Fringe review: The Great American Songbook Cabaret

Posted on August 19, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

 

The Great American Songbook Cabaret (Stage 18, Sugar Swing Ballroom)

By Marc Horton

I confess to having once been a tiresome baby boomer much given to lecturing indifferent and bored whippersnappers that it was my generation that had put a stranglehold on pop music.

“We had the Beatles,” I would pronounce, “and Dylan. And the Stones, and…yadda, yadda, yadda…” I think I might once even have included The Monkees, God forgive me.

For the record, I recant. What I said then was balderdash. It was stupid becauseno generation can make the claim to being the best. The generation that comes closest to perfection, however, is the one responsible for the Great American Songbook: classic, unforgettable, evergreen tunes that have proven themselves open to fresh interpretations from singers as different as Renée Fleming, Rod Stewart and Willie Nelson.

Again for the record, I love these songs for their clever lyrics, surprising rhymes and tricky, seductive melodies. Nobody beats Cole Porter or Harold Arlen or Hoagy Carmichael or Johnny Mercer or George and Ira Gershwin or…the list goes on.

And I’m positive that the three young singers and their equally young back up band responsible for this superb cabaret show agree with me. They deserve sellouts.

Victoria Breitkreuz, a MacEwan theatre arts grad, holds centre stage with her powerful voice. She is ably supported by vocalists Raine Radtke and Cossette Dubrule as they present a handful of some of the Songbook’s most memorable tunes.

Breitkreuz provides a simple narrative line of love found and love lost as she introduces the audience to an early-love ballad – Lazy Afternoon by Jerome Moss and Sonny Burke – to a torchy lost-love classic – Arthur Hamilton’s Cry Me a River.

The best?

I Had Myself a True Love, a little-heard Harold Arlen song from the musical St. Louis Women. Breitkreuz brings the house down with this one. Kudos to the band as well: Aretha Tilloston on upright bass, Dave Herrick on trumpet, Jazz Nipp on piano, Leah Harmen on tenor sax and Sam Malowney on drums.

My one criticism? This show is too short. I could listen to these guys all day.

Marc Horton is a former entertainment writer with the Edmonton Journal. He plays a rudimentary jazz piano and he cannot carry a tune.

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Fringe review: My Love Lies Frozen In The Ice

Posted on August 19, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

My Love Lies Buried in the Ice, Dead Rabbits Theatre. Photo supplied.

My Love Lies Frozen in the Ice (Stage 3, Walterdale Theatre)

by Todd Babiak

Of all the stories to bring to life on a small stage consider this one: it is 1897 and Salomon Andrée is off to the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon with two companions, Nils and Knut. It does not go well.

In the hands of London’s Dead Rabbits Theatre, massive balloons and blowing gales and polar bears are creative opportunities. As they demonstrated with The Dragon, a hit at last year’s Fringe, they are masters of stagecraft. With white sheets, a few ladders, small appliances, and dollies anything is possible.

Our way into the story of the lost explorers is through the shattered woman they left behind, sister to Salomon and in love with Nils. She is not a passive figure, waiting calmly for her men to come home, as much as everyone would like her to be.

As delightful as it is to see and to hear, the most astonishing aspect of My Love Lies Frozen in the Ice is the performers’ balance between comedy and tragedy. The four performers, Samuel Buitekant, Woody Franklyn, Milly Ramone, and Maxwell Sly, slip expertly from silly to sincere.

This is a deeply theatrical piece of theatre, ambitious and strange and wonderful.

 

 

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Romeo and Juliet … A Fringe review by Marc Horton

Posted on August 19, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Romeo and Juliet: The greatest love story ever to be misunderstood in a junior high English class, mildly redeemed by Leonardo DiCaprio before finally coalescing upon middle aged reflection of a passionate early adulthood mistake (Stage 1, Westbury Theatre)

By Marc Horton

At one point in this energetic iteration of Shakespeare’s greatest love story, the audience is asked by one of the dozen-or-so hoofer/actors up there on stage: “Is this entertaining?”

Dangerous question. Not so easy to answer but, yes, it is, at least for the most part.

The production with the longest name at this year’s Fringe – long titles are a hallmark of writer/director Jake Hastey’s Toy Guns Dance Theatre – has too few laugh-out-loud moments countered by too many confusing ones. This is Romeo and Juliet pared to the bare essentials with the parts judged to be extraneous replaced by fun, sometimes very clever, dance and movement performance.

And to Hastey’s credit and that of his accomplished cast, the final moments of his Romeo and Juliet are surprisingly moving, considering that much of what has come before has been played for yuks, cheap and otherwise.

But, hey, this IS Romeo and Juliet and star-crossed and doomed lovers SHOULD be moving.

This is also the Fringe and yuks are not only expected in productions like this, but are demanded. Hastey doesn’t let his audience down.

Some laughs are of the bargain variety, but they are laughs nevertheless. For example, the opening brawl between followers of the Capulets and Montagues is fought in slo-mo between two performers who clearly understand the rudiments of a pre-fight stare-down between two heavyweight prizefighters. It’s smart stuff.

The sword play continues with pool noodles standing in for the usual cut-and-thrust from the more traditional épées.

Fun, too, is the moment when a dancer who introduces herself as Juliet confesses that she doesn’t really know how she smells – a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, of course – but someone up on stage really stinks.

“That’s bullying,” she’s admonished, and stripped of the role of Juliet.

Tribute is also paid to other versions of Romeo and Juliet with an acknowledgement or two tossed in the way of film director Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 DiCaprio movie with Claire Danes. And Mrs. Capulet sings the opening bars to the ballad Maria from West Side Story, the Bernstein/Sondheim take on R and J.
In the end, the Bard here is subjected to drastic editing, some of it just a bit too heavy-handed for those who might prefer a little clarity with their Shakespeare.

Marc Horton is the former movie reviewer and books editor for the Edmonton Journal. He is also a veteran Fringe reviewer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Exquisite Hour: a 12thnight.ca Fringe review by Todd Babiak

Posted on August 19, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Belinda Cornish and Jeff Haslam in The Exquisite Hour (2013), Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Andrew MacDonald-Smith.

By Todd Babiak

The Exquisite Hour (Stage 12, Varscona Theatre)

Stewart Lemoine has written wilder comedies, with more intricate plots. His dialogue is sometimes more sparkling, more self-consciously ingenious. In other Lemoine plays, there are more laugh-out loud scenes. Lemoine characters can be in deeper peril than in The Exquisite Hour.

But this tender two-hander, written specifically for the odd constraints of the Fringe, might be his most perfect play. It has everything we most love about Lemoine’s strange and illuminating comedies, where people speak and act with a little bit more care and a little bit more abandon, at once.  The world he crafts is just as charmed.

What makes The Exquisite Hour so special, and just a little bit different, is the immediately recognizable fragility of Mrs. Darimont and Zach Teale, played by Belinda Cornish and Jeff Haslam, two of Lemoine’s longest-running and finest collaborators.

We’re in a backyard somewhere in North America, where Zach tends his garden and sips lemonade with just a bit of a kick. Mrs. Darimont shows up with a basket and a plan. She has something to sell. Like any good marketer, Mrs. Darimont wants to change her potential client’s life in some small — or large — way by probing him for a void or wound. She will offer to transform him with a sweetly bygone product: a set of encyclopaedias.

The focus on words and their meaning, what we make of them, allows Lemoine and his performers to enter a highly civilized world. But Zach is just a little bit less eloquent than other Lemoine men, and a little less clever than the roles Haslam often plays. He is lonely, wounded in ways we come to feel more than understand. The brilliant Mrs. Darimont is just as vulnerable.

Haslam and Cornish handle the subtle transformation in The Exquisite Hour, from afternoon to evening, well, exquisitely. The play is moving and mysterious and masterful.

 

 

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Puck Bunnies: a guest Fringe review by Marc Horton

Posted on August 19, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Trevor Schmidt, Darrin Hagen, Jason Hardwick in Puck Bunnies. Photo by Ian Jackson.

Puck Bunnies (Stage 12, Varscona Theatre)

By Marc Horton

Do not confuse a puck bunny with a buckle bunny. The former is sexually obsessed with hockey players while the latter feels the same way about rodeo cowboys.
Badge bunnies want to get it on with cops and crosstitutes favour lacrosse players. It can be a complicated business but make no mistake, puck bunnies rule.

This latest offering from Guys in Disguise, probably the most successful Fringe franchise in history, is a look into small town life where the hockey rink is a cultural hub and players are gods.

Written by Trevor Schmidt and Darrin Hagen, which is as close to a guarantee of   Fringe success as you can get, this one-hour rapid-fire production focuses on three puck bunnies who are sitting in the stands of the local rink watching the Panthers, their favourite team, take to the ice. So dedicated is this trio, that it’s not even a game, but a scrimmage, for God’s sake.

There’s Tammy, whose desperation is perfectly captured by Hagen, Tonya, played wonderfully by a superbly pouty and catty Schmidt, and Tina, performed with a wonderful blend of sweetness and naivite by newcomer Jason Hardwick.

Tammy has a new and mostly unwanted baby in tow whose daddy is Clint, one of the forwards on the Panthers. Motherhood has earned her a promise ring from Clint, although it’s probably not the first such bauble Clint has bestowed on a girl.

Clint has ambitions to join the NHL (what small town player doesn’t?) but just might be satisfied with a trade to, say, Red Deer.

Tonya is dating Ron, the goaltender, who apparently has a very low sex drive. It seems he prefers shirtless stretching exercises with his roommate and then watching Ru Paul’s Drag Races on television to hooking up with Tonya. Could it be that Ron is…gay?

Tina is without a boyfriend for the moment. Her former beau has disappeared, perhaps traded to another team or, worse, has been “re-incarcarated”, according to Tammy. “Do you mean like Shirley MacLaine?”  Tina asks.

There are rules to be followed if you’re going to be a proper Puck Bunny and avoid being reduced to a d lowest-of-the-low, a “ swamp dog”, who lurks around the bus stop waiting for the Panthers to return from a road trip.

Tammy, Tonya and Tina know these rules and follow them religiously, not that it’s likely to do them much good in the end. They just might be on the cusp of being relegated to the swamp.

While this is a romp of a production, fueled by one-liners delivered with the speed and accuracy of a pass from McDavid to Draisaitl, there is much more at work here.

There is a profound understanding of what hockey means in a small town and a much deeper understanding of what it is to be vulnerable.

I loved this show. You will too.

– Marc Horton is a former sports columnist and entertainment writer with the Edmonton Journal. He learned his hockey skills in the 1960s at the Gerry Murphy Arena in Yellowknife, where hockey is king. Over the course of eight seasons, he scored five goals and had one fight in which he was soundly thrashed.

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Hockey Night at the Pub and Pickle Pub: a 12thnight.ca guest review

Posted on August 19, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Jon Paterson and Ryan Gladstone in Monster Theatre’s Hockey Night at the Puck & Pickle Pub. Photo supplied.

Hockey Night at the Pub and Pickle (Stage 37, Suzanne Thibadeau Auditorium, La Cité Francophone)

By Marc Horton

We’re sitting in the Pub and Pickle, a Canadian saloon where the attention of everyone is focused on big-screen televisions.

We’re watching Canada’s best hockey pros play America’s best hockey pros in the gold medal game. The time is the upcoming Olympic Winter Games in PyeongChang and Gary Bettman, head honcho of the NHL, has allowed “his” players to attend.

With McJesus on our side, what could possibly go wrong?

Plenty.

Not that there’s a thing wrong with this romp through hockey fandom from playwright Ryan Gladstone of Monster Theatre. It’s funny, a little scatterbrained, and ridiculously, hilariously Canadian.

Gladstone and actor Jon Paterson play a pair of dedicated hockey fans at the Pub and Pickle who are there to watch the game.

No, that’s wrong. Gladstone and Paterson play everyone on the pub on this momentous day.

There are two hockey nerds playing trivia one-upmanship, a couple on their first date, a pair of chain-smoking cougars agog at the sexual possibilities available, two oldtimers reliving hockey’s glory days, a pair of very drunk fans who have been at it since 5 a.m., a Canadian and an American debating the merits of the game on either side of the border (do you realize it costs eight bucks to go to a Coyotes game?).

Oh yes, they also play hockey play-by-play man Jim Hughson and commentator Kelly Hrudey whose relationship is apparently fairly prickly.

The result of all of this is inspired silliness with both performers happily flubbing the occasional line and turning to the audience for help and/or advice. We’re also asked to cheer on the Canadians and boo the Americans as the fantasy game unfolds.

If you have ever watched a game in a pub – and who hasn’t? – you’ll happily recognize these characters. They’re exaggerated to be sure, but not by much.

Marc Horton is a former sports columnist and entertainment writer with the Edmonton Journal. He is a season ticket holder with the Oilers and only last week predicted his team would win the Stanley Cup this year…and next. He was in a pub at the time.

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Review: Slack Tide

Posted on August 19, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Merran Carr-Wiggin, Chris W. Cook, Julia Guy in Slack Tide, Blarney Productions. Photo by Mat Simpson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Slack Tide (Stage 8, Old Strathcona Performing Arts Centre)

In the mysterious first moments of Slack Tide, a man (the excellent Chris W. Cook) arrives on a rocky ocean beach clutching a bouquet of roses.

He is waiting, brooding; his gaze is inward. And as time passes — and it does, in this dark and unusual new drama by up-and-comer Bevin Dooley — his anxiety and the tension of the scene mount together.

A play about atonement unspools that way — as a long, slow burn that escalates gradually, agonizingly, in small, well-placed reveals in Wayne Paquette’s Blarney production.

Something terrible has happened — and terrible gets doled out very gradually and suspensefully in Slack Tide. Matty is just out of prison, we learn early, estranged for six long years from both his sister (Julia Guy) and their friend Mary (Merran Carr-Wiggin). And as he says, prison isn’t good for much, but it’s good for thinking.

Thinking (not talking) is what all three characters spend a lot of Slack Tide doing. They ponder their wounds and their words in a play of secrets that gets its force from being stingy with the verbal — and leaving space and room for the actors to communicate in other ways. All three are powerful; the performances are wary and watchful.

That kind of spare, elegant text and pacing, with its long silences and pauses and reaction shots, is highly unusual amongst young playwrights (and in the oft-overwritten Canadian repertoire for that matter). As its name suggests, Slack Tide moves in increments of horror, so slowly it doesn’t seem to move at all. The experience of that is tense and compelling. Questions about forgiveness And then — a rip tide? —  it crashes in a horrifying melodramatic explosion of activity that seems, in truth, contrived for dramaturgical neatness.

After the absorbing mystery build of this promising, fearless piece, you’re beached by improbability. Before that, though, you’re drawn onto the strip of shore where time can stop and questions about forgiveness and love can be explored.

   

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Fringe review: Myth of the Ostrich

Posted on August 19, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Jennifer Spencer, Jenny McKillop, Jenna Dykes-Busby in Myth of the Ostrich. Photo by Mat Busby.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Myth of the Ostrich (Stage 8, Old Strathcona Performing Arts Centre)

Weird, when you think about it, how much farces, roommate comedies, bonding sitcoms depend on strict, rigid conservatives. There’s got to be a reason for secrecy — for withheld information, for ever-more preposterous lies, for panic about getting found out.

Myth of the Ostrich, a three-woman 2014 comedy by Toronto’s Matt Murray, has Pam. She’s a prissy, old-fashioned die-hard conservative mother, organizer of Catholic Women’s League bazaars, submissive wife married to a controlling lawyer (omni-present, invisibly, at the end of a stream of cellphone calls), newly moved to Toronto. From Alberta, natch.

In a farce, Pam would get her comeuppance — like family-values cabinet ministers and right-wing financial critics — from hypocrisy. In this sitcom, Pam has to be protected by the other characters, from worldly knowledge that everyone onstage and in the audience does not find particularly risky.

Much depends on poor Pam. This is a way of saying that Myth of the Ostrich relies heavily — too heavily probably — on the charm of the actors and the playful energy of the production in committing to comic panic, zero to 60, out of thinnish fuel.

Kendra Connor’s Praise Doris production scores big on all of the above. And in the problematic but crucial role of the wife/mother out of another time who arrives at the apartment of a liberal big-city writer, Jenna Dykes-Busby is downright selfless in delivering a performance of round-eyed, child-like charm as butt and catalyst.

Jennifer Spencer, who commands a very funny range of deadpan and/or withering double-takes, is Holly the writer, struggling to finish her latest inspirational oeuvre at a laptop plastered, like her cluttered apartment, with post-its. The opening scene, her ritual for sitting down to write, is highly amusing (we struggling writers wince as we laugh). The arrival of a stranger, Pam, bearing a letter suggesting that Pam’s kid and Holly’s kid, teenagers, are, gasp, secretly dating — strictly against Pam and her husband’s house rules — elicits a shrug. From Holly and from the audience.

But wait, even thin sitcoms aren’t built on shrugs. There are future developments, another secret, or two. And there’s Holly’s friend Cheryl, a Newfie who’s in the play to be outrageous and breezy, and say things about sex, religion and men that are a dead certainty to shock Pam. Which is why you get the fun of seeing Jenny McKillop deliver a show-stopping comic performance.

Why Holly and Cheryl rise to panic is a question you need to put right out of your mind. And I can’t answer it anyhow. By then, the reactions of everyone in the play are over-inflated. It’s one thing to see conservatives panic. Liberal, worldly types are a harder sell in hyper-ventilation.

But the actors, all three, are game. They’re armed with funny lines, and chemistry, and timing. And that’s a lot.    

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For kids and the people they take to the Fringe: Onions and Garlic. A guest Fringe review by Todd Babiak and his daughters

Posted on August 18, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Onions and Garlic, Empress of Blandings. Photo supplied

By Todd Babiak (with help from his daughters, Avia and Esmé

Onions and Garlic (Stage 11, Studio Theatre)

It isn’t easy to be an onion seller in a town full of onions. Our hero pushes his cart of aromatic root vegetables from house to house. The kopeks are scarce, of course, and it’s all made worse by his cruel capitalist of a brother.

This could seem a rather obvious set-up, preparing children and parents for a morality play that’s a little bit too Vidalia for anyone’s taste. While playwrights Paula Simons and Celia Taylor based Onions and Garlic on a folk tale, they added so much knowingness and delightful absurdity we forget we’re in the land of easy answers.

Dave Clarke is both the songwriter and the on-stage musician, bringing the “plinky plinky” and bantering with the cast.

Onions and Garlic jumps with tap dancing, musical numbers, funny accents, a fine collection of Yiddish insults, and gratuitous references to the green onion cake. Like a well-spiced dish it finds a magic place that works for five year-olds, tweens, and parents who are occasionally wounded by children’s theatre.

The cast is uniformly excellent. Rory Turner, the king of Sunny Leonie, is a boisterous riot, a lovely contrast to our modest hero. Onions and Garlic is a gentle, clever, goodhearted follow-up to Taylor’s adaptation of Molière’s The Flying Doctor at last year’s Edmonton Fringe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Review: To Be Moved

Posted on August 18, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Kristian Stec and Zoe Glassman in To Be Moved. Photo by Mat Simpson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“What’s one thing you couldn’t live without?” Anna (Zoe Glassman) asks Jeff (Kristian Stec) as their attraction blossoms  before our very eyes — and ears. “Music!” he says instantly.

Jeff is in the right show.

There is something magical about the way sound becomes music and music becomes narrative in To Be Moved. It’s a love story, spun out in sound, movement, and light, on a stage dominated by a glowing turntable suspended on a textured vertical wall, a cascade of angled white album covers (designer: Megan Koshka). 

This seductive collaboration of talents is led by Braydon Dowler-Coltman, a young actor/ director/ theatre artist of the experimental stripe, and the premier sound designer/composer Matt Skopyk, whose soundscape is a digital dissonances, open-ended melodies, surges that gain symphonic swells that increase and subside as the relationship starts in attractions, gains traction and hits obstacles.

The sound is amazingly theatrical. And so is the movement: both Glassman and Stec are eloquent and inventive dancers, who explore the story in a viscerally physical way.   

The verbal text is more problematic. The playful interplay whereby the two characters “discover” each other — “what’s your favourite place?” “if your life was a movie, what would it be?” — has charm. There are patches when the text tries a little too hard to be poetic, and ends up sounding a bit over-written and inert.

Maybe the lesson is that love stories live and breathe beyond words, in exhilaration and wonder of the body and the senses. And is this, To Be Moved speaks volumes.    

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