlesque performance,” says Hansen. She plays film studies PhD student Luster Kitten (a salute to Buster), and “Golden Grind is my powerpoint, my thesis, come to life.”

Hansen’s own historical researches have revealed that “women and gender diverse folks were not treated as well as they should have been,” exploitation embedded in the double-sided title. “I’m a big fan of burlesque,” Hansen says, “the improvisational aspects, the tongue-in-cheek, the performance….”

Ha Ha da Vinci. In this evidently unclassifiable solo show, with illusions, magic, music, and theatrical effects  from Port Townsend-based Phinia Pipia, a grad student finds herself transplanted to renaissance Italy in da Vinci’s time machine. A tuba is involved; it had me at “a tuba lights the way.”

Rebecca Merkley in Satan Does A Cabaret, Dammitammy Productions. Photo by Brianne Jang

Satan Does A Cabaret. You may have seen Jesus H (for Hardcore) Christ who showed up last year, all big hair and Crocs, rocking out as the substitute teacher in our Grade 2 class at the Christian Bible Assembly. The creator and star of Jesus Teaches Us Things, quick-witted Rebecca Merkley, is back. Satan, fresh from a hot tour of Georgia, has commandeered an open mic night at a local coffee house for an evening of song, dance, poetry and, you know, damnation. Satan shares the stage with live musician Shayne Ewasiuk. Says Merkley, there are six songs from the 90s to the mid-2000s. “Let’s face it, Satan is a millennial.” 

I leave you (temporarily) with three premises with which to tease your mind. The Silence of the Lambs Jr. (for kids, but with an “adult language and content” warning). What? Syster och Bror Bygga IKEA (Sister and Brother Build IKEA!). As a setting for family dysfunction nothing beats building an IKEA night table together, right? And this one, either inspired or terrible: Who’s Afraid of Winnie The Pooh? Once you think of “Winnie and Piglet having the new couple over for drinks,” you just can’t unthink it. Which is a reason to go and find out more. It arrives here (from Minneapolis), with buzz.

Shows, tickets, schedules: all at fringetheatre.ca.