Was I dreaming? Ha Ha Da Vinci, a Fringe review

Posted on August 18, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Ha Ha Da Vinci, Phina Pipia. Photo supplied.

Ha Ha Da Vinci (Stage 14, Café Bicyclette Stage)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In its way this quietly captivating show created by and starring Phina Pipia is a bit like an exotic sorbet. You can’t quite identify the flavour, but it melts in your mouth, and you find yourself wanting more.

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Kooky things happen in Ha Ha Da Vinci, uncaused, but they don’t feel kooky. They feel weirdly natural. A woman with a tuba is transported to renaissance Italy in Leonardo da Vinci’s failed time machine, and gets a message from the past. In fact she talks to the great man himself via a red radio in the bell of her tuba. Going back in time is no problem, apparently; it’s going forward into the future that’s the big challenge (a thought that recurs).

Phina Pipia in Ha Ha Da Vinci, Edmonton Fringe 2024. Photo supplied

Bits and pieces of The Mona Lisa magically reassemble themselves into the whole painting. Every step the woman takes on a rug brings forth a different note, and music happens. She’s moved to dance; she plays something from Carmen on the tuba; she picks up a guitar and sings a song. She unfolds a magic square, with amazing results. Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man drawing, hanging at the back of the stage, near an easel and paints, suddenly reveals a red heart. The man has a new, moveable face; it’s our heroine and she sings an opera aria. A sign appears: “look to the moon.” And the moon appears. “Some things are just bound to happen,” she tells us.

You should never go to any Fringe festival expecting to hear a virtuoso tuba solo (or you will, needless to say, be bound for disappointment a lot of the time). It feels special when it happens. Suddenly a lovely renaissance lantern hangs from the woman’s  tuba. You not know what will happen next.

This is a whimsical kind of enchantment, a strange free-floating assortment of music, imagery, dance, illusions. You might be dreaming, which would explain a lot, and it feels fine. I loved it.

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A splintered world, from the inside out: Center of the Universe, a Fringe review

Posted on August 18, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Jayce McKenzie in Center of the Universe, Edmonton Fringe 2024. Photo supplied.

Center of the Universe (Stage 13, Service Credit Union Théâtre at La Cité francophone)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Maxine, at 13, is bright, smart, charming. She just doesn’t seem to be able to (in the common parlance) get her shit together.

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Which is why Maxine is in detention. Again. Writing “I will not rollerblade in the school” on the blackboard, whilst wearing rollerblades. “I don’t know why it’s so hard to do anything, and why I’m so confused all the time.”

There is a reason. And it emerges in the course of a show that sets out to actually demonstrate, from the stage, what it’s like to be an ADHD-er: hyper-alert but perpetually distractible, lacking segués, disorganized, always late, getting bright ideas and abandoning them, letting the free-associative impulse squelch any thought about causes and consequences. “I don’t feel super-connected. So, usually I just feel alone and have to distract myself.”

This deliberate evocation of a scatty world from the inside out, a world that’s very apt to disintegrate, does not, of course, make for dramatic coherence or focus in the usual sense. And Center of the Universe, by and starring actor/playwright Jayce McKenzie, who knows a lot about both ADHD and playing kids, doesn’t hang together in any conventional, explainable way. This is a play with its own kind of theatrical ADHD, and it makes you a bit dizzy.

There are long interludes of Maxine’s favourite music, there are exchanges with a mysterious and reassuring Voice, there are little outbursts of audience participation with a Ouija board. Maxine consults a family photo album tucked into her backpack, which features her sticker collection instead of family holiday shots, a troubling insight into the domestic dynamic.

Can I explain the ending to you, with Maxine gathering her resources for a reveal concerning a mystery box? Nope (and I wouldn’t even if I could). But Center of the Universe does vividly conjure a world of scattered impulses. And McKenzie is such an endearing performer: you want her to succeed.

 

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A human explosion of fabulosity, and rage. Local Diva: the Danielle Smith Diaries. A Fringe review

Posted on August 18, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Zachary Parsons-Lozinski stars in Local Diva: The Danielle Smith Diaries, Low Hanging Fruits at Edmonton Fringe 2024. Photo supplied

Local Diva: the Danielle Smith Diaries (Stage 1, Westbury Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The entrance of the Fringe: the diva seems to have been flung onto the stage from some cosmic wind tunnel, long limbs akimbo, in perpetual motion. Tragidean, the star of Liam Salmon’s Local Diva: the Danielle Smith Diaries, is a veritable human explosion of fabulosity — and rage.

“I feel like I’m constantly on the edge of a vortex,” they tell us. And they dance as if their identity, maybe their life, depended on performing — precarious if you’re wearing stilettos and you live in Alberta.

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Tragidean (Zachary Parsons-Lozinski) has a story to tell, and a visceral wariness about telling it that’s part of the story. We seem to be standing in for the media, where “angles” are created in advance,  then illustrated, then “common ground” is fabricated. And MLA opinion pieces are splayed on broadsheet pages as if they’re news. The diva calls bullshit on that. “How does it feel to be circling the drain?” the diva asks Postmedia, accusingly. They’ve read the stories about themself: “Local queer. Local gay man. Victim. Hero. Example. Metaphor. A villain.”

And they’re just warming up. Playwright Salmon writes in a witty, hot-coals way for a character who arrives onstage having reached some sort of firewall of exasperation. Or is this the melting point of despair? Owen Holloway’s production, for the indie company Low Hanging Fruits, lets it rip. Parsons-Lozinski goes for broke, in a memorable way that isn’t cautious about leaving room for escalation (and is probably not sustainable for longer than the 45-minute running time).

Tragidean’s story, which emerges mid-narrative from the B-grade drag circuit with stops in bowling alleys, is the story of a queer prairie kid. They opt for invisibility in Catholic high school; they come out, they discover a drag persona and the magical validation of performing. And they discover a world that is, by definition, political. Obviously, they point out, more than 50 per cent of Albertan “don’t care about me and my rights.” Jason Kenney “felt like rock bottom,” says Tragidean. And … it got worse. Danielle.

The world is on fire, Jasper incinerated, “photo ops with known fascists,” “Alberta is in the Stone Age,” the health care and education systems getting systematically dismantled, boards loaded with UCP hacks, progress = coal, Gaza is a mass grave. “It breaks my brain,” says Tragidean, whose mind works by wide-sweep accumulation. They’re not about persuading us. They have arrived at the point of finding the world incomprehensible, absurd, unlivable.

How has it all come to this? This final fury has something to do with the mystery of Local Diva, and why Tragidean is onstage, by themself, telling us their story. You don’t very often get to experience a true and impressive rant onstage, written eloquently and performed as if there’s no tomorrow. And maybe there isn’t.

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Argue one for the team: Mass Debating, a Fringe review

Posted on August 17, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Mass Debating (Stage 11, Varscona Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

What are the odds that the smart girls on the debating team from Our Blessed Bleeding Virgin of Perpetual Sorrow and Suffering will succeed in wresting the Heart of Jesus Trophy from the reigning champions, St. Sebastian’s Parochial School for Entitled Boys?

It’s Catholic junior high school. It’s 1973. Better starting praying for a miracle, girls. The deck, and the monsignor, are stacked against you.

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This odd little musical comedy by playwright Trevor Schmidt and composer Mason Snelgrove does have its sport with old-school Catholic education. The debate questions are a riot: the role of women in the work force (bad idea), divorce (imaginary), contraception (you’ve got to be kidding).

But the real fun of Mass Debating, in Schmidt’s 100% More Girls production, is in the gender-reversed performances by the sextet of inventive comic actors. The boys are played by female actors; the girls, all named Mary and kitted out in prim tartan skirts, by male actors. And you can get quite giddy watching Jason Hardwick’s glum Mary with her bouncing red ringlets. Or the dazed mid-distance look on Jake Tkaczyk’s impassive Mary, a beautiful statuesque blond. Or the mounting exasperation of Schmidt’s bespectacled Mary, whose rallying cry of “not fair!” goes unheeded.

The uncertain swagger of the junior high boy is amusingly captured by Kristin Johnston, whose idea of conversation with the opposite sex is an unstoppable free-associative monologue. Michelle Todd is a smug little brainiac who knows everything, with Cheryl Jameson as a particularly needy and terrified little boy. Their dealings with the opposite sex are very amusing, as set forth under Schmidt’s direction.

The dialogue, as you might expect from Schmidt, is a funny capture. Between songs, there are “messages from the diocese,” and whispered consultations about the other team. “Mary Margaret’s wearing a bra,” says one lad. “What a slut!” says his teammate.

The opener of Snelgrove’s 70s-flavoured pop score is about the stakes in this all-important championship bout. And each character has a musical spotlight moment. But to me, the music, with a couple of exceptions, seems a bit generic, a bit coming-of-age bland. There’s a song about remembering the particulars of childhood, left behind.  “Everything changes but some things stay the same.” I don’t quite get the connection between the finale song, “I finally found my voice; I see that I have a choice,” and the play we’ve just seen, a demo that the boys always get to win.

But you’ll laugh. And there’s surprise tap-dancing, always a delight. More debates should be won that way.

 

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Don’t drink the water: Accidental Beach: A Previously Improvised Musical, a Fringe revew

Posted on August 17, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

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

Accidental Beach: A Previously Improvised Musical (Stage 18, FOH PRO Stage)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“On January 18, 2024,” says a solemn announcer, “Grindstone Theatre improvised the perfect musical. Viewer discretion is advised.”

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Here’s the thing: they wrote it all down. As an experiment in musical theatre creation, Accidental Beach is a cheeky Fringe demo of something the Grindstone company does every week, with amazing dexterity, in The 11 O’Clock Number. They make up an entire musical on the spot — script, score, the works — based on audience cues.

We the people love the local. And Grindstone knows it. Jason Kinney’s Hot Boy Summer: The Musical, the musical satire created by the Grindstone team of Byron Martin and composer/songwriter/ musician Simon Abbott, was a bona fide homegrown hit.

I’m just going to go ahead and assume that the location of this unhinged new musical, Edmonton’s crazy, shifting riverside beach, was a cue, and the improvisers said Yes, because that’s what they do. And on the night of Jan. 18, they made it into a wildly freewheeling “libretto” about Accidental Beach where, hey, accidents happen.

The heroin needles and dead bodies add up, hot-rod SkiDoo dudes and junkies cruise the river, mobsters, assorted dope dealers, the macho workers of the Water Factory who turn toxic river sludge into a Saskatchewan elixir that’s better than booze. There’s a wholesome rom-com pair of musical theatre lifeguards, Sandy (Abby Vandenberghe) and Danny (Ethan Snowden), who don’t quite realize they’re in love. There’s Sandy’s dumbass boyfriend (Dallas Friesen).

And there are protracted developments involving boobs and boob size that have got to have been an unfortunate audience cue. Or else a throw-away improv line because tall slender Malachi Wilkins found himself in a wifely role. There’s … stop. WHY am I telling you the plot? I don’t even understand the plot. Just when you think the plot might be making sense (worrying: you’re cut off), it just stops doing that.

Anyhow, the point is that there’s an agile cast of four in Mhairi Berg’s production. And they are startling singer/dancers who commit, selflessly, to a lunatic assortment of roles, goofball props, and costume changes — and story developments or detours that would stump lesser beings. And the songs, accompanied and I guess instigated by fellow improviser Simon Abbott on the fateful night of the 18th, are amazingly constructed, with lyrics that rhyme. Even Saskatchewan River gets to be in a lyric (no kidding).

The songs, plus the bravado to pull them off, in a variety of styles from the jazzy to the bluesy to the musical theatre patter variety, are the real achievement of Accidental Beach: A Previously Improvised Musical. My favourite, I think, is a particularly lyrical summer number for two guys just zooming down the river, “just two friends on a SkiDoo, just two guys going for heroin….” Ah, the magic of an Edmonton summer. Abbott leads the onstage band from the keyboard, and he is an expert at making the spontaneous seem like a musical development the show has been waiting for.

The beach may be an accident, but the talent isn’t.

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How does change happen? WROL (without rule of law), a Fringe review

Posted on August 17, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Emily Thorne, Jordan Empson, Astrid Deibert in WROL, Light in the Dark Theatre at Edmonton Fringe 2024. Photo by Emily Marisabel.

WROL (Without Rule of Law), Stage 1 (Westbury Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The phrase that weaves its way, ominously, through WROL (Without Rule of Law), is “when the collapse occurs.” Not “if,” as you will note, but “when.”

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For the members of a breakaway Girl Guide troupe we meet in the bleakly funny “comedy” by Calgary-based playwright Michaela Jeffery (The Listening Room), they’re words to live by. Armed with that conviction about an imminent social/environmental apocalypse, a quartet of Grade 8 girls are in the woods  preparing to fend for themselves in a world that has never shown much interest in their concerns. The acronym they create is YOYO (“you’re on your own”).

The girls are with their skeptical pal Robbie (Baran Demi), who leans into caution when it comes to “crazy doomsday bullshit,” mainly because of the power differential. “You can’t protect people you love from bad things happening.”

As Emily Marisabel’s Light in the Dark production opens, Jo (Robyn Clark) is working on a series of helpful how-to videos: “come prepared to get prepared.” Breathless and earnest, she’s up to Episode 4, “Shelter.” And she’s demonstrating for the camera her own personal version, made of waterproof dog food bags she’s been collecting. “When you don’t have a dog it’s harder.”

The scenes are interwoven with school presentations. The chosen subject of Sarah (Emily Thorne), who’s brought along an entire book bag, is mass disappearances of the 21st century. Maureen (Jordan Empson), a starchier character, is grudgingly doing a public apology for a disruptive activist intervention at a school function.

Their hideout seems to be the site of a vanished commune, a disappearance, officially ignored, that invites an exposé. But the crux of a play is much less dramatic: the feeling of being stalled, powerless, paralyzed. “We say important stuff and no one listens,” as one character says. In a world that trains girls to be inobtrusive, how does meaningful change happen? The characters argue about that. Writing “strongly worded letters” doesn’t seem to be the answer.

The play’s capture of a generation’s frustration is seasoned with a kind of wry, un-condescending humour. And the actors, theatre school grads, turn in convincing, committed performances. If the 90-minute production feels long, it’s largely because the voices regularly fade into inaudibility in the Westbury Theatre. In a play about not being listened to, there’s an irony that can be overcome.

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“Who we were and who we are”: Rob and Chris (Bobby + Tina), a beautiful and funny new musical. A Fringe review

Posted on August 16, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

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

Rob and Chris (Bobby + Tina) – a new musical

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The couple we meet in this wonderful new musical adaptation of Collin Doyle’s hit play Let The Light of Day Through — by the playwright and a remarkable young composer/songwriter Matt Graham — know what it’s like to live on the widening, scary fault line between “who we are” and “who we were.”

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Rob and Chris (Garett Ross and Jenny McKillop) were once Bobby and Tina, who fell in love in Grade 11, high school kids whose lives changed when Tina got pregnant. They had a baby even before they graduated. Now just in their 30s they’ve struggled to survive a fathomless grief by making themselves a comedy to be playful in. They try to amuse each other by arranging assignations for afternoon nookie in “sexy trashy” motels (standards: no bugs, no hair, no dead crack whores under the bed). And to keep the door to the past — the mystery room in their house and the great tragedy inside — closed, they wonder about starting again, “flying the coop,” selling their house, moving somewhere new. They think about how (and why) to keep being a couple when they’re different people now; does love wear itself out, long term, floundering in despair?

Rob and Chris play themselves at every stage of their relationship, as well as each other’s parents (they’re funny satirists), real estate agents, their kid Ben at many ages. I’m telling you all this first so you’ll appreciate the challenge involved in making a beautiful, funny, heartbreaking play into a beautiful, funny, heartbreaking musical. If you’re wondering if the musical theatre is up to this kind of complexity, wonder no more.

It’s in progress, as the creators have emphasized, as they cut and add songs. But Graham, a musical theatre songwriter of startling resourcefulness, who plays live at the keyboard, has a kind of fluency with complicated thoughts that turn witty in his lyrics. And they’re placed at meaningful moments. Motifs, including a silvery little riff that’s a pinch of memory perhaps, recur. Rob and Chris, turning over thoughts of moving to Montreal, or Florida!, get a fun and wry little Graham song about that.

The opening musical gambit, Prelude: The Door, is a little gem, portentous but with lightness. The recurring lullaby, gets increasingly poignant on each repetition. Would a song about going to university, when you have a baby and you’re living in your parents’ basement, be possible maybe?

Kate Ryan’s Plain Jane production, with its dramatic Trent Crosby lighting, stars two actors with powerfully convincing chemistry: Ross and McKillop are real-life husband and wife. McKillop is the more impulsive Chris; Ross has a kind of rueful, tentative quality that is the perfect complement.

Anyhow, these are first thoughts about a new musical that is open enough to include the arc attached to huge, life-changing heartbreak, with songs that approach obliquely, never a head-on assault in order to be moving, often with humour — just like Doyle’s writing.

Rob and Chris (Bobby + Tina) is on its way. And the Fringe is for shows like that. You shouldn’t miss the chance to see it.

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‘We listen. We engage. We share’. Fun with absurdity in Bright Lights, a Fringe review

Posted on August 16, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Rachel Bowron, Jenny McKillop, Mhairi Berg, Oscar Derkx in Bright Lights, Blarney Productions at Edmonton Fringe 2024. Photo by Brianne Jang

Bright Lights (Stage 11, Varscona Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A weekly support group for people who’ve had encounters with aliens operates under an earnest multi-limbed mantra: “this is a safe place. We’re here for you. We believe you. Your truth matters….” But in its sassy heart Bright Lights, a springloaded 2016 comedy by Kat Sandler (The Party and The Candidate), has a question for you. If push comes to shove (as it so often does in the contemporary world), how would you prove you’re an actual human and not an alien?

Asking the question, as Bright Lights does so hilariously, is an invitation to absurdity. And the comedy and the cast of Luc Tellier’s crack Blarney production relish the theatrical challenge of ever-so-gradually upping the ante, in ways that never stop seeming like fine-grained realism.

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

A newcomer to the group, — a performance nicely pitched by Mhairi Berg — arrives in response to a poster to share her experience of alien abduction that ends up with her sleeping in a field beside her car with all her clothes on backwards. You know, a classic. But the encounter includes a discovery that rocks the group. And the real fun of the piece is the interplay of idiosyncratic personalities, nailed with great comic pizzaz by Tellier’s first-rate cast.

Rachel Bowron is grim Dave, the fiercest of the group, a veteran of “quadruple alien probing” (the mind boggles), on perpetual red alert armed to the teeth for the coming war. Jenny McKillop is the daffy, conciliatory, and extremely pregnant Laurel. Particularly amusing is Oscar Derkx as Wayne, the ex-child star and full-time narcissist who constantly quotes the now-defunct TV series Junior Law. (“so help me law” is his favourite oath). He’s particularly infatuated with his own  psychic abilities. There’s a very funny glibness about Ross, the leader of the group, in Braydon Dowler Coltman’s performance. And, as catalyzed by the newcomer’s reported experience, they slide into overlapping conversation, and the absurdist reaches of argument, with escalating speed under Tellier’s direction.

Who can you trust? Can you believe where you don’t trust? Logic gets invoked, and foiled, at every turn; does it even work with “reality”?. Questions like that get lobbed lightly through the air of Bright Lights. And it’s all fun.

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An audacious juxtaposition of comedy and trauma: Stéphanie Morin-Robert: SOFT SPOT, a Fringe review

Posted on August 16, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Stéphanie Morin-Robert: SOFT SPOT, Edmonton Fringe 2024. Photo supplied.

Stéphanie Morin-Robert: SOFT SPOT (Stage 17, Grindstone Comedy Theatre and Bistro)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There is nothing timid or easily classifiable about this complex, boundary-testing comedy from the fearless, and very funny, Stéphanie Morin-Robert.

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The soft spot in question is a bruise. And as we know from Blindside and Eye Candy, she’s the kind of artist who isn’t afraid to squint at the bruise (with her one eye), laugh at it with us — and press it till it hurts and we gasp.

There are two intertwined stories at play in Soft Spot, one starring Morin-Robert’s party-hearty great grandpa, and one starring her own chaotic cross-border entry into the world of motherhood. So, it’s a genealogy of sorts, hung on a sort of karaoke framework. Partly it’s stand-up hilarity, of a particularly vivid sort. Morin-Robert, who lost one-eye to a childhood cancer and freely pops the glass one in and out, has a way with memorable stories about being at an ocularist conference in Texas (“like Burning Man” for people who make glass eyes for a living). We sing along, with gusto, to “now I’ve got you in my sights with these hungry eyes….”

Morin-Robert has evidently not seen a commonplace of propriety much less a taboo — sex, birth in its most visceral details, religion, parenthood — she could resist a comic tangle with. And there’s something about the delivery — her relaxed charm, her endearing confessional manner, the occasional eye roll, a sense that we’re sharing confidences and insights — that makes it all so engaging.

This is a show with a gut punch. And the audacity of it is the full weight she gives to comedy en route. I gather that this isn’t the final version of this audacious show; we the Fringe audience are there for us to test it with her (an exciting use of the festival). And I wonder if the shocking revelations about Grandpa, and heartfelt reflections on a toxic family inheritance don’t come just a bit late, in a show that is, quite literally, all about uncovering layers. But the ending has huge impact. This might be the bravest show at the Fringe. And it’s got to be one of the funniest.   

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SeaMAN: absurdism at sea, swimming for shore. A Fringe review

Posted on August 16, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Bruce Ryan Costella and Amica Hunter in SeaMAN, Edmonton Fringe 2024. Photo supplied.

SeaMAN (Stage 1, ATB Westbury Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In this relentlessly nutty and scrambling show by 2 Sleepy Ratguys (Amica Hunter and Bruce Ryan Costella) we meet a salt-crusted, windburned, garrulous old sea captain — in two bodies.

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The pair aren’t, as it transpires, nautical alter-egos exactly, with two intertwined versions of a story. They’re more of a sight/sound gag: matching grey wigs and underwear, a single rubber boot each, a shell phone, an old-tar accent and a tendency to say “as for ye…” or “if you catch me drift.” And they’ve been reduced to “30-minute boat tours, no refunds.”

Business, needless to say, is slow at “the beautiful Edmonton shoreline.” But here we are, and Captain Sea Man finds their crew — cabin boy, navigator, first-mate, cook — among us, armed with props.  As always, the willingness of Fringe audiences to be playful collaborators (tie knots in ropes, say ay aye captain), and improvise along with performers who are having fun not being slick or organized, is heartwarmingly generous.

And there was much laughter from the opening night audience. It’s one of those theatrical occasions when you know you’re out of sync with the rest of the crowd.

There’s no fourth wall at sea, it need hardly be said. And there’s no shortage of bright comic ideas in SeaMAN — flashbacks, cheap theatre jokes, fun with scale, demonstrations of fishing technique gone wrong, a storm at sea, a side story involving a siren. And Hunter and Costella, both likeable performers, are quick on the uptake, in asides to the audience as props go wrong or missing. But the dedication of SeaMAN to making absurdist comedy out of time-worn images and the lameness of lame gags, while non-stop and nothing short of game, begins to seem a little threadbare to me, in truth.

This is a show that could be clever, if it put its mind to it. So far, though, you’re entitled to wonder if it’s settled for the shallow end of the sea — for being a little satire, for adults, of kids’ theatre clichés.

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