Fringe review: Wooster Sauce

Posted on August 16, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

John D. Huston in Wooster Sauce. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Wooster Sauce (Stage 14, Holy Trinity Anglican Church)

“Now, touching this business of old Jeeves — my man, you know….”

With this, Fringe veteran John D. Huston — in just the sort of  spiffing white dinner jacket that’s theatre code for vintage satire — revives the double-sided stage portrait he brought to Edmonton in 2008.

In Wooster Sauce, fashioned by playwright Kenneth Brown from two stories by P.G. Wodehouse, Huston plays both halves of an iconic Brit tandem. He’s clueless upper-class slacker Bertie Wooster and Bertie’s matchless valet Reginald Jeeves, the sublimely capable “gentleman’s personal gentleman” who takes charge of his employer’s life and extricates him from every scrape.

In Jeeves Takes Charge, Bertie recalls the mysterious arrival of the indispensable Jeeves: he “floated noiselessly through the door like a healing zephyr,” provides a life-saving hang-over elixir, and pries Bertie out of his engagement to the formidable Lady Florence Craye, who’s  assigned him Types of Ethical Theory to read, with future plans for Nietzsche. Egads. The joint complications of Bertie’s uncle’s scandalous memoirs and  a dinner jacket in “a rather sprightly young check” are dispatched with ease by Jeeves.

Bertie Changes His Mind, a rare example of a Wodehouse story told in Jeeves’ voice, is an escapade stage-managed by the estimable valet to get Bertie cornered into a “chance” engagement doing a spot of public speaking in a snooty girls’ school.  

The droll stories have a daffy way of aerating the English idiom whilst putting a well-polished boot into the backside of the British class system. In this production, which is a matter of telling rather than doing, the fun is in Huston’s vocal quick-changes, from the fluting plumminess of Bertie to the more sepulchral gravitas of Jeeves who rolls his vowels like a man ascertaining whether to swallow an oyster.

It is, of course, entirely possible that Wodehouse is an acquired English taste, like Branston pickle or Marmite, odd but distinctive. But this is a pleasant, untaxing sort of Fringe enterprise. As Bertie would say, it’s easy to “suck down a cheerful morsel.”

As seen at the Winnipeg Fringe.    

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Fringe review: Fruit Flies Like A Banana

Posted on August 15, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Hilary Abigana, Greg Jukes, C. Neil Parsons in Fruit Flies Like A Banana. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Fruit Flies Like A Banana (Stage 37, Suzanne Thibadeau Auditorium0

“Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.”

This epigrammatic wisdom sets the tone for an exuberant show in which classical music goes rollerskating, or somersaulting, or hanging upside down. Finally a euphonium players gets to dance: we’ve all been waiting for that. 

The Fourth Wall, a three-person American ensemble of trained classical musicians (Hilary Abigana, C. Neil Parsons, Greg Jukes) with an unusually acrobatic skill set, choreographed for comedy, cavort their way around the world through a multi-instrument 15-piece play list. The order is determined by throwing a blow-up beachball globe into the audience; whoever catches it picks the country.

If you have never seen an accordionist, a flautist, and a bass trombonist actually do the tango, while playing Astor Piazzolla’s Bordel 1900 (from his Histoire du Tango, as the cast explains) in a tangy arrangement — and who has? — this is the show for you.

Some of the selections are evidently written specially for these spirited and playful musicians, Hilary’s Hornpipe, for example, to which she contributes while jigging in a chair. When the possibilities include a fully orchestral piece like movement 3 from Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony #7 — in the show to represent Antarctica — the arrangements have to be ingenious to sound full. And they are.

The trio conjures conjures ice and snow on three snowshoe-shaped sleds, in precarious gravity-defying configurations. Occasionally classical musicians are called “rockin” (by themselves usually); rarely do they physically rock. 

There’s music you’ll recognize: even if you don’t think you know Chopin’s Minute Waltz you do. There’s music you’ve never heard, like a movement from Moss Garden of the Saiho-ji, a Japanese-sounding piece by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho.

The Fourth Wall-ers play on everything from bodhrans to boomwackers. Music class was never this fun in school. And there’s a bonus: a whirlwind rapping tour through the titles of Fringe shows.

As seen at the Winnipeg Fringe. 

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Fringe review: Shadowlands

Posted on August 15, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Shadowlands, by and starring Savanna Harvey. Photo by Savanna Harvey.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Shadowlands (Stage 5, King Edward Elementary School)

This odd, enigmatic, ambitious little play by and starring Edmonton artist Savanna Harvey takes us behind the scenes (so to speak) in Life: life at the cellular level, life before birth and possibly after death.

We’re in the dark lab of existence where “particles are clumping and unclumping and re-clumping,” as the least abstract, most accessible bit of an elusive introduction has it. Well, the puckish playwright has named her company Pretentious Productions.

Anyhow, scientific research is underway. The most striking visual image in a piece that is, at its most successful, a series of visual images, is a shadowy figure in a light-up lab coat, with lights glinting off a grid.

Shadowlands is a series of truncated scenes distinguished by the particular hand-held lighting source — flashlight, emergency light, glow globe, LED fairy lights — that reveals it. A bell rings; the stage returns to blackness before the next light-up scene happens.

The scenes loop, in serial fashion. In one recurring scene, which resumes from time to time, in roughly the place it left off, the play returns to a blinking red emergency light and a voice ordering evacuation. In another loop, a hyperactive character who turns out to be lab mouse is skittering around a cage on the prowl for pellets.

The spoken text is a bit of a buzz-kill, flat and prosaic. But the images do resonate. And the structure of Harvey’s play, the unfolding of a mystery, is intriguing. Characters who seem to have no connection are gradually linked into a story — or perhaps more accurately, a Rubik’s Cluster of themes. The dots get connected into a portrait of generations and someone lost. 

If cells can divide and multiply indefinitely, endings are arbitrary. The link between mothers and daughters who become mothers continues into infinity. OK, I have to admit that when the cancer researcher cries “I solved it!” I wasn’t entirely sure what “it” was. The mystery of cellular division? A genetic cure for cancer? But I was moved to think about the puzzle.  

Repetition is required, of course, in serial constructions, like this one. Gradually, though, Shadowlands seems to get noticeably slower (I’m looking at you, lab mouse) instead of accelerating. The repetitions seem more obvious. The blackouts seems longer.

And this seems counter-intuitive in a play where time, as we’re reminded, is of the essence.  As seen at the Winnipeg Fringe.

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Review: The Ballad of Frank Allen

Posted on August 15, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

The Ballad of Frank Allen. Photo by Paul Robinson

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Ballad of Frank Allen (Stage 13, Old Strathcona Public Library)

In the international register of theatre premises (small-cast musical comedy division), here’s an entry that should get its own citation: what if a tiny man lived in another man’s beard?

In The Ballad of Frank Allen, a methodical janitor doing his job in a lab accidentally flips a switch and gets miniaturized. Frank finds himself in residence in the beard of a slacker dude named Al, currently working at Cheezy Meatz. If you think male-bonding premises have been wrangled as far as they can possibly go, think again. An unusual — let’s be bold and call it unique — buddy/odd-couple roommate sitcom is born.

Frank the janitor (Shane Adamczak the playwright) is resilient. He  assesses his situation and looks on the bright side. Since Al is such a sloppy eater, “I eat like a king.” He sets up a makeshift hammock in the beard forest. And he sets about training the vaguely aspirational but hopelessly ineffectual Al “not to do stupid things,” particularly vis-a-vis women.

As for Al, he’s completely unaware of his new companion and lifestyle coach until the night of the tequila shots. Al can suddenly hear Frank, but only when they’re both drunk, a prototype for male-bonding adventures world-wide.   

This kooky sitcom has to struggle to live up to its premise, and never really does, in truth. The plot strains at the seams to be sufficiently outlandish and bizarre. Al’s series of job descriptions are one-liners inserted to be give the piece some comic heft.

But the ballads, both solos and duets, are well-crafted, and inspired. They’re intense, performed with gusto by Adamczak and Lafrance. Some are touching. Some have the kind of loony commitment to the material that seems exactly the right way to spin a premise that wears its quirkiness up front, bold, and, er, full facial. 

As seen at the Winnipeg Fringe.

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Fringe review: Picnics at the Asylum

Posted on August 15, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Picnics at the Asylum (Stage 9, Telus Phone Museum)

Angela Neff, Picnics at the Asylum. Photo supplied.

The eccentric character who gets conjured in this personal memoir is loud, colourful, fun-loving, generous with his affections. He loves his kids; they adore him. He sings too loud; he drives too fast; he drinks too much; he has too many kids. He’s a no-small-measures no-rules guy, larger than life in a life-sized world. And there’s big charisma in that.

As we learn in this amusing and scary solo memoir from San Francisco’s Angela L. Neff, the man is her dad. And even his downside is big: he’s completely unpredictable. He veers wildly from manic exuberance to destructiveness and catatonic melt-down. His life is a declension into chaos and he spreads chaos around him.

And in the end, madness will unravel everything, even love.

It’s an arresting novel-sized story. And in theatre that’s a tough assignment, setting up a world of adult impulse and largesse, as seen through the eyes of a little kid. The vision belongs to young Angela, an observer in a gaggle of seven siblings jockeying for their dad’s favours in a dad-centric family.

Neff charts a gradual evolution of the watchful into the wary. The starting point is her small, quiet, unhistrionic voice; she doesn’t try too hard. So departures into her dad’s loud Johnny Cash imitations, or the funny but horrifying times he takes his kids along to his AA meetings, have an extra dimension: what was appealing becomes ever more embarrassing.

What I like about the show is, in a way, what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t presume to explain the dad’s mental illness, or his strange attraction to Catholicism; it would have to violate the kid perspective to do that. But the arc whereby he ends up a ragged, raging street preacher isn’t outlandish; there’s a love of performing that seems to turn viral, or rancid, in him.

Picnics at the Asylum doesn’t explain itself. In a Fringe world loaded with confessionals that are insistent about what conclusions we should draw, this is a show that, impressively, trusts us with a coming-of-age story from a fellow observer. And lets us think what we will about loss. 

As seen at the Winnipeg Fringe.

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Fringe review: How I Learned To Hug

Posted on August 15, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

How I Learned To Hug (Stage 26, The Almanac)

At the outset of his riotous one-man comedy/memoir How I Learned To Hug, the uniquely manic Australian performer Jon Bennett reveals the Montreal airport encounter when Security discovered a number of unexpected items in his carry-on.

One was pepper spray. One was a copy of the showbiz manual 99 Ways To Tell A Story.

It takes an entire coming-of-age saga, retrieved from an archive of  past loves, age six onward, to explain the former. As for the latter, you’ll feel absolutely certain that the uniquely pellmell race-against-primal-chaos cadence and delivery, the nose for absurdity, the spiralling infrastructure of Bennett’s storytelling, won’t be catalogued anywhere in the official 99. Or the appendix, for that matter. It’s entirely off the grid.

The story begins with the breathless Bennett detained in a security chamber, under interrogation by a female version of Jay Z. He tells her the story, and she’s a hostile audience.

Soon, we’re immersed in the very funny, unexpectedly rueful and poignant account of the young Bennett’s gains and losses, near-misses, and fiascos in the fraught world of love and sex. 

“Close your eyes and imagine me losing my virginity,” he advises us at one point. Invitations like that aren’t a dime a dozen, even at the Fringe. Bennett thinks nothing of asking people “when was the first time you got sexually titilllated?”. And there’s a kind of offhand, shrugging confessional charisma about him, not to mention a line in rueful self-deprecation, that makes people cough up a memory as often as not. For a performer of such restless energy, his rapport with the audience is surprisingly instantaneous, unthreatening, and relaxed. 

Bennett, the reigning monarch of the Power Point, assembles photos of early girlfriends, family members, his first condoms, love letters dating from the time of his six-year-old self. And this amusingly non-airbrushed documentation — has Bennett ever thrown out a single snapshot? — lends a kind of home-made authenticity to proceedings. 

It’s Bennett’s unexpected aversion to public displays of affection that’s the axis of his story. It has roots in heartbreak. And it will be overcome in an unexpectedly exhilarating way. Bennett, a connoisseur of personal embarrassment, expertly negotiates a satisfying blend of exasperation, outrage, and emotional heat to savour, with us, the moment of triumph.

If you’re paralyzed by the F-bomb, this is not the show for you. Otherwise, you’ll laugh out loud, and wince a little. I did.

As seen at the Winnipeg Fringe.

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Fringe review: Get Me The F#ck Out Of Edmonton

Posted on August 15, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

 

“Get Me The F#ck out of Edmonton” – and other ramblings of a fringe has-been (Stage 8, Old Strathcona Performing Arts Centre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Here’s the thing about Wes Borg: he is Fringe history — from the top of his red curly moptop (which I seem to recall comparing to a lopsided Brillo pad) to his bare feet.

This ageless party arrives back in his home town fresh from a July run of Get Me The F#ck Out of Edmonton at the Winnipeg Fringe, where he’d first performed 30 years ago, as he tells a late-night audience there.

It was tailored to the local crowd, replete with musings about Keanu Reeves, who once did Hamlet at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. That’s the enormous stage where Borg was standing alone, barefoot as usual, listing warnings, including “foul language, puppet genitalia, and an accordian; someone will play the accordian.”

Get me f#ck back to Edmonton. The actor/playwright/musician/comic and the Edmonton Fringe in Edmonton go back. Way back. Borg was a member of the late-lamented four, five, or two-person experimental comedy troupe Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie. “We weren’t as good as you remember,” he tells the Winnipeg audience.

It seems only right that this impish, insurrectionist spirit, ensconced for the last eight years in Victoria (he says he went for a week, and couldn’t afford to leave), should return at Fringe time  to the city he got the f#ck out of.   

The show is an homage of sorts to the free spirit Bird who passed away in 2009 at the age of 41. It’s Borg in cabaret mode, with keyboard, guitars, and an assortment of funny original songs, anecdotes, diverse annotations and musings, amusing free associative detours, derailments of trains of thought.

You’ll hear I Hate Toronto, which rolled out the shortcomings of everywhere in Canada (except Alberta) and landed the Trolls a six-show CBC contract. Borg’s latest song is a musical tribute to his new wife. “I saw her on the internet,” he says. They were married last fall. “She’s a motorhome…. In B.C. it’s perfectly legal to marry a vehicle.”

He needed a volunteer. “Does anyone here play no instruments whatsoever?” That’s how he picked Tamara for harmonica duties. He has songs denouncing dreams, OS operating systems, slavish political correctness. His introductions are funny; he remembers good times with Bird.

Borg is a relaxed performer, with an unusual tolerance for chaos. His own operating system seems capable of multiple re-boots without seizing up. In Winnipeg, not only was Borg not unduly rattled when the lighting board malfunctioned, he seemed secretly delighted that improv was required.

So, like the Fringe itself, you’ll be taking a chance, embracing the unpredictability factor when you sign on to this show. Veteran fringe-goers won’t want to miss an opportunity for group nostalgia. Newbies may find it all a bit baffling — its principles of “organization” are, er, elusive — but the songs are a hoot. 

As seen at the Winnipeg Fringe.

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Fringe review: Edgar Allan

Posted on August 15, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Katie Hartman in Edgar Allan, The Cold Harts. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Edgar Allan (Stage 38, Auditorium at Campus Saint-Jean)

“Everything fun is a little bit dangerous,” proposes one of the eerie songs in Edgar Allan. Exactly. And here’s the show to prove it.

In this unnerving little tale of a boy and his doppelganger, the Brooklyn duo Cold Harts devises a cunning way to knot together the strange, haunted life of Edgar Allan Poe and his strange, haunted stories.

The tie that binds is Poe’s William Wilson, in which the title character is pursued by his double, a man with the same name who thwarts his worst impulses. But there are chilling glints of other Poe stories too in the toxic anatomization of boyhood friendship .

On his first day at a boarding school we meet 11-year-old Edgar Allan, an urchin of terrifying precocity tuned to a sinister frequency and played with glittering mania by Katie Hartman. His goal, he tells us with chilling precision (while accompanying himself on the ukulele) is to be, and remain, remarkable. “It is only a matter of time before they yield to my will,” he says of the lesser beings in the student population.

The uber-mensch kid, is in for a shock. His equanimity is shattered when he discovers another student (Nick Ryan) of equally formidable gifts — and the same name. And a lethal competitive instinct is adrenalized by this grave and mysterious person who talks only in a hoarse whisper.

Corvus and Noctua, as they nickname themselves after the crow and the owl, are wary, and inseparable rivals in a tactical war of one-upmanship that seems to bring out the worst in Edgar Allan.  The performances are funny, dark, and sharp-edged as daggers.   

The one set piece in the darkness onstage is an empty oblong door frame. Perfectly Poe. In its sinister way, Edgar Allan plays with the shiver that ripples along along your spine when you look into a mirror and see someone else, or see someone through a doorway and it turns out to be … you.

That double-edged axis of horror haunts the Poe canon. And that’s where this clever little show — playful, dark, and dirty — lives.  

I missed this gem the first time around, in 2015, and even its reprieve visit the next winter. Don’t you make the same mistake, I warn you. It won’t follow you around forever.

As seen at the Winnipeg Fringe. 

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Fringe review: The Merkin Sisters

Posted on August 15, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Ingrid Hansen and Stéphanie Morin-Robert in The Merkin Sister. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Merkin Sisters (Stage 1, Westbury Theatre)

What is art? ask the fractious siblings jockeying for stage supremacy in this raucously inventive satire of contemporary performance art.

The Merkin Sisters (Ingrid Hansen and Stéphanie Morin-Robert, expert physical comedians both) have already prowled the audience at the outset, silent and unsmiling in bathing suits and rubber bathing caps. And they’ve grimly dispensed questions on tiny pieces of paper. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done to a sibling?”

Then they’ve repaired to the stage and arranged themselves on beach towels. “Some people ask us why we do what we do. (pause). And what it is we do do….” Portentous whispering ensues.

Ah yes, Art, the ultimate question and the ultimate answer. “What if … your art could last forever?” “What if your art had no name?” “What if your art sold for 20 bucks?” The Merkins brainstorm by artful free-association. And what if your art was a riotous attack on upper-case Art … like The Merkin Sisters?  

The Merkins, paid-up members of the fierce artistic élite, don’t skimp: every known theatrical device is included in their pièce de résistance. There’s artsy puppetry; a white glove pops out in a birth scene. There’s a balletic pas de deux;  there’s a dance in which they bounce off each other’s blow-up balloon bellies. The masturbation sequence has flowers, and a song. The visuals are dominated by hair, lots of it: head wigs that grow into full body wigs, pubic wigs that erupt out of bathing suits, hair balls that get born and grow up.

Naturally, there’s audience participation. The Merkins are imperious and hard to please. “Could the audience please make the sound of waves? And a seagull?” We oblige. “NO! Just one seagull!” Occasionally sibling rivalry can’t be contained by the avant-garde. “Why do I always have to play the vagina?” asks one sister, sulking. Answer: “You have the bigger mouth.”

Hansen and Morin-Robert, who separately have other shows at the Fringe (Instellar Elder and Blindside respectively), are fearless and funny. They’ve evidently seen one too many self-important pieces of Art. This one’s revenge, and it’s teasingly baffling. A show to be savoured by the adventurous Fringe-goer. 

As seen at the Winnipeg Fringe.

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Fringe review: Szeretlek: A Hungarian Love Story

Posted on August 15, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Myque Franz and Zita Nyarady in Szeretlek: A Hungarian Love Story. Photo supplied.

Szeretlek: A Hungarian Love Story (Stage 4, Academy at King Edward)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There is an amiably homemade quality about Szeretlek: A Hungarian Love Story, a modest collage of family anecdotes about a post-war romance.

In it, real-life couple Zeta Nyarady and Myque Franz tell story of the former’s grandparents, a city girl and a village bookworm who met and fell in love when the former got a job teaching in a country school. 

“True stories don’t always have the logic of storytelling,” we are told in Szeretlek. Fair enough, although the logic of boy meets girl, marries girl, starts family line isn’t exactly a wild departure from conventional storytelling. But taking true stories onto a stage and acting them out demands a certain “theatre” logic — and, in truth, something a little more dynamic and propulsive than Toronto’s Grand Salto Theatre delivers in this sweetly unpretentious show.

The opener is a dance number of moderate skill involving a recalcitrant umbrella and old-people masks, deposited at the side of the stage. Although heightened characters — the boy’s imperious mama, who has an inexplicably cartoonish English accent  — appear, masks don’t get much theatrical mileage thereafter. 

Similarly, the other props in the show, a red hat for example, aren’t used with much theatrical pizzaz. The two performers, likeable both, talk to us directly. Franz teaches us to pronounce the title, Hungarian for “I love you,” and to get up dance a Hungarian two-step called the czardas.

Both dances and songs have the feel of something casually improvised, and pasted together — something you might get up to at a family reunion. Neither performer is strong of voice, and the music involves conventional choices. But Nayaradi has an agreeably old-fashioned look about her; Franz couldn’t be more user-friendly with the audience.

It’s a kind of scrapbooking, apparently, of family stories and theatrical devices. And for us, it’s an hour spent in the company of pleasant people, who haven’t quite found a way to incorporate their theatre school skills into a show. 

As seen at the Winnipeg Fringe.

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