Die-Nasty, the meta-Fringe fringified edition. A report/ review sort of thing from 12thnight

Posted on August 22, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Die-Nasty, Fringe 2024 edition. That’s Kristi Hansen as a shifty theatre reviewer named Liz Nicholls. Photo by Janna Hove.

Die-Nasty! Edmonton’s Live Improvised Soap Opera (Stage 11, Varscona Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

I finally dropped in last night on Die-Nasty, the ultra-meta super-fringified Fringe edition of Edmonton’s weekly improvised soap, a venerable must-see Edmonton comedy institution.

It’s set at the Fringe and it’s about the Fringe (its shows, its artistes, its administrators, vendors, volunteers, street performers, buskers, its box office whiz kids and its proprietors of Nordic spas, and oh yeah its theatre critics…). By night #7, an episode directed by Peter Brown, Fringe free-association has turned into possible dream scenarios that have turned into nightmare sequences, with ghosts and everything. “Everyone’s a clown now,” someone says. Like I say, scary as hell.

A lot has apparently happened. Alyson Dicey (Kirsten Throndson), the director of KidsFringe known for her unstoppable good nature and cute hats), seems to have died, alas, although whether in a clown car accident I cannot say. She’s in “purgatorial limbo,” and in scene 1 is taking advice from sardonic The Ghost of Acacia Hall (Gwen Coburn) about whether to return to life or stay dead. The Fringe has a kind of non-committal existential logic that way. “Your choice,” shrugs the Ghost.

Fringe artistic director Murray Utas whose hair levitates at moments of extreme stress, is played by Randy Brososky in a performance that actually does capture the way he talks, fast, and gathering speed and emphasis till all the syllables join together in communal solidarity. He has moved KidsFringe to the beer tent. “The best decision we ever made,” he has reportedly declared.

There’s been a Fringe murder, I gather. And Rachel Notley (Shannon Blanchet) and a Mormon detective, Elder Evans (Jason Hardwick), a lifelong Notley supporter, are investigating it (hmmm, a back story that somehow floated free before I got there). Hamish McCrackin (Cody Porter, a possibly criminal loon who gazes into the mid-distance with a terrifying fixity) has evidently gone mad in Fringe jail. Seven straight nights at the Fringe can do that to anyone, no matter how sturdy mentally they think they are. Shirley Dunaphew (Casey Suliak) introduces “my new son from Toronto” in a queasy and ambiguous little scene. And is that a little flicker of spark between Shirley and Murray, (who’s adopted a small son, by the way, played charmingly by Nikki Hulowski)? Time, and a few more episodes, will tell.

Liz Nicholls (Kristi Hansen), a shifty-eyed theatre reviewer with big blonde wedge hair, has witnessed a murder but is pretty keen to weasel out of writing an official statement. Surely she’s not implicated! Anyhow, she’s getting Liz Nicholls tattooed on her butt by a needle artiste with an exotic accent (Jacob Banigan). Presumably in case of a sudden identity crisis she can check out her byline in a mirror. Or is this just a case of pure unadulterated narcissism?

“I’m happy for my sister at the National Post, really” she insists, unconvincingly. “And for being the only one who knows what I’m talking about.”

I’ve got to think about that. Later. When I’ve figured out the hair thing.

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How hard can it be? The real-world theatre of the absurd in 638 Ways To Kill Castro. A Fringe review

Posted on August 22, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Patrick Lynn and Sebastian Ley in 638 Ways To Kill Casto, Vault Theatre at Edmonton Fringe 2024. Photo by Spenser Kells.

638 Ways To Kill Castro (Stage 3, Nancy Power Theatre at the Roxy)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

As a source of absurdity in the world, there might actually be a rich, limitless, renewable repository in … reality. And this smart and very funny satire by Sebastian Ley knows exactly how to mine it for comic gold. Which is to say, with a straight face, characters with no sense of humour, and grave commitment.

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Absurdity pertaining to government and politics is particularly high-yield (and rare to find at the Fringe). It’s the early 70s, and despite a decade and a half of single-minded and, it must be said creative, attention to the subject (code name Operation Mongoose), the CIA has still not succeeded in assassinating Castro. How hard can it be? The title of the play is, hilariously, no joke. [Note to skeptical readers: these are historically true, look it up.]

It’s not for want of trying, as we learn in 638 Ways To Kill Castro. The “ways” are all tailored to what the spy elite of the mighty American military-industrial complex have discovered to be favourite Castro activities: exploding cigars, diving suits laced with botulism, poisoned conch shells…. They’ve even tried to hire a little Cuban kid to pretend to be Castro’s bastard son and assassinate him. Foiled again: they’ve come up against “terrible Cuban child labour laws, “terrible because they exist,” as Goldwater (David Ley) points out with a calm, dry deadpan.

638 Ways To Kill Castro, Vault Theatre at Edmonton Fringe 2024. Photo by Spenser Kells.

As the play opens, the Operation Mongoose office is getting desperate for results. The CIA bureaucracy is on them to produce. Ominously, an ambitious newcomer Vandenberg (Patrick Lynn) has arrived from the finance office to oversee their accounting, and an official review is imminent. The ass-covering has already started. Is their a pinko in their midst?

Vandenberg gets introduced to the team led by Trench (playwright Ley), in charge of brainstorming new ideas and desperate to impress his dad, a CIA bigwig. Of the office workies, David Ley is the unfaze-able World War II vet, a career 9 to 5-er always on the phone to the New York or the Cuban office. Assassination? A job. With a pension. “A few gunshots never hurt anyone,” he says when yet another device dreamed up by gadget guy Pope (Samuel Bronson), misfires in the office. You’ll laugh out loud to overhear a phone call to Haven with further instructions about an exploding pen.

This succession of failures, too outlandish in a Dr. Strangelove way not to be true, continues as human tensions roil and boil in the workplace. Surprises ensue, some of them pertaining Pope’s growing awareness that he might have psychic powers.

The working-out of this intricate dark comedy has one or two brief moments when the satire briefly sidesteps its own logic. But it’s an accomplished piece of work, fun for the audience with its engaging mix of scenes for two, three, all four. Playwright Ley has a sharp eye for period detail, and ear for dialogue, and there are performances to match in Kathleen Weiss’s Vault Theatre production. It’s full of pauses that are zingers in themselves.

This is a show to seek out. Avoid assassinating for a ticket, or at least cover your tracks.

 

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Amazing but true: mind-exploding synchronicity from the brain inside Gordon’s Big Bald Head

Posted on August 22, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Amazing but true. A quick sidenote to Monster Theatre’s Erika The Red (my review is here). By a mind-exploding Fringe synchronicity, on Wednesday I saw improv virtuosos Gordon’s Big Bald Head, actually improvise on the Varscona Theatre stage (Stage 11) an entire production of Erika The Red, their own version of the Monster Theatre play, as part of The Art of the Steal, their annual undertaking to improvise, on the spot and in 60 minutes, any show in the Fringe program, chosen randomly.

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And amazingly, the trio of deluxe comic improvisers (Jacob Banigan, Mark Meer, Ron Pederson), actually embraced, impromptu on the spot, many of the same comic complications and themes of the original — the bloodlust for revenge, the problematic ethical complexities of (you know) pillaging and all that, gory death scenes on a bare stage, and even (hilariously) the language gap between the Celts and the Vikings. With added layers from Marvel. How do they do it? GBBH is one of those great Edmonton mysteries, unequalled anywhere: an astonishing achievement in concentration and smarts, and spontaneous literate wit.

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Complicated fun with Vikings: Erika The Red from Monster Theatre. A Fringe review

Posted on August 22, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

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

Erika The Red (Stage 15, Campus Saint-Jean Auditorium)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In Erika The Red, Tara Travis single-handedly populates the stage with the following: villages of doomed Scandinavians, boat-loads of ferocious Viking warriors, a gang of inept but aspirational second-generation Vikings, a young heroine bent on revenge, a horse. Ah yes, and battles.

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In this new “epic one-woman Viking saga” from Vancouver’s Monster Theatre, you are seeing the improbable magic of one of the country’s most accomplished performers at work. All of the above are set in motion, with precision physicality and vocal dexterity, in an absorbing coming-of-age story with a complicated comic tone, a satisfying narrative arc. And a lot of characters.

As you’ll know from their archive of Fringe hits (including The Canada Show, Napoleon’s Secret Diary, Jesus Christ: The Lost Years among them), history is a big draw for the Monster mind. Here, co-creators Travis and Ryan Gladstone have been inspired by a surprising archaeological discovery: an impressive Viking warrior grave, richly furbished with weapons, and occupied by a skeleton that is female. Erika the Red, which even opens with its own amusing mockumentary, imagines the story that led to the grave.

The village trouble-maker teen is AWOL when her village gets raided, pillaged, and destroyed by Vikings. An unlikely avenger is born. At first she doesn’t understand the language of her Viking captors, gibberish with the occasional word you almost get. Gradually, gibberish retreats as Erika learns Viking. And then, hey, we’ve all learned Viking.

Tara Travis in Erika The Red, Monster Theatre at Edmonton Fringe 2024. Photo supplied.

And the gang of young Viking wannabes, who keep arriving at villages after all the killing and pillaging is already done, get individualized by Travis. They have names, distinctive postures, gaits, facial grimaces, and appear in scenes together. The sea adventure that follows — storms, shipwrecks, sea monsters — is ingeniously set forth against Gladstone’s projection-scape. And Erika, a girl!, gradually takes charge, with her Scandinavian know-how and single-mindedness. Travis even does her own live recurring Erika the Viking warrior-type poster images onstage.

In the course of 60 minutes, an ultra-violent revenge story unspools farther and farther and gets gathered back in, with additional narrative colours lightly applied: grief, friendship, finding your own family. Impressively done. Clever and fun.

 

 

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Til’ (a whole bunch of stuff, check the box) do us part: I, Diana. A Fringe review

Posted on August 21, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Sue Huff and Kevin Tokarsky in I, Diana, Northern Sabbatical Productions at Edmonton Fringe 2024. Photo by Axel Torres.

I, Diana (Stage 2, The Next Act Backstage Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Narcissism requires constant maintenance and sustenance. In this light-hearted new relationship comedy, with a twist, from Linda Wood Edwards, we meet the kind of someone theatre blurbs love to call “a strong woman.”

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Diana (Sue Huff) is a prairie razzle-dazzler who styles her general demeanour and game after the Roman goddess of the hunt. The centre of the universe, as she declares cheerfully of herself.  Diana is, naturally, an indefatigable collector and discard-er of followers (all men, as you will surmise). Getting married on high holidays — like Christmas, Valentine’s Day, 9-11, or the closing night of a community theatre production of South Pacific —  “elevates” the whole affair.

A serial divorcée, Diana is her own wedding planner, as you might expect. Marriages can go south, “but wedding photos can be controlled.” So Diana’s marital career unfolds in a set of amusing wedding photos, the obverse side of her mirror in the amusing design by Huff and Kevin Tokarsky.

The light-as-air fun of Wood Edwards’ production is that all the men, eye candy for Diana, are all played by one: the game Tokarsky, in a series of wigs that will make you laugh. He’s chosen in each case by Diana for a certain resemblance to a celebrity or a celebrated type— Richard Gere, Tom Selleck Don Johnson, the quintessential rancher dude, John Denver, Harrison Ford…. And glitches, for you to have the fun of discovering, begin to occur, every time. A continuing theme is that the men are considerably more interested in her children than Diana is, which she finds both perplexing and irritating.

Wood Edwards’ writing is peppered with droll asides that are the personal property of Diana, who (as Huff knows) is funny because she says witty things with a beaming smile and unsmiling, absolute, matter-of-fact certainty.  “I love you Diana,” says one of the smitten ones. “You hold some appeal for me, too,” she allows warily.

Sometimes it’s refreshing to have validation for your worst instincts, and this is the comedy to tease you with that prospect. Is there any reason for driving a station wagon when you could be at the wheel of a Ferrari?

 

 

 

 

     

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Camping with “two special girls”: Let’s Not Turn On Each Other, a Fringe REVIEW

Posted on August 21, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Jacquelin Walters and Michael Watt in Let’s Not Turn On Each Other, Walters and Watt at Edmonton Fringe 2024. Photo supplied.

Let’s Not Turn On Each Other (Stage 25, Spotlight Cabaret)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Now, here’s a theatrical welcome to warm the heart. An appealing pair of clowns, whose resting state is high excitement, are downright ecstatic when they catch sight of us.

Bethandreth and Cownow can scarcely believe their good fortune in having company. After all, they’ve been out in the wilderness by themselves for a long time — months maybe, or years or decades, “let’s just call today Friday” — waiting for a signal from “the prophet.” We gather they’re true-believer cultists on assignment, whose outpost location, they’re convinced, is a measure of their importance to “the guild.”

In this unusual new “musical play, a clown show with occasional music by and starring the team of Jacquelin Walters and Michael Watt, they have an original patter song about that. “Two special girls….”

Every day they wait, an appealingly wide-eyed and boisterous Vladimir and Estragon (Beckett goes camping, with guitar and ukulele?). The prophet has left them with a daily ritual, specific instructions for guild-approved virgin behaviour. These include a written manual: “wash your face,” a “daily stretch,”“look out for wolves,” “listen to a tape” from a scratchy collection that includes one devoted to seven hours of the prophet breathing.

The songs, inventively folk-ish in style, have a kind of ritual significance to the characters that is very unlike the usual infrastructure of musical theatre. They’re positioned at moments of crisis when Bethandreth and Cownow are in need of reassurance. “What do we do when we’re in trouble? We sing The Trouble Song,” they tell each other other. “Turbulence is the stream in which we travel….”

When an inadvertent revelation comes their way, they set forth from their wilderness home on a scrambly journey, with an unreadable map, through hill and dale and over the bar of the Spotlight Cabaret. And they sing themselves a touching little song, “did you know?”

We meet characters who are hopeful and distractible in the clown-ly way, bouncing back from their wounds. The performances from Walters and Watt are big and bold, with southern accents that come and go. They virtually burst out of an inconclusive, open-ended story; first they’re followers, then they have to make their own choices, in tandem with nature. “We’re going to make love to Mother Nature.”

It’s an oddball, wistful little original, this one. I found it beyond my grasp, but in an appealing way.

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Jay-suss, saving souls, and raising money: Brother Love’s Good Time Gospel Hour, a Fringe revew

Posted on August 21, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Brother Love’s Good Time Gospel Hour. Photo supplied.

Brother Love’s Good Time Gospel Hour (Stage 1, ATB Westbury Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Edmonton, are you ready to be saved!?” asks Brother Love, travelling salvation salesman  — and purveyor of such spiritual aides as his ‘dirty preacher wives’ video series, and “Christian poppers” and other recreational enhancers. And the answer apparently is Yes.

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Brother Love (Noam Osband) and his cheery assistant Sister Alice (Edna Mira Raia) are here, along with his glum band and the Gospelettes back-up tambourine rattlers, to wrest our souls from the damnation of “secular pornography,” which is A SIN. His mission is to divert our spiritual path from the sinful competition to “Christian porn,” which is not only righteous, but for sale. Salvation, we will learn, has much to do with body orifices, created as they are by the Lord. “My god is a sexy god.”

“Someone will get touched tonight,” he and Sister Alice assure us. And there’s a catchy join-in song that pursues the thought in numerous reprises of  “glory glory glory somebody touched me,” the Stanley Brothers classic repurposed for this special occasion.

Fifteen minutes into this raucous show Brother Love and co are displeased that there have been no donations yet. The urgency of the mission on behalf of Christian porn has been upped, as Brother Love reveals, by the bad behavior of his latest ex-wife, Mrs. Love IV, who “cleared me out.” Poor woman, she just didn’t understand a preacher has to be on call 24/7 for in-person visits to troubled female members of the flock. But it’s not the money, Sister Alice hastens to add. Lack of donation shows such a lack of respect for “the Lord’s conduit.”

As you will glean, no one would accuse this satire of Christian evangelism of being in any way subtle. It has a fearless sense of humour; it identifies its satirical target early (instantly), and hammers it relentlessly for an hour. This is, of course, exactly how televangelist infomercials work, by endless repetition, in thundering demonstrations of greed and crassness that wear you down. And Brother Love does set the bar impressively high. Theatre, however, does stall under such high-pitched repetitions (even if you’re supplied with tambourines and paper money to join in).

The Lord’s conduit is a spirited, fearless performer, and his defence of Christian porn and ‘cocaine for Christ’ is unwavering. All good unclean fun, and the audience did dig in. In the end it kind of erodes your cringe threshold, and you may find it takes you a while to get it back. If audience participation tends to make you avoid eye contact, this might be a show to actively avoid.

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And back in the Hundred Acre Wood…. Who’s Afraid Of Winnie The Pooh? A Fringe review

Posted on August 20, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Thomas Buan in Who’s Afraid of Winnie The Pooh?, Clevername Theatre at Edmonton Fringe 2024. Photo supplied

Who’s Afraid of Winnie the Pooh? (Stage 18, FOH PRO Stage, Grindstone Venues)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The title alone of this play from Clevername Theatre of Minneapolis stops you in your tracks, with its sheer head-on bravado and disaster potential.

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What can this be? A parody of Edward Albee’s lacerating ‘60s relationship drama that rocked the post-war theatre world? A joke perhaps a couple of notches too goofy? No, and no. Who’s Afraid of Winnie the Pooh? might be the most surprising show at the Fringe, and one of the most memorably clever.

Alexander Gerchak’s play isn’t a spoof. Amazing as this sounds, it is actually a version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? — with the insights, the one-upmanship, the relationship exfoliation, the humiliation gamesmanship that make the Albee a shattering experience.

Stephanie Johnson and Thomas Buan in Who’s Afraid of Winnie The Pooh? Clevername Theatre at Edmonton Fringe 2024. Photo supplied.

Winnie (Thomas Buan) and Piglet (Stephanie Johnson) return home from a Hundred Acre Wood party, in warring mode. She’s invited a younger new couple, the upwardly mobile Christopher (Nick Hill) and brittle Hunny (Victoria Jones) over for more (and more) drinks. And the sniping and undercutting begin, along with the warning “not to talk about the Boy.”

Winnie, “a bear of very little brain” as his partner is fond of pointing out, is a writer of stories that have long since ceased to impress her. In his fuzzy brown cardigan, he has the slightly worn air of someone who’s taken his share of slings and arrows. And Piglet, flirtatious and hostile in equal measure, is dishing them out, along with condensed milk cocktails (the hard stuff). “Don’t mind the old fuzzball,” she cheerily advises the guests, who are finding the bickering awkward.

And so the ritual humiliation begins. “A real man is made of more than stuffing.” Let’s play Pork the Pig, Pooh suggests. Or Pin The Tail On The Donkey.

If you know the Albee play, you’ll be fascinated to see how this version is fashioned in parallel to the A.A. Milne stories, and feels dangerous in an Albee way. If you don’t, you’ll appreciate the artful way it takes us to insights about the famous Pooh stories, and “the Boy,” Christopher Robin, who will get sent off to elementary school in another dimension than the Hundred Acre Wood. If the Albee is about the high cost of life-sustaining illusions, the version in the Hundred Acre Wood is, in its own original way, a play about the end of childhood.

Did I expect to laugh, and be moved? Nope. But both happened. And I’m still thinking about it.

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Opening a portal into the dark world: Microwave Coven from Guys in Disguise, a Fringe review

Posted on August 20, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Darrin Hagen, Jake Tkaczyk, Jason Hardwick, Trevor Schmidt in Microwave Coven, Guys in Disguise at Edmonton Fringe 2024. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

Microwave Coven (Stage 11, Varscona Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

At Maxine’s “contemporary split-level,” the suburban matrons of Placid Place are counting down to the stroke of 12, noon that is (much more convenient for scheduling than midnight).

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It’s 1977 and Maxine (Jake Tkaczyk), Fiona (Darrin Hagen), and Carmen (Trevor Schmidt), suburban cultists in dramatic matching robes, are preparing to open a portal into the demonic world.  They’re waiting the arrival of their new neighbour (Jason Hardwick), a perky innocent who’s “the closest thing we’ve ever had to a virgin.” And the snacks, including devilled eggs and devil’s food cake, are ready.

In this the latest from Guys in Disguise, and the writing team of Hagen and Schmidt, they worship at the altar of modernity, the microwave oven, glowing strangely in the dark. “O microwave we bow to you …” they chant, in tribute to this reasonably affordable instrument of world-wide domination.” The ding, the defrost button, the hypnotic rotating plate, the magical way a frozen hunk of something gets to be dinner (OK, maybe not chicken; that gets rubbery).

Guys in Disguise have long had a particular fascination with femininity, marriage, and the depression, dissatisfaction, and dreams of wives at home (Prepare For The Worst, Don’t Frown at the Gown, Crack in the Mirror), not to mentioned processed cheese. Suburbia, the traditional stomping ground of the married, is the playground for a sense of humour in which insights and double-entendres mingle over snacks (not hors d’oeuvres, that’s a different milieu). Fiona still remembers the moment when the neighbours came to watch her melt Velveeta for the first time in her new microwave. “I’ve never seen the entire subdivision come together like that.”

The mysterious way that small appliance worship opens the portal to the fires of hell is a pretty giddy concept, not to be explained by the likes of me. Suffice it to say this is the Guys in Disguise suburban version of Rosemary’s Baby. The performances in Schmidt’s production are, like the wigs (designer: Schmidt), amusing to see. The cast knows a lot about the comic potential of gravitas and costuming: Carmen’s rumbling baritone, the grandiloquent gestures of Maxine, the homey bustle of Fiona.

Take a break from your “serious” Fringe pursuits, and lose yourself in “the fog of distraction.”

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He had it comin’: The Black Widow Gun Club, a Fringe review

Posted on August 19, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Kristin Johnston in The Black Widow Gun Club, Whizgiggling Productions. Photo supplied.

The Black Widow Gun Club (Stage 4, MacEwan Fine Arts Walterdale Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

This stylish little confection devised by Trevor Schmidt for Whizgiggling Productions comes with all the film noir trimmings:  — sexy sinister music (Mason Snelgrove), atmospheric shafts of light, snarly dialogue that includes the term “low-life,” smoking “for emphasis or affection,” femmes fatales in black if not mourning), a murder.

And here’s a wrinkle: one dead husband plus not one but three widows. An invisible detective is conducting an investigation, and Hugh’s serial marital history is emerging.

Cheryl Jameson in The Black Widow Gun Club, Whizgiggling Productions. Photo supplied

Schmidt’s production reassembles the three-actor cast of comic actors — Michelle Todd, Kristin Johnston, Cheryl Jameson— who have made previous Whizgiggling Fringe appearances hits (Destination Wedding, Destination Vegas, Lady Porn). The performances in Schmidt’s production are sharp and stylish. The formidable first Mrs. Fairfax, a filthy rich red-lipsticked socialite whose copious supply of moolah was a evidently a big draw for the late Hugh, gets an incisive portrait from Johnston. She’s a veritable ice floe of grievances and resentment, with a ‘we are not amused’ glare that could congeal oil at 100 paces.

Michelle Todd in The Black Widow Gun Club, Whizgiggling Productions. Photo supplied.

The second Mrs. Fairfax (Todd) was a cocktail bar waitress on the make (“I was the only one he truly loved”) who refers to Hugh as “daddy” with the sugar implied. She was supplanted by the third Mrs. Fairfax (Jameson), a boho artiste specializing in cocaine-fuelled death-centric nudes, who admits breezily she was never in love with the guy. But hey, “I’ve done worse with worse.” Hugh gave each of his brides a pearl-handed lady-sized revolver as a wedding present. In retrospect, Hugh….

They each step from the darkness into a spotlight to tell their story. There isn’t much more I should tell you since it’s a thriller,  short, staccato, and cunningly put together by the playwright/director. But it’s entertaining, performed with flair, and fun to piece together.

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