The magic of a delightful play: The Importance of Being Earnest, a guest 12thnight Fringe review by Todd Babiak

Posted on August 23, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Carol Chu, Rory Turner, Maggie Salopek, Damon Pitcher in The Importance of Being Earnest, Empress of Blandings Productions. Photo by Emmanuel Dubbeldam.

The Importance of Being Earnest (Stage 15, Holy Trinity Anglican Church)

Oscar Wilde understood the potential of the English language, to delight, better than almost anyone who came before or after him. This is how we can have two successful productions of the show in a mid-sized city in the same season. The Importance of Being Earnest sounds as fresh today as it must have in 1895.

This may or may not work as justification for modernizing the show, with contemporary fashion, pop music, and smart phones. It’s certainly good for the costume budget. But fear not. Celia Taylor’s production does not toy with the real magic of the play: Wilde’s dialogue and the naughty, tiptoeing quality of the lovable buffoons who represent English manners.

The Importance of Being Earnest is a deceptively difficult play. A lazy production can feel messy. The Edmonton Fringe version is crisp, quick, and winning, with a uniformly excellent cast having genuine fun with some of the cleverest lines ever written.

Among them, Rory Turner, who plays Algernon Moncrieff, might as well be wearing a frock coat and a Lafayette vest. He’s so much the ridiculous Victorian gentleman he makes his smart phone look silly. Bravo, Algie.

— Todd Babiak

 

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The brain “spamming itself”: Jem Rolls: I, Idiot, a Fringe review

Posted on August 23, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

 

Jem Rolls: I, Idiot. Photo by Jem Rolls.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Jem Rolls: I, Idiot (Stage 13, Old Strathcona Public Library)

At a festival full of people running around using the word “genre” indiscriminately (even though they really just mean sitcom, say, or musical), the quixotic English poet Jem Rolls has, he feels, invented a new one. His new show I, Idiot is “verbal bouffon.” 

This alludes to clowns, but in a Euro, contortionist, avant-gardiste way. It might even be “post-modern.” But, as Rolls helpfully explains at the outset, that elusive term is something “every else understands, apart from you” and will not be mentioned during I, Idiot.

Anyhow, Rolls, a Fringe veteran of many decades standing, has fashioned a show that purports to be an exploratory tour of his own brain. Which, of course, might just as well be said of his other shows, since Rolls is a poet of the roiling, digressive, free-associative rant. His performances accumulate lists — of grievances, of outrages, of cosmic questions — and teases words together into daft but clever re-configurations. And then hurls them at you, non-stop, high-speed, and at top volume. 

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I, Idiot is also a scientific analysis of the unstoppable, widespread, possibly universal, phenomenon of human stupidity — in detail. In one poem, Clanger Man, for example, Rolls examines the fine distinction between the faux pas and the merely stupid: “if you compliment the chef on the finger bowl, is that a clanger or are you an idiot?”.

When you’re studying human stupidity, nothing is really off-topic. Lucky for Rolls. In the course of I,Idiot, Rolls will spin from the temperamental differences between the English and Canadians, the former revelling happily in misery, the other demonstrating their expertise in the rarefied art of “apologization.” The inspiration to be found in the moronic state of the world is endless: “morality is having about as good a century as Morse code.” As a connoisseur of paradox, Rolls finds a lot to work with in the current climate of untrue truths (try Rolls’s concept of “self-surveillance”).

Rolls is always on a roll. And the exuberant, not to say relentless, staccato hammering of his signature style will not be  everyone’s cup of tea. Especially if you haven’t taken a Dramamine beforehand. It doesn’t stop, or even pause, during the interpreter dance sequences, or interpolated clown routine, or moments of “awkward humour.” 

Well, at least we can take comfort in our togetherness. We’re Team Idiot, and “no stupid is an island.” 

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Put on your bridal face. Don’t Frown At The Gown, a Fringe review

Posted on August 23, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Trevor Schmidt and Darrin Hagen in Dont Frown At The Gown, Guys in Disguise. Photo by Epic Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Don’t Frown At The Gown (Stage 12, Varscona Theatre)

A monster mother stands like a Colossus (in size 13 pumps) astride the latest from Guys in Disguise, Don’t Frown At The Gown, by the team of Darrin Hagen and Trevor Schmidt.

Mrs. Janice Fowler (Hagen) isn’t just old school in a girdle and party dress and those pointy cats’-eye glasses. She’s the Principal of old school. Mrs. Fowler, life coach/enforcer, is not a woman to be trifled with, or diverted in any way from her two cosmically appointed tasks: to maintain the old school social proprieties best exemplified by ‘60s Suburbia, and to have complete control of the upcoming wedding of her daughter Susan (Schmidt) in every particular. Ideally, with no input whatsoever from the terrorized  bride-to-be, or Susan’s more resistant best friend and maid-of-honour Frankie (Jason Hardwick). 

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Mrs. Fowler, a sort of middle-brow suburban Lady Bracknell,  has sailed into “a sacred space,” Lady Laura Lee’s Bridal Belle Boutique, with the two girls in tow, for a final fitting and accessorizing. When confronted with Frankie’s news that she’s landed a job as “weather girl on the Channel 2 news,” Mrs. Fowler is aghast, . “You know what kind of women end up on TV?” she thunders. “Actresses. Or  worse.”

And she’s taken aback, too, by the mysterious Lady Laura Lee herself (Jake Tkaczyk), who’s unapologetically single and owns her own business, and who pointedly asks the rabbity Susan an outlandish question: “What would make you happy?” 

These temporary setbacks don’t prevent Mrs. Fowler from delivering herself of a long speech about womanly duties, such as cleaning, baking, and sex. If there’s a paradox about being an authority on submitting to authority, Mrs. Fowler doesn’t notice. She’s played with aplomb and considerable eyebrow involvement by Hagen.

The thing is, weddings and traditional views on the proper role of women as adjuncts to their husbands aren’t exactly a dangerous satirical target any more, to say the least. There are droll asides, as always, in the writing, and puns and sight gags to savour. But the turf seems awfully well-travelled. While entertainingly performed (and costumed), the play itself seems thinner and more repetitive than its hit predecessors. 

In one way, of course, the actors needn’t be men. In another way, that gives a special resonance to Lady Laura Lee’s pep talk to the glum outcast Frankie, who isn’t drawn to marriage and suburbia, just to Susan. There’s “a new kind of modern woman,” approaching, says the bridal shop owner. She’s absolutely right.  And the collected oeuvre of Guys in Disguise is vivid proof.

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In a cabaret past the end of the world, Roy Versus The Red Baron. A Fringe review

Posted on August 22, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Roy Versus The Red Baron. Photo from program.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Roy Versus The Red Baron (Stage 35, L’UniThéâtre)

In an officer’s mess past the end of the world, where history goes to let down its hair and have a few drinks, two mortal enemies of a war a century ago are carousing, singing, playing with toy planes together, and needling each other.

One is the German aristocrat Baron von Richthofen, the Red Baron, the most famous and fearsome fighter pilot in the world. The other is the polite self-effacing Canadian flying ace from small-town Ontario (and then Edmonton) who shot him down over the Somme. Even his name is self-effacing, and you might not know it: Roy Brown.

In this spirited new “fantasy cabaret” by Kenneth Brown (who directs and is onstage at the keyboard), Zachary Parsons-Lozinski and Andrew Gummer play the sparring partners. And a study in contrasts they are, as conjured by two exceptional singing actors. Von Richthofen (Parsons-Lozinski) the breezy, witty Euro-bon vivant, bemused by the modest good manners and naiveté of his polite Canuck counterpart (Gummer). “I don’t understand foreign languages. I’m from Ontario.” His simile between flying formations and shinny hockey is, needless to say, lost on the Baron.  

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Their repartee has the amusing texture of a historical vaudeville, with our Canadian unknown hero as the straight man. And between songs (culled from the World War I musical hall repertoire) and joke routines, their stories emerge. As set forth by playwright Brown, it’s a collision (over drinks) of the 19th century and the 20th, the Old World and the New: Von Richthofen with his ironic noblesse oblige, his horseback riding and hunting parties; Brown, the “colonial” with his boyhood dream of flying.

The Canadian, traumatized by the horrors of war, is most proud of his singular achievement of never losing a man in his squadron in combat. That’s not how the German’s mind works. 

The Red Baron’s final fatal mission is conjured here, and our man, haunted by the death, tells us that he “did not feel like a victor.” It is, indeed, a long way to Tipperary. Entertaining and instructive.

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Fun at the apocalypse, and a Fringe discovery for reviewer Todd Babiak! Today, For Now, a review

Posted on August 22, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Today, For Now, Random Samples Collective. Photo supplied.

Today, For Now (Stage 7, Yardbird Suite)

We are haunted by a prospect of a huge asteroid hitting the earth and killing everyone. Why? Maybe the dinosaurs. Maybe because we are sickos.

Writers and directors have addressed themselves to the prospect of the great collision several times, with the seriousness that apocalypse demands. Today, For Now is an altogether different take on the fiery end of the world: absurd and funny.

Jeff Leard and Valerie Cotic, a couple of Vancouver actors, play the beleaguered hosts of a nightly news show, Today, For Now. They also play a variety of people who are planning to die in more private ways: lonely women with bottles of looted wine, politicians, children, and murderous suburbanites.

At times it feels like a sketch comedy show masquerading as a play but Today, For Now is so clever and Leard and Cotic are so lively and committed that it hardly matters.

— Todd Babiak

 

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The lost dreams of Roseglen: One Polaroid, the last of the trilogy. A Fringe review

Posted on August 22, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Boyan Peychoff, Julie Golosky, Jennifer Spencer in One Polaroid. Photo by Nathaniel Vance Hehir.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

One Polaroid (Stage 9, Telus Phone Museum)

What happens to golden moments and lost dreams anyhow? Judging by Michele Vance Hehir’s Roseglen plays, they linger in in the air of small prairie towns, contribute to sunsets, and melt past and future together into a perpetual present.    

One Polaroid, the third of the trilogy, takes us back to Roseglen, now a dying town in 1973. The school is gone, the train doesn’t stop there any more, the choir that once was isn’t. Roseglen is on a slow fade-out into the horizon. And two aging sisters, possibly its  last inhabitants, are endlessly playing out the repercussions of choices made long ago.

The days repeat on a loop. Jean (Julie Golosky) wants the radio on; Agnes (Jennifer Spencer) wants silence. Jean dotes on a cat named Lucky; Agnes grinds her teeth and sighs a lot about this. (Side note: Fear for Lucky. Cats, dogs, and even parakeets are apt to meet bleak ends in Canadian theatre of the naturalist type). 

Once a year on his birthday, a tradition the sisters cherish, their nephew Andrew (Boyan Peychoff) visits. There is a cake (always chocolate); there is fruit punch (always spiked with 7-Up). And there is a game (always guess-the-tune, artist first). 

But there are hints of change in the otherwise uninflected unspooling of days. Jean is prone to odd panic attacks. Agnes is determined that a long-buried family secret will get exhumed and revealed. And Andrew arrives, early, with news about his plans — plans that by definition include a jarring sense that time has a future tense.

It’s not a breathless intersection of high-speed forces, to say the least. The play paints a human landscape in a delicate, monochromatic palette that leans to the sepia end. And the production, directed by Vance Hehir, is punctuated — if that isn’t too strong a word — by long slow pauses in which the characters are remembering, or thinking, or thinking about remembering. In this crowd, a musical parlour game is a veritable rave.  

One Polaroid can’t be rushed that way. And the actors find the rhythm and the inner pulse of that kind of prairie minimalism rather beautifully. The tragedies of Roseglen have a lived-in feel about them. And secrets take a lifetime — or a trilogy — to get spilled. 

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The Coldharts are back, with another shivery show: Eddie Poe, a guest 12thnight Fringe review by Alan Kellogg

Posted on August 22, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Katie Hartman and Nick Ryan in Eddie Poe, The Coldharts. Photo by Sara Erdman.

Eddie Poe (Stage 37, Auditorium at Campus Saint-Jean)

Brooklyn-based “minimalist music theatre artists” The Coldharts (Katie Hartman and Nick Ryan) are back with the second instalment of a triptych of their shows inspired by the Edgar Allan Poe semi-autobiographical doppelganger short story William Wilson, itself inspired by a Washington Irving story.

In this telling, we find 16-year-old Virginian Edgar Allan (Ryan) off from the capital in 1826 Richmond to Charlottesville’s University of Virginia in search of a B.A. in ancient and modern languages.

The preposterously solemn, seemingly rock-ribbed Edgar Allan has secretly been engaged to (Sarah) Elmira Royster, who extracts a promise from her husband-to-be to behave himself while away studying.

But of course this is not to be, as the evil inner Eddie (Hartman, among other roles) conspires to lure him into various debaucheries — drink, gambling, profligate spending, card cheating. There is more to come later in life, as we know. And none of this is good for his health, as you will come to understand. He strikes up a friendship with kindly and very rich Glendinning and makes a mess of that, too.

Things don’t go well.

The Coldharts are an impressive duo (Marge Ryan’s costumes are superb) and they do many things well. You won’t go wrong here to enjoy a top-drawer Fringe experience, cheap at half the price.

That said, I wonder if this iteration will garner the same consistently rave, best-of-show notices its predecessor racked up. For example, skilled as she is in various disciplines, Hartman seemed to be over-amping far too often, and she should really air-check her southern accent. A re-write might just be order.

It’s not a fair comparison, but I found myself drifting back to Catalyst Theatre’s Nevermore, the brilliant musical that has travelled the world. But again, there is more than enough in Eddie Poe to have us waiting for the next chapter….

– Alan Kellogg, a graduate (references upon request) of Edgar Allan Poe Intermediate School, Annandale, Va.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Let the experts make you laugh: TEDxRFT, a guest 12thnight Fringe review by Todd Babiak

Posted on August 22, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Kory Mathewson and Julian Faid in TEDxRFT. Photo by Aaron Pedersen

TEDxRFT(Stage 11, Nordic Studio Theatre)

A TED talk, if you have escaped the phenomenon, is an opportunity for someone who knows a lot about something to talk about it for twenty minutes, usually without notes, usually with slides.

These are experts and enthusiasts, typically with a lesson to impart.

Kory Mathewson and Julian Faid, two of the city’s finest improvisers, have a unique take on the TED talk: what if our presenters knew nothing about their subject? What if, instead of being experts, they are simply enthusiasts?

The format of this hilarious hour of nerdery is simple: Mathewson builds the slides for Faid, and vice-versa. Neither of them has seen the slides before arriving on stage. The audience comes up with the title and… voilà, we watch two very funny young men suffer a lot of intellectual discomfort.

Mathewson and Faid have travelled the world with their know-nothing TED talks. The one thing they both know a lot about is the process of improvisation, and how to make an audience laugh.

This may be among your last opportunities to see a TEDxRFT (the RFT stands for Rapid Fire Theatre). Our expert non-experts have received a cease-and-desist letter from TED, a rather well-resourced and non-comedic enterprise.

— Todd Babiak

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A timely look at a hot topic: Wellspring, a guest 12thnight.ca Fringe review by Alan Kellogg

Posted on August 22, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Natasha Napoleao in Wellspring, Frente Theatre Collective. Photo supplied.

Wellspring (Stage 13, Old Strathcona Public Library)

From Edmonton’s fearless Frente Theatre Collective, the same folks who brought us a play about tailings ponds, here is a meditation on fracking. Even largely unrepentant lefties like yours truly might try to toss off a snarky, disparaging one-liner or two on the artistic merits of tackling seemingly intractable topics like this for the theatre.

Which only goes to prove that smug predictions often blow up in your face. For, following a very brief, unfortunate opening (and closing), here is a tight, engaging 60-minute production, particularly well-timed politically for Albertans. And, as it happens, not just for us, since it actually premiered in Texas.

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The arc of a small, foothills oil patch boomtown powered by fracking is well-told, sometimes powerfully so, by three townswomen.

Gabby (Janelle Jorde) is an upbeat teenager who cheerfully tries to make sense of the increasing tensions overtaking her town.

Rita (Natasha Napoleao) has moved from Atlantic Canada in search of the cash to fund the B&B she dreams of starting back east.

Bernadette (Rebecca Starr) is a devout widow who is steadfastly connecting the dots leading to her loss. Her dream is to visit Lourdes as a pilgrim.

For those of us who share the POV here (mea culpa), our views will be validated re: the dark side of the petro economy — and on a human scale at that. But you’d think that even those who give the industry more credit would have to be impressed with playwright Leslea Kroll’s sympathetic treatment of the townsfolk. For example, Rita, who is in denial for much of the story, just wants a decent job so she can return home.

Fringe festivals have a long, proud history in showcasing activist theatre. May it continue, and may Wellspring find the audience it deserves.

– Alan Kellogg

 

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A century after its premiere, The Soldier’s Tale comes to the Fringe. A review

Posted on August 22, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Andrea House and Oscar Derkx in The Soldier’s Tale. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A Soldier’s Tale (Stage 5, King Edward School)

A Fringe Tale. A multi-disciplinary cross-section of talents — a symphony orchestra conductor, seven professional musicians, three actors, a dancer — gather on a a stage in a small make-shift theatre carved from a school to make something rare happen. For you. For 16 bucks (including surcharge).

So, The Soldier’s Tale. A collaboration between the Russian master Stravinsky and a Swiss writer C.F. Ramuz with a Russian folk tale to hand, it premiered in 1918 in the dying days of World War I. A century later Fringe audiences will be the first in Alberta ever to see it.

The Soldier (Oscar Derkx) is marching home after the war “marching marching all the day, soon he will be home to stay,” says The Narrator (Davina Stewart) in a jaunty rhyming text translated from French and tuned up for his forces by director Farren Timoteo. 

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“Will his journey never end?” Ah, there’s a folk tale question for you. En route Joseph meets the Devil (Andrea House), an alluring figure with come-hither eyes and a sexy French accent. She talks him into trading his cheap fiddle for a red book containing the secrets of unlimited post-war wealth (plus three days of bliss on a soft bed). And he agrees.

Bad choice, Joseph. It’s the start of a whole series of events, in which the Devil and man’s corrupting venality figure prominently. For starters, Joseph finds that time has passed magically. And he is “a ghost among the living,” a tragic wandering figure with nothing, not even his graceful, smiling beloved (the dancer Camille Ensminger, in lovely sequences choreographed by Laura Krewski). “What can I do to be what I used to be?”

The score has a vivid, brightly jagged, modernist drive to it, as delivered by the crack ensemble conducted by Alexander Prior, the ESO’s charismatic chief conductor. And Timoteo synchronizes the play to the memorable music, in inventive ways. Stewart is a wry and not entirely unsympathetic narrator and annotator, declaring and then sliding into scenes. Derkx is just right as the soldier whose best intentions tend to dissolve in the heat of the moment, and cede to the prospect of gain. And House is magnetic as the Devil. Nothing really makes sense if the Devil isn’t alluring.

A memorable Fringe experience.

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