The calming effect of drawing, conversation, and silence: the unique experiment of Muse, a Fringe review

Posted on August 21, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Cameryn Moore, “muse,” Little Black Book Productions. Photo by Hassan Ghoncheh.

muse: an experiment in storytelling and life drawing (Stage 5, Acacia Hall)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There’s a uniquely welcoming show at the Fringe that’s actually about audience participation, an experiment in experimenting … with yourself.

As a non-artist whose hands-on art experience is stick-persons on stickies, and the back row of Art History 201: the Renaissance, I was curious. As someone who’s never even held a piece of charcoal, much less been in a life-drawing class with a live nude model, I wondered what it would be like to draw someone.

So I borrowed a sketch book, and got offered a piece of charcoal (there are art supplies, while they last) at the door. The only introduction offered by the model, Cameryn Moore (a playwright/ actor in the theatre side of her life), was to list the number of poses she was going to do, some one-minute, some three-, some 10-.

If you ask her questions, which Moore invites you to do, you’ll find Muse a memoir, and a fascinating one, about a life spent since 2017 in Berlin as a theatre artist, a nude life-drawing model, and a Size X-large person in a judgmental culture. If there weren’t questions, presumably, Muse wouldn’t be a memoir and Moore would be fine with silence, after a couple of first-hand stories she offers at the outset, to make things not be weird for an audience used to coming to the Fringe for a “show.” But who wouldn’t want to ask a nude model some questions if they got the chance?

Ah, the questions. A funny, candid, and thoughtful sort, Moore  attended to the questions, and considered them before answering. Actually, my fellow draw-ers asked questions I wanted to hear the answers to. She considered them before answering. Nude models aren’t allowed to shrug, of course. But Moore was relaxed about conversing in this way, and so we relaxed too.

And gradually, both in questions and in the companionable silences, we get the idea that being a sculptural nude body has been validating, transcending, for someone the culture is very inclined to marginalize. I wouldn’t dream of using the f-word (fat, I mean). Moore does.

The 60 minutes went by in a flash. And at the end, in “the community gallery” of our drawings on the floor (if we felt like revealing them) for everyone to wander around and see, there was a kind of group ease and joyful spirit.

Incidentally, for what it’s worth, it turned out I don’t have a clue how to draw. There’s no transforming dénouement like that to my expedition. But it was a fun, easeful, and  experience. And I wouldn’t have missed it.

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Teasing ‘High Art’ into submission: The Merkin Sisters: Deux, a Fringe review

Posted on August 21, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Ingrid Hansen and Stéphanie Morin-Robert in The Merkin Sisters: Deux, Edmonton Fringe. Photo supplied

The Merkin Sisters: Deux (Stage 13, Service Credit Union Theatre, La Cité francophone)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

But is it Art?

The Merkin Sisters, that sibling duo of hirsute avant-gardistes, are back at the Fringe after six years to tease and tickle that Ultimate Question once more in their follow-up show.    

And those Merkins (Ingrid Hansen and Stéphanie Morin-Robert) know how to make an entrance. Unsmiling, they jostle through the audience in the galleries butt first, in bathrobes and towel mohawks — direct from the gender-neutral shower room so to speak — to get to the stage. That’s where high-style robotic choreography gives way to a version of Swan Lake. And that’s where there’s an explosion of pubic hair the likes of which haven’t been seen here since they were last in town.

It’s performance art that’s a funny, deadpan satire of performance art. If you’re asking, but what does it mean? you are so on the wrong track. The Merkin Sisters makes playful, inventive physical comedy from free association, unhinged from causality or motivation or logic, glowering all the while. And they fool around, hilariously, with a fundamental principle of the avant-garde: if you don’t find it baffling it’s not High Art (maybe only medium-low to low,). “Some people ask us why we do what we do (moment of silence). And what it is we do do,” a Merkin asks us solemnly.

Exactly. There’s a veritable catalogue of theatrical devices to jar you out of your staid middlebrow lives and present you the chance to ask another High Art question (while laughing): But is it ironic?

The Merkins are scornful; they cast withering looks our way. They’re not here to ingratiate themselves with the audience in one of those interactive shows where there’s no right answer. This is High Art. Dancing Lycra lipstick tubes that are their own mouths, a cutting-edge development in contemporary puppetry. And there are appearances at perplexing moments by old-fashioned puppets too, There’s a ne plus ultra masturbation scene for two. There’s an amplitude of body hair, and a birth scene that’s obligatory in the metaphor lexicon of audience interaction performance art.

And every once in a while, a Merkin reaches into a jar of little pieces of paper on which we’ve all answered a question about the first time we lost (fill in the blank) — and annotates tersely: “Pandemic Art,” “Un-relatable art” and the like.

Actually one of the Merkins, grouchy, has a question too, doubtlessly asked many times in the world of High Art: “why do I always have to play the vagina?” Answer: “because you have the bigger mouth.”

The fun of The Merkin Sisters is to  see physical comedians, and a goofy comic invention, unleashed on Performance Art. You get to see what performance art would look like if it was riotous. If you’ve seen one too many broody Fringe confessionals, this could be your kind of show. Then give yourself an encore: hie yourself to Hansen’s weird and kooky solo show Epidermis Circus.

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Wanna be in a movie by a legendary director? The Method Prix, a Fringe review

Posted on August 21, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Deanna Fleysher and Brooke Sciacca in The Method Prix. Photo by Sulai Lopez

The Method Prix (Stage 17, Grindstone Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“People ask me all the time what it’s like to be a genius artist,” says the legendary Hollywood auteur-director Vincent Prix (Deanna Fleysher), flinging himself into a selection of dramatic sultry poses as he shoots live footage of himself.

He’s greeted us at the door, with an intensity of gaze that positively reeks of artistic greatness. Now we’re in his “studio” to watch genius at work, as the great man makes “a classic of the American cinema” from scratch. And in this latest from L.A.’s Deanna Fleysher (Butt Kapinsky), a “drag clown” whose appetite for risk seems to have no limits — it’s kind of breath-taking and kind of scary — we will find ourselves part of the shoot.

One among us finds a lighting instrument in his hands; another is the make-up person. The caterer has the honour of holding the Prix Perrier till needed. As headshots of contenders appear on the screen, Prix scrambles through the audience on the hunt for a hot young leading man. He rejects one after another — too much Nordic angst, too happy, “too mentally healthy.” And then  “Hollywood wild child” Dylan Thruster (Brooke Sciacca) swaggers up to the stage, with exactly tousled coiffure, and the slightly open-mouthed bring-it pout that models have.

Prix is on fire; he’s found his man boy, his new Brando, his new … well….. But the leading man keeps finding desirable co-stars, his -ex, his L.A. trainer, his love interest (Prix is dismayed), among us, and brings them to the stage. We’re the extras, called upon to invent the scenery as the leads chew it. The fourth wall is long gone, trampled underfoot. It’s chaos — is it art or is it a shambles? — and it’s funny, as Prix works his impulse “Method,” to shoot scenes.

Fleysher’s show, a satire of the movie mythology of the director/creator/genius, is actually built on audience participation, risky in itself, and escalation, even riskier. Scenes Prix creates with us, recorded live on the screen, and live scenes with Dylan Thruster are interspersed with Prix’s fantasy sequences (with songs) about coupling with his leading man. The interplay of live, live feed recording on-, off-, and backstage gets more and more frenzied.

All those Hollywood clichés about making love to the camera? All those theatre clichés about playing with, and not just for, the audience? Fleysher and Sciacca never waver. They’re fearless improvisers both, and they keep upping the ante. The architecture of  The Method Prix is balanced precariously on the epic egos of their characters. And from that infrastructure you can’t quite believe how far they’re unafraid to go.

Funny, original, nervy, and nerve-wracking.

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An Old Testament skit: Bathsheba and the Books, a Fringe review

Posted on August 20, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Bathsheba and the Books, Handmade Ivy Stage and Screen, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

Bathsheba and the Books (Stage 1, Westbury Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Bathsheba and the Books is a rare example of serious Old Testament scholarship, a sadly neglected field at the Fringe. JUST KIDDING.

It’s more like an SNL sketch or a Catskills skit night contribution than a play. The amusing premise is that the Old Testament’s sexpot Bathsheba, King Solomon’s mom, has left her va-va-voom days behind, she says. The new image she’s cultivating is Literary Intellectual (“leave me alone, I have reading to do”). And her plague (of locusts) project, so speak, has been putting together a compilation volume she’s set to call the Bible. Why that title? “Lord of the Rings was taken.” She’s even enlisted an increasingly harried editor (Chris Fassbender), who needs the work.

Who knew Bathsheba (Aimée Beaudoin) was the one? Anyhow, the Old Testament remains a largely unfurrowed field when it comes to comedy — OK, except for those Adam and Eve jokes, and Moses at the Red Sea-side routines, and those inadvertent occasions when the heaping on of ‘begats’ tends to make the crowd hysterical. But let’s not quibble: David Ellis Heyman’s claim to that territory is largely unchallenged in Canadian theatre.

Anyhow, the whole process of selecting the books for the world’s first Bible is on speed dial because Bathsheba’s son King Solomon, one of those spoiled rich kids with anger management issues (Jake Tkaczyk) has run out of money for his vanity project, The Temple of Solomon. So he’s grabbed hold of the project, and Bathsheba has 15 minutes to choose the books for her best-seller. Deadlines deadlines.

The self-appointed project bean-counter Hiram (played by Jeff Halaby like a wired Borscht Belt comic) is on the case, putting in his two shekels-worth about which books to pick, which to toss, which to save for the sequel.

Davina Stewart’s cast is a quartet of skilled comic actors. And they, along with director Stewart’s choices, make for an amiable, mildly amusing 45 minutes.

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More than a Scooby snack: SCOOBIE DOOSICAL, a new Dammitammy musical. A Fringe review

Posted on August 20, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Andrew Cormier, Cameron Chapman, Bella King, Natalie Czar in SCOOBIE DOOSICAL. Photo by BB Collective

SCOOBIE DOOSICAL (Stage 4, Walterdale Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Well gang, looks like we have another mystery on our hands (a couple, actually).

One (a Fringe specialty) is the mystery of inspiration. With their new musical, Dammitammy Productions’ resident playwright/composer muse Rebecca Merkley finds a kooky outlier of an idea. It bounces gaily off a ‘70s cartoon so earnestly dopey it’s achieved vintage stoner status as a classic. (Side note: never let it be said there is no place at the Fringe for the classics).

A gang of teenage sleuths and a talking Great Dane on a perpetual quest for Scooby snacks: that’s what Merkley is working with, in this high-speed four-actor musical. SCOOBIE DOOSICAL isn’t a spoof exactly (spoofing a spoof is like capturing air in a sieve); it’s more like an homage. And Scoob, played by the delightful Bella King, is the hero, both put-upon and infinitely forgiving, and devoted to the inept nice guy Shag (Cameron Chapman).

There’s a mystery, involving a villain; the evil and homophobic Professor Riggleruffs (Andrew Cormier) is hot for revenge, or maybe world domination (lucky for the world, he’s a Luddite) and he’s terrible to his glum cat Kyle (Natalie Czar), always a bad sign. There’s non-stop activity: chase scenes (through a toy mansion), car rides, adventures in the woods (“rustle rustle” says Czar wielding a branch for verisimilitude). Periodically there are ad breaks, with jingles, starring the increasingly exasperated L’il Stinks (King).

SCOOBIE DOOSICAL, Dammitammy Productions, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo by BB Collective

There’s big fun in watching Cormier and Czar quick-change wigs and  characters (their near-misses are funny, too), faster and faster — and annotate (“wow, creepy laughter”). The cat doubles as crisis-prone Daphne; Cormier is also the bespectacled smartie Velma.

SCOOBIE DOOSICAL is a veritable barrage of dog and cat jokes, and lightly tossed contemporary allusions of all sorts — to musicals, to theatre, to politics, capitalism, the state of the world, to gun control, to text-speak, homophobia, and political correctness. AND it’s a musical about love and loss and the terrors of growing up, which borrows from Sondheim’s Into The Woods (“no one is alone”) and Company. Sondheim and Scooby Doo: it’s a first.

Merkley’s songs, which range from pop-y Pedal to the Metal to musical theatre ballads (“I’m seeing you brand new for the very first time”), have clever, rhymed lyrics. From what I could hear, that is. At the opening performance the clangy sound mix favoured the keyboards (Yvonne Boon) so extremely they were often inaudible, alas.

There’s a real original at work in this fledgling musical. It’s bright, it’s fun, it’s full (possibly over-crammed) with theatrical ideas, and it doesn’t shy away from poignance. So far it feels like it’s in sketch form coming at you, a discovery with a future. And that’s something the Fringe is for. 

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The hunger for human connection: Fiji, a Fringe review

Posted on August 19, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Vance Avery and Chris W. Cook in Fiji, Shatter Glass Theatre, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

Fiji (Stage 6, Gateway Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Isn’t it what everyone hungers for in the end? Human connection at the deepest, most visceral, level? A soul mate?

That universal quest for an all-consuming, all-consumable passion is at the heart of Fiji, a dark and disturbing two-hander that’s billed as “a true crime-inspired love story.” Rom-com meets thriller in this Edinburgh Fringe two-hander of 2021, getting its North American premiere here in a production directed, with great finesse, by Lora Brovold.

It starts as one of those comically awkward meet-ups that are the sequel to online chatting. Sam nervously arrives early at Nick’s apartment for dinner with a bottle of wine. Will they live up to their online billing and be compatible in person? Will they have sex? They’re careful with each other’s boundaries, and they start to get  more comfortable with each other. They ask those get-to-know-you dating questions: What floats your boat? If you could invite anyone, dead or alive, to dinner, who would it be? If you won a million dollars, what’s the first thing you’d do?   

Chris Cook in Fiji, Shatter Glass Theatre, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied.

Gradually, unobtrusively what has started in wincing comedy — ever so natural in the skillful performances of Chris Cook and Vance Avery — gathers unsettling details. “I’ve wanted this for a very long time,” says Sam. “There’s no going back,” says Nick, who’s making dinner, carbonara, to launch their weekend date.

It’s the way Fiji twists darker and darker, without losing its macabre sense of humour that will rattle you. Talk about deadpan; Fiji brings home the bacon. It’s a shocking little play. And I just don’t know how to tell you what it’s about without giving something crucial away. Suffice it to say it’s based on the real-life 2001 case of one Armin Meiwes, but don’t look it up till after the show if you want the full experience.

The test of the production is how it builds tension (not to mention appetite), and how it makes the unthinkable not just possible but kind of inevitable. Everything is consensual, almost reasonable. Love is sought; love is involved. And Brovold in her directing debut and these two fine actors score on all points. I held my breath so long I started to see purple stars.       

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What just happened in there? Crrrrrrazy. Forest of Truth, a Fringe review

Posted on August 19, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Forest of Truth, Theatre Group GUMBO, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied.

Forest of Truth (Stage 28, Nancy Power Theatre at the Roxy)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Hello, depressives out there. For those of you done with the solemn, the quietly understated, the mild-mannered, minimalist or monochromatic, in life and in art, the Fringe has an antidote for you.

To call Forest of Trees high-spirited or zany is to fall way short of describing the maniacal energy of this lunatic clown fairy tale creation by Theatre Group GUMBO from Osaka Japan.

It’s a veritable hallucinogenic of a show. And the morning after, I’m wondering if I just dreamed it. Dizzying colours, giant sparkly apples, metallic butterflies on spikes, a dancing sperm with a light-up end that danced into the crowd in search of an egg…. Let’s just say the props department chez GUMBO doesn’t think small.

Forest of Truth, Theatre Group GUMBO, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

Everything about the reactions of the agile, rubber-faced four-performer cast is outsized: mugging on speed. Smiles are madly ear-to-ear; Frowns are full-face crumples. Laughter is a full-body workout: mouth wide open like a scream, shoulders up and down like pistons. When the characters are delighted, the stage nearly shakes. Flirtation? well, I could tell you about the giant sequined nipples for the audience to twirl, but then there are some things you have to see for yourself, in person.  Polite? Don’t make me laugh (even harder). And there isn’t one inside-voice in the show.

Did I forget to tell you the plot? Oops. In the Forest of Truth, which is pretty much the conceptual opposite of the Hundred Acre Woods, all will be revealed about the true nature of love. The queen of the forest, who (I think) is a relative of Snow White’s evil stepmother, is hot after some “true love essence” to keep her #1 in beauty. And her minion, the fairy of the forest, is her procurer. The scenes are announced on placards; the fairy shrieks with laughter every time at this vaudevillian device.

There’s a manly warrior with anger management issues who brandishes a sabre and falls in love with a demure maiden awaiting her Prince Charming. A veritable earthquake of passion instantly happens, with (temporarily) romantic music. Later in the show, since they’re in the Forest of Truth, we’ll discover their secret thoughts about each other. The fairy of the forest will ride across the stage on a stick horse for reasons that are not revealed in the forest of truth. Why on earth am I telling you the story?

It’s crazy (or as they’d say in the show crrrrrrrrazy!). It’s fringe-y. Sit back and let it come at you.

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Theatre magic: with Tiger Lady, the Dead Rabbits return to the Fringe. A Fringe review

Posted on August 19, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Tiger Lady, Dead Rabbits Theatre, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied.

Tiger Lady (Stage 1, Westbury Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The story is fascinating, snatched from the archives of circus history by the English company Dead Rabbits Theatre (The Dragon, My Love Lies Frozen in the Ice).

In Tiger Lady, we meet Mabel Stark, the circus world’s first-ever female tiger tamer. In the early years of the 20th century, the heyday of the Ringling Brothers, a Kentucky orphan escaped the harsh bonds of her unpromising life, and ran away with the circus. And a star was born.

It’s an exotic story, to be sure. And how a nimble cast of six create something rich and strange (a love story, a comedy with tragic dimensions, a tragedy with comic dimensions) from it is the particular achievement of Tiger Lady. That they create an atmospheric world using three ladders, a sheet, a door, parachute silk, and music is magic. Theatre magic, the kind that happens before your very eyes.    

Tiger Lady, Dead Rabbits Theatre, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

Somehow — you won’t quite believe it yourself — you’ll find yourself captivated by the ingenious and playful theatricality that turns a story of crazy courage and ambition born of desperation into … a love story. It happens on the spot; the Dead Rabbits are not about exposition. “It’s funny how the world turns on the smallest of things.”

Mabel (Natisha Williams-Samuels) leaves a world where “the circus is the devil’s work” and discovers a world where love can exist, albeit with a high-risk factor. She falls in love with a tiger, her special tiger Rajah, her baby (puppeteer Eddie Breckinridge). Yes, you will feel fear and awe as Rajah gets bigger and bigger. Yes, your heart will be warmed by the attraction between Mabel and an empathetic human (Abayomi Oniyide). The audience participation in a show about showbiz is fun and unforced.

Tiger Lady, Dead Rabbits Theatre, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied.

The ensemble populate the circus, including the animal division, with comic gusto: the mouthy and conniving ringmaster Al (Antonio Victoria ) forever holding bankruptcy at bay, along with his much put-upon animal trainer and enabler Louis (James Parker) and his jaded dancer (Chloe Waddilove) who needs the job. Ferdinand the elephant has a particularly memorable entrance.

And then, from time to time, the ensemble pick up instruments — trombone, banjo, washboard, a drum that’s a box — and flesh out the narrative with jaunty jug-band tunes.

It’s a measure of the theatrical expertise at work here that you hold your breath every time that free-standing door opens, a theatrical variation of The Lady, or the Tiger?. As in circuses everywhere, we’re attracted by the allure of danger, the possibility of a fall, a maul, the outcome that can never fully be predicted. It’s only human.

And so is the way a high-spirited comedy is haunted by the thought that the deepest scars are the ones you can’t see. Mesmerizing.

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Let’s play ‘who’s the deviant?’. The Catalogue of Sexual Anxieties, a Fringe review

Posted on August 19, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

The Catalogue of Sexual Anxieties, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo suppliedall

The Catalogue of Sexual Anxieties (Stage 8, Old Strathcona Performing Arts Centre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If the Andrews Sisters had sung about masturbation or genital warts, they might have ended up with a musical like The Catalogue of Sexual Anxieties.

“Are you sex deprived?” One of the trio of the bright, disarming young women onstage asks us at the start of of this sprightly boogie-woogie musical by Marion Poli, Aniqa Charania, and Charlotte Szabo. In an audience pretty much equally divided between men and women, one lone guy in a nearly full house bravely puts up his hand. And we are full of admiration for him.

It’s one thing to sidle up to sex obliquely, via characters or metaphors or allegories. But there’s probably no subject in the world more fraught, alarming, anxiety-producing when it’s addressed directly, personally, in public, with strangers. And no subject that kills the confessional instinct, or can make you feel lonelier or more uncertain when you suspect you’re an outlier.

Is it just me? It’s a universal question. And the spirit of this inclusive show, devised by three actors when they met at musical theatre school in Glasgow, is reassuring. When it comes to sex, if everyone is weird, no one’s weird. What can rules mean under the circumstances?

In the Victorian period (when, as they point out, the vibrator was invented), women talking about sex, much less keen to have it, were labelled “hysterical.” So, as latter day “hysterical ladies” this trio have licence to share stories (and songs) about everything from their own sexual awakening, their first time, their fears about under-performing or over-performing, to condoms and niche questions like “can you get tetanus from braces?”   

They’re funny and candid, and their show has lightness to it, not least because it relies on the musical theatre stagecraft of director Kate Ryan of Plain Jane Theatre. The performers are in constant motion, grouping and regrouping as they consult a big impressively antique-looking volume, a bible of blasphemy as one says, from chapter to chapter.

There are cultural differences in sexual attitudes to be explored: Szabo is from England, Poli is from France, Charania from France, with ethnic variations too. And their choice of musical style for original songs by Patrice Peyrieras — they’re strong singers — has a kooky charm to it: Andrews Sisters’ tight harmonies, with choreography to match.

What drives this playful show is sparkle, chemistry, and the musical chops of the likeable performers, who sing songs, and share stories, and feel free to disagree the way women friends do over coffee. It starts to unravel a bit three-quarters of the way through its 75-minute duration; perhaps the show casts its net a little too wide, once the actors start addressing motherhood, the biological clock, careers…. Until then, it’s a bold original.

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An eccentric musical about an eccentric real-life character from Canadian history: Amor de Cosmos. A Fringe review

Posted on August 18, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Cody Porter in Amor de Cosmos: A Delusional Musical, Joe Clark Productions, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

Amor de Cosmos: A Delusional Musical (Stage 8, Old Strathcona Performing Arts Centre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Start with this, and hold the thought: there is a new musical in the theatre repertoire about a Canadian provincial premier.   

That would be William Alexander Smith, an earnest loon of a 19th century guy who (to radically foreshorten his resumé), re-christened himself Amor de Cosmos, became the second premier of B.C., became an MP, became appallingly right-wing, and went insane. You know, the usual.

And, a century and a half after his salad days, he has been lured out of the mists of historical obscurity by attracting the attention of writer Richard Kemick (evidently a diligent and inspired researcher) and singer-songwriter Lindsey Walker, who is the quintessence of musical versatility.

Amor de Cosmos: A Delusional Musical is crowded with incident. And politicos. And characters (assorted friends and relatives and employers). And elections, and editorials from the newspaper he started, and lawsuits…. In 60 minutes. What heightens a wildly scrambling caper of a true-life story to near frenzy is that the cast size is one: the game, crazily busy Cody Porter armed with two hats that enable him to do dialogues, with assistance from composer Walker at the keyboard.

Cody Porter in Amor de Cosmos: a delusional musical, Joe Clark Productions, Edmonton Fringe. Photo supplied.

I have to admit that I had  trouble following what is undoubtedly a fascinating story, with cautionary reverb in these parlous right-sliding times. Partly this was because of the condensation of its narrative intricacies from the 90-minute original. Partly it’s because the text, written entirely in iambic pentameter, tended, like Walker’s lyrics, to fade into the iffy acoustics of Stage 8. Alas, a mic, a mic, his kingdom for a mic.

A shame since Porter is a fine comic actor, and his essentially light singing voice could use a boost. I did hear enough to know that Kemick’s book is witty, smart, with epigrammatic turns of phrase and lots of puns (“Rielpolitik”).  And his insights about a well-meaning reformer who turned into a crackpot and went into politics make for an arc that is undoubtedly worth the hearing. “A good job is a bad thing” or “I’ve seen the writing on the wallpaper.” How many musicals have you seen lately that open with a thought about “the art of any filibuster …”?

This is an eccentric musical about an eccentric character from Canadian history, and it definitely has a future. Like Amor de Cosmos himself it’s a real original, which is what the Fringe is for. It’s just that it cries out for most hospitable technical circumstances for its cleverness. After all, Walker’s hook song, “you must be unforgettable” has found a forgotten figure who’s potentially just that — on the plus and on the negative side.

“Every day’s a struggle with the world. Not to own it. Just to know it,” says our hero in his pre-anti-hero days. Which is also true of musicals.

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