What I learned at this year’s Fringe: thoughts of a Fringed brain

Posted on August 21, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Celina Dean and Mathew Hulshof in The Margin of the Sky, Teatro La Quindicina, Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I want to go to the beautiful place and enjoy the view and then come back. I think we all do.” — Leo in Stewart Lemoine’s The Margin of the Sky 

You can’t go off to the Fringe and be there for a week and come back without learning things, and having an odd sense of heightened reality. It’s bound to happen. Here are some assorted thoughts from time well spent…. 

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Most remarkable story that isn’t in a show. The Margin of the Sky, the final production of Teatro La Quindicina’s 40th anniversary season, is the last time you’ll ever see a Teatro show at the Fringe. The company was born there in 1982, the very first Fringe, before anyone even knew what exactly that was. Then Teatro was a troupe of high-school friends who gave themselves a kooky name, and took a comedy called All These Heels (one characters was a Hungarian concert pianist with an eyepatch, played by Leona Brausen) by one of their number, Stewart Lemoine to “A Fringe Event.” And now? Teatro is a professional theatre company, with subscribers, fans, a season, a theatre with a red velvet curtain, Equity contracts…. And they bid farewell to the Fringe in 2022 by reviving a 2003 Lemoine comedy about what creative inspiration means, and where to find it. It begins a hold-over run Tuesday as part of Teatro’s 2022 summer season. 12thnight review here.

Rebecca Merkley in Jesus Teaches Us Things, Dammitammy Productions. Photo supplied.

Funniest clowning: Jesus. In Rebecca Merkley’s Jesus Teaches Us Things, the man himself is a riot. The guy loves a crowd, and since he’s had a couple of thousand of years to tune up his act, he does a big opener: you should see what he can with a glass of water. 12thnight review here.

Audience participation: always tricky. When it goes wrong, the audience wants to shrink into nothingness in their seats. When it goes right, it’s a party. See above, for a stellar example; Jesus takes questions. Another is White Guy On Stage Talking. In one scene we make a group list we made with the two performers (Jake Tzakcyk and Megan Sweet) of “things we’d sell your soul for.” See below. 12thnight review here.

Even veteran artists, who’ve had two years of pandemical isolation to brood on their art, tried something new for this Fringe. 

Andrea House, Brittany Ward in Salsa Lesson. Photo by Jae Hoo Lee,

(a) The magical reinvention of a classic story as an original musical: in Salsa Lesson, actor/playwright/singer-songwriter Andrea House gives a story — a narrative of the middle-aged plateau and unexpected new horizons — breath-taking dimensions. The story, ruefully funny, is in House’s own invented “mom-rap,” a kind of hip-hop/ spoken word poetry cross. And the songs, mostly in Spanish, give the everyday,” with its hopes and disappointments, and its yearning for love, a heightened lustre of passion. Enchanting. 12thnight review here.

(b) The magical reinvention of a long gone era as an original cabaret: The Pansy Cabaret tells a story no one knew, even Darrin Hagen, a queer historian, and playwright and actor, composer and musician). What he discovered was the true history of the “Pansy craze,” a vivid queer culture that flourished a century ago and vanished in the decade after Prohibition, erased by homophobia. Drag queen Lilith Fair re-creates it in great style onstage, with a fascinating selection of  beautifully sung vintage Edwardian music hall songs, accompanied by Daniel Belland at the grand piano. The warning to the a world sliding ever farther right couldn’t be more clear. The Fringe holds it over starting Tuesday. 12thnight review here.  

Seth Gilfillan and Josh Travnik in Conjoined: A New Musical. Photo supplied

New musicals of every shape and size, many of them by young artists: Fringe 2022 was an unusual proliferation. Such a complicated, challenging form: storytelling through and with music, songs that have lyrics and performers with an unusual range of skills (see Salsa Lesson above). The largest scale new musical I saw? Chris Scott’s amazingly ambitious The Erlking — horror, mythology, satire, folk tale. The smallest? Conjoined, witty, funny, clever, and macabre — and infused with real musical theatre savvy. It’s a stagecraft challenge, too, for co-creator Stephen Allred’s production: two conjoined brothers, the A-type one who dominates, the other who seethes with resentment, and hatches murderous thoughts. 

(Thunder)CATS, Grindstone Theatre. Photo supplied.

Satire: it’s a helluva lot easier to just make fun of Cats than it is to actually create a funny raunchy full-bodied alternative musical — by marrying the “now and forever” Broadway musical to an 80s TV cartoon. That’s a lot of sexy feline dancing, cartoon battles, a hot band, copious Lycra, the whole kit-and-caboodle. …. In (thunder)CATS, The Grindstone team of Byron Martin and Simon Abbott (with Curtis den Otter) did that. 

Most creative sex scene: the Romeo and Juliet clinch of two puppets from found objects, a sock and bunched-up panties, on a stage strung between two audience volunteers, in SNAFU’s “spicy puppet cabaret” Epidermis Circus. It’s held over at the Fringe starting Tuesday.

White Guy On Stage Talking. Photo supplied.

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen at the Fringe? It’s a question fringers get asked regularly. For me, White Guy on Stage Talking, I think. See above. Twenty-one performance art scenes that theatricalize, in a scrambly, amusingly cheap-theatre way, pretty much everything that makes you crazy or anxious or outraged about modern life. It’s for your brain to put together. The runner-up in weirdness is about creation, too. The Hunchback Variations is all about artistic failure, the continuing and possibly inevitable failure, in 11 minutely adjusted “variations” of the efforts of two of history’s most famous Deaf artists, to create a famously elusive stage effect, from Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.

Ellie Heath in Fake n’ Bake, Edmonton Fringe 2022. Photo supplied.

The solo confessional: these require a special kind of theatrical ingenuity to answer the unspoken question ‘why am I on a stage telling you about my life?’ Ellie Heath’s Fake n’ Bake, the story of a life sucked into a vortex of addictions then restored, inhabited a playful stage world. Jon Paterson’s How I Met My Mother is a personal invitation into a theatre named after the mother who saw him through his bad-ass teen years. Paterson, a Fringe veteran of 25 years standing, tells the story of a theatre artist in search of redemption who reinvents himself, improbably, as a care-giver for his mother who’s declining into dementia.  

Alanna McPherson, Chelo Ledesma, Bella King in Dreamers Cantata, Plain Jane Theatre Company. Photo by db photographics

Welcome discovery: I hadn’t known about Georgia Stitt and her Alphabet City Cycle till I saw Dreamers Cantata, one of my favourite Fringe shows. Such clever, challenging funny and insightful songs, part of the Plain Jane Theatre Company’s new revue Dreamers Cantata, curated from contemporary musical theatre innovators. Beautifully delivered by young triple-threats who sizzle. See below. 

Most startling, possibly unwelcome, discovery: Wouldn’t you know it? Bots can actually write plays (Plays By Bots, written by a bot named Dramatron and acted by the improvisers of Rapid Fire Theatre, was pretty funny, in a deadpan sort of way. Geez. Is nothing sacred?

New talent: young artists I hadn’t seen before (a long list, among them Sydney Williams (Pressure, by up-and-comer Amanda Samuelson), Miracle Mopera and Kyra Gusdal (Mules), Alanna McPherson along with her castmates Bella King and Larissa Poho (Dreamers Cantata). 

The starting continuity of the Fringe presence in this theatre town: Kevin Sutley directed the 2006 premiere of Mules, starring the co-playwrights. And he directed this 2022 Fringe revival, with young artists. Jana O’Connor, the new head of Lit Fest, was the stage manager of the 2003 premiere of The Margin of the Sky. She’s one of the quartet of actors in Teatro La Quindicina’s Fringe farewell revival of the Stewart Lemoine comedy. 

Theatre is lucky; we have some great piano players in this town: Daniel Belland (The Pansy Cabaret), Simon Abbott (thunder)CATS), Michael Clark (Conjoined), Steven Greenfield (Dreamers Cantata) among them. Just sayin’. 

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A last weekend at the Fringe: how did THAT happen? See some shows!

Posted on August 19, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

How on earth did it happen? Amazingly, it’s the final weekend of Destination Fringe. So much theatre, so little time.

True, the Fringe has been unfailing creative, non-stop, about not vanishing during The Great Pause. But at the start of the 41st annual edition how could we be sure it would still be there for us, in that big jostling summer extravaganza way we’ve known? Would The People come?

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The People have come. By Friday mid-afternoon, 86,000 tickets for 164 indoor shows had been sold. And somehow, suddenly, here we are, realizing that the curtain comes down Sunday night in 27 venues. Which means there’s still time to set forth and see some shows. 

For your last weekend of fringing, have a look at 12thnight.ca reviews (they’re all grouped under Fringe 2022). And have a peek at reviews of shows I enjoyed last Fringe (The Disney Delusion for one). Or plays like Even Gilchrist’s high-spirited, funny and poignant Re:Construct, which premiered earlier this very season. 

Buy yourself a green onion cake and let the  Fringe grapevine wrap itself around you; listen to the buzz. Hit the Late Night Cabaret, a showcase for Fringe artists letting their hair (farther) down. Or Die-Nasty, a serial improvised soap set at the Fringe. Or Gordon’s Big Bald Head: The Sincerest Form of Burglary, a trio of virtuosos who will improvise any Fringe show, picked at random from the program, based on the title and the show description.

Or just experiment, take a risk! See what you find. After all, there are shows for every taste, and tastes you didn’t even know you had. Hell, if you just can’t make the first move, give yourself over to the Fringe Randomizer to pick one for you, fringetheatre.ca/festival/randomizer. Geez, here’s irony. I gave it a whirl and it just picked Performance Review for me. 

No matter what, see a show, see several, see many this weekend. Get your mind blown. That’s what the Fringe is for. 

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And there’s more … Fringe holdovers next week in two locations

Posted on August 19, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Epidermis Circus, SNAFU. Photo by Jam Hamidi

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Oh no, it’s true. The Fringe ends Sunday. But if your GPS went wonky and you haven’t managed to arrive at Destination Fringe yet, or your might-have-seen’s haven’t quite materialized, regrets are premature. You’ve had a reprieve.  

Some of the most intriguing shows and performances at the 41st annual edition of the Edmonton Fringe are held-over next week, in two different curations in two different locales. 

KK Apple and Kerry Ipema in Six Chick Flicks or a Legally Blonde Pretty Woman Dirty Danced on the Beaches while writing a Notebook on the Titanic. Photo supplied.

The Holdover Series is presented by the Fringe itself, and it includes four shows, each with two performance in the Westbury Theatre (aka Stage 1) Wednesday through Saturday Aug. 24 to Aug. 27. The Pansy Cabaret, Guys in Disguise’s re-creation of the remarkably vivid queer and drag culture of a century ago in New York, is one. See the 12thnight review here.

Six Chick Flicks is a high-speed send-up of six faves, in 60 minutes, by two dexterous women. The 12thnight review is here. Epidermis Circus is the ingenious work of Victoria’s SNAFU, in which puppeteer Ingrid Hansen creates the entire cast of puppet characters from her own hands (and other body parts), plus mirrors and cameras. See the 12thnight review here. 

The fourth show in the Holdover Series, iHuman Studios Fringe Remix featuring Sample Cafe is an original, created specially for the occasion.  It’s a showcase for the participants of the Fringe’s now Youth Empowerment Program, and includes a live visual art installation featuring the Fringe’s new street art wall. It features Creeasian x Sampler Cafe, broken-beat specialists who’ve performed through the Fringe in the Indigenous péhonán series.  

For the full schedule, information, and tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

Celina Dean and Mathew Hulshof in The Margin of the Sky, Teatro La Quindicina, Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

At the Varscona Theatre (BYOV Stage 11 in Fringe lingo), Teatro La Quindicina’s season finale revival of the Stewart Lemoine beautifully unusual 2003 comedy The Margin of the Sky Wednesday is held over Aug. 23 through Sunday Aug. 28. There’s additional poignance attached to the run. The Margin of the Sky is the last time Teatro will ever be at the Fringe, where the company was born in 1982. Curtain time each night is 7 p.m., with an extra 2 p.m. matinee performance the Sunday of the run. Read the 12thnight review here. Tickets: teatroq.com.

Ghouls Ghouls Ghouls, Send in the Girls Burlesque/ House of Hush. Photo supplied.

Held-over at the Varscona, too, is Ghouls Ghouls Ghouls, an original Fringe creation that marries burlesque to the ghostly tradition, by the combined forces of Send in the Girls Burlesque and House of Hush. There are two performances, Aug. 25 and 26, 9:15 p.m.  Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

[Grindstone’s holdover plans have fallen through, reports that theatre.]

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Gathering dreams: Dreamers Cantata, a new revue from the Plain Janes. A Fringe review

Posted on August 19, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Alanna McPherson, Chelo Ledesma, Bella King in Dreamers Cantata, Plain Jane Theatre Company. Photo by db photographics

Dreamer’s Cantata – A New Revue (Stage 11, Varscona Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

What would we do without the Plain Janes? 

In addition to their excavations in the corners of the musical theatre repertoire where the forgotten or neglected, the over-produced or under- appreciated are gathering dust, this indie theatre company seeks out the new, the hip, the innovative. And we’re the beneficiaries.

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For this new revue, they’ve sought out witty, challenging work from contemporary musical theatre songwriters who are all women or gender non-conforming. Some names we know, others not (I speak for myself here on the ‘not’).  And in the selection they’ve curated, linked by wispy dreamer’s logic, characters  dream of the free-floating possibilities that can change a life. Some are hopeful but wary, or ambivalent, Others unleash full-throttle yearning, or rueful consideration of the gap between the dream and the Monday morning reality. 

Some dreamers, as we’re told in the narrative (by Ellen Chorley) are visionaries or fantasizers, others are shit-disturbers,  or off-centre thinkers who see things from unexpected angles. Or they’re just plain out to lunch. 

A revue is a particular kind of challenge: lifting a song off its original moorings in a musical and leaving it to the actor to make it live. A quartet of strong singers, including Larissa Poho who plays violin and ukulele and pianist Steven Greenfield, really know how to deliver them. Bella King sings Georgia Stitt’s The Wanting of You, from her Alphabet City Cycle, with such expressive force it makes your eyes water. “I wear it everywhere I go/ Just like a coat that doesn’t know/ That it’s supposed to keep me warm.”

Alanna McPherson bites into Stitt’s Blanket in July, the fury of a woman passed over, harboring tigerish thoughts, in a witty set of images, about her rival: “She is your great Aunt’s mildewed fur! She is the dashboard with a ding….” 

Poho has a fine time with Shaina Taub’s sassy shrug of a love song Might As Well. “Do you know you spend seven years of your life in the bathroom…. so I might as well spend some of the time with you…”). And Greenfield, from the keyboard, tucks into The Red Queen from Elizabeth Swados’s Alice in Concert.  “Time to purge,” he sings on the subject of life clutter. “Off with their head!” 

There’s  a lyrical song about roots (Sing Me Home) by Edmonton jazz artist Mallory Chipman, beautifully delivered by Poho. Waitress, by the surprising singer-songwriter Sarah Bareilles, serves up two high-contrast songs. King does a killer version of When He Sees Me, a captivating song about the fear of stepping outside the carapace of solitude to take a chance on love. And McPherson’s version of What Baking Can Do, a witty double-entendre of a song about setting forth your secret ingredients but disguised and with the edges crimped, is a delight.  

I loved the fun of Freedom from The Mad Ones — girls out on the open road driving, no destination, no map, car windows down, singing loud — delivered by a spirited trio.

There’s a downside to revues, of course. When you get to discover songs this unusual and smart,  you become a dreamer, too. They leave you wanting the whole musical.

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Insights honed to a knife edge: Horseface, a Fringe review

Posted on August 18, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Alex Dallas, Horseface, PKF Productions. Photo supplied

Horseface (Stage 14, La Cité Auditorium)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

At the heart of this whip-cracking solo show is a smile — wide, tight-lipped, ambiguously ulterior. This is what seething looks like when it’s smiling.

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In this funny sharp-eyed solo memoir by and starring Alex Dallas — Fringe audiences will remember her from the late lamented feminist comedy troupe Sensible Footwear — she is fuming. But since she’s English, which means operating under the mantra “don’t make a fuss,” there’s an air of cordiality — with homicidal top notes. Even as a little girl, Dallas recalls, she had recurring nightmares about wolves encircling the house “out there in the dark, biding their time.” And the older she got the more she understood what they meant.

The wolves are men — teachers, colleagues, boyfriends, friends of friends, strangers, university professors, celebrities at the Toronto Film Festival. “My mother never told me I would become prey,” she says, revisiting her childhood household, with its paternal secrets and stiff upper lips. And at the age of 64, she’s fed up and furious.  

Manspreading is the recurring trigger (euww, there’s a phrase I wish I hadn’t used) for this spirited review of the outrageous presumption of the predatory male. She unspools back to a seminal moment, at single-digit age, and the paunchy old school teacher who calls a little classmate friend “a stupid lump of a girl, a horseface.” The show was born at that moment; young Dallas stood up and told the bully to fuck off, and got ejected from class for her pains. 

It starts young, the closing in, the groping, the lewd come-ons, the assaults, the near-rapes — in metal work class, in restaurant kitchens in 5-star hotels, on public transportation, at Labour Party rallies for heaven’s sake. And Dallas is unsparing about reviewing the humiliating compliances required, in her ‘20s, to be “a cool girlfriend” and “pixie dream girl, funny, bubbly….” An expert storyteller, she makes of this chronicle, decade by decade, a wincing sort of black comedy. No wonder she’s “obsessed” with true crime. 

Anger isn’t very often a sustaining drive on the stage. But Dallas has a brisk, fierce delivery, contained in a crystalline English idiom (that smile is dangerously amusing). Which gets us back to manspreading and a recurring question in Horseface. Is it ever OK to kick a man in the balls?

Depends on the circumstances, that’s all I’ll say. 

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And put your hands together for … Jesus Teaches Us Things, a Fringe review

Posted on August 18, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Rebecca Merkley in Jesus Teaches Us Things, Dammitammy Productions. Photo supplied.

Jesus Teaches Us Things (Stage 16, Sue Paterson Theatre, Campus Saint Jean)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You’ve got to hand it to Jesus. He’s more famous for his exits, right? (well, exit singular really). But the guy really knows how to make a big entrance.

“We will we will save you!” Enter Jesus, rocking in Queen-ly fashion, tossing that big hair of his, exuding showbiz charisma right down to his Crocs. The crowd, all of us Grade 2s at the Christian Bible Assembly, put our hands together. His middle initial H is for Hardcore. 

Rebecca Merkley in Jesus Teaches Us Things, Dammitammy Productions. Photo supplied

In Rebecca Merkley’s very funny, inspired show, directed by Christine Lesiak, Jesus is stepping in as substitute teacher today; Pastor Greg (Adam Keefe), with his mild-mannered pastor’s air, and tithe bucket (10 per cent, just like an agent), hopes he’ll “stay on curriculum” this time. “Awwright!” A real old-school crowd-pleaser from way back, Jesus gets the rock rolling with a couple of quick miracles (the secret is safe with me). With the promise of more to come “Awwright, I could resurrect Meat Loaf….”

Hey, new dimensions here, maybe a re-branding? Jesus has a reputation for those morose, not to say depressive, gazes (not that you blame him) — with long straight listless hair to match. Who knew that he had so much showbiz energy and sparkle? Or a sense of humour? Or that his hair had so much body? 

Merkley, who has stage pizzaz for days, along with one of those big brash vaudeville comic-type voices, is an exuberant performer. She clowns around with the audience in a good-humoured all-embracing way. Her playground in Jesus Teaches Us Things is the territory, mined for smart satire, between religion and perky elementary school teaching techniques.

We’re improvising together. Hey, we learn a campfire action song, “crack the whip, chop the tree, hit the nail.” There’s a whole theology in that. There’s arts and crafts time. And Jesus takes questions from the class. Can you explain the trinity? asks one of my classmates. A tough one; Jesus puts in a call to his dad. Merkley is funny and very quick on the uptake.  

Keefe hits exactly the right notes as the bland pastor in the beige cardigan who puts a smile of well meaning-ness on his face at will, and is just a bit behind the beat. He pops in occasionally to check up on the lively substitute teacher. Are you learning anything? he asks us, with a hint of the accusatory. “Yes Yes!” we declare. “Luke 10, verse 3!” 

It all feels kind of celebratory. Which might even be the point.   

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Inner critics be gone! Ellie Heath takes charge in Fake n’ Bake, a Fringe review

Posted on August 17, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Ellie Heath in Fake n’ Bake, Edmonton Fringe 2022. Photo supplied.

Fake n’ Bake (Stage 28, Lorne Cardinal Theatre at the Roxy)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Here’s a solo show for a likeable, vivacious woman, who arrives onstage to tell us a story, wow, trailing her own personal Greek chorus. They’re an assortment of inner critics, glowing beacons of negativity, bad ideas, and hopelessness, happy to tell Ellie Heath how she screwed up, how “awkward, pathetic, and weak” she is. Self-esteem, be gone!

Ellie Heath, creator and star of Fake n’ Bake, Fringe 2022. Photo supplied.

They’re right there, shining through the outsized McBurger, McMilkshake and McFries cutouts onstage (designer: Tessa Stamp), reminding her helpfully that the obvious way to shed  weight from an already very delicate frame, no problem, is to eat even less and exercise even more. Inspirational, really, how they remind her of the childhood bullies who chanted “fake n’ bake, fake n’ bake, ass ass patty cake.” What are friends for, eh?

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In all the dialogues that Heath will have in her first solo-written play — Ellie and her dad, Ellie and a skeptical ER nurse, Ellie and doctors — it’s the inner critics circle who step up with immediate helpful answers to any confusion or anxiety. Substitute booze for food, add pills, start smoking.… That way you can get an eating disorder and a whole chain of addictions all at the same time. And then you can enhance your anxiety level, by your ingenuity at hiding all of the above. 

The repertoire of Fringe artists telling personal horror stories onstage is quite lengthy, to tell you the truth. What sets Fake n’ Bake and the production directed by Kristi Hansen apart is its inventive storytelling and vivid theatricality; it has a reason to be on a theatre stage. Despite its serious subject matter it’s downright fun and funny.

Heath is a terrific performer, as you already know if you’ve watched comedy sketches by the Heath and her Girl Brain cohorts. You really want her to win. She deserves to win. One day she looks that chorus of hers in the “eye” and takes charge. And you want to cheer.

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Celebrating a vibrant culture erased by homophobia: The Pansy Cabaret from Guys in Disguise, a Fringe review

Posted on August 17, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Daniel Belland and Zachary Parsons-Lozinski in The Pansy Cabaret, Guys in Disguise. Photo by Ian Jackson.

The Pansy Cabaret (Stage 27, Nancy Power Theatre at the Roxy)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You just can’t go through the world assuming that drag shows will have overtures that are collections of vintage jaunty Edwardian songs played from a grand piano by an expert pianist (Daniel Belland by name). And you can’t expect “poignant” to be called upon to describe a show with that many sequins and a giant stiletto onstage. 

A century ago, in New York, in pansy bars, music halls, and pansy cabarets, on Broadway stages and in vaudeville, queer and gender fluid performers were putting it out there, in funny, playful songs and cheeky comedy routines. They were the highest-paid entertainers of the time, in a showbiz town.

Bert Savoy, 1929, The Pansy Cabaret, Guys in Disguise. Photo supplied.

The Pansy Cabaret captures that period when joyful expression and freedom seemed possible, and welcome. Guys in Disguise’s Darrin Hagen, a queer history researcher of note, has unearthed this fascinating and, he thinks, little known story. And it’s performed by a real sparkler of an entertainer, Lilith Fair (aka Zachary Parsons-Lozinski). She captures the sound and cadence of a century ago, feelingly. And she also salts the betweens and sometimes the middles with very funny contemporary winks and asides. .

The show opens, for example, with an amazing ode for a lost love by one of the period’s biggest stars, Daryl Norman (his mom made his costumes). And it’s followed by Ray Bourbon’s cheery “I’m back in drag again….  I’ve never like squeezing into BVD’s or shorts. Unless they’re on someone else.” 

Zachary Parsons-Lozinski in The Pansy Cabaret. Photo supplied.

Ms. Fair, who’s lightning quick on the uptake, has fun with the audience, even in a formal theatre. And she annotates with explanations, the origins of camp for one — a drag queen shield for “gender warriors” as she put it. 

The end of Prohibition was the abrupt end of the Pansy Craze and all its richness. Suddenly, a vibrant, witty culture died; access to stages and bars for homosexuals was verboten, by law. In Europe the countdown to the lethal perils of Nazism was underway.

And the queer voices that had sung songs and cracked jokes, vanished; they were silenced in a single decade.

The Pansy Cabaret is a celebration of that giddy, brave culture, a window into what once was…. We’re in Alberta, a slender border away from the steady grind toward repression. The moment is now for us to make sure that legacy doesn’t slip away.  

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The underwater world of depression: Pressure, a Fringe review

Posted on August 17, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Sydney Williams in Pressure, Nextfest Arts Company. Photo supplied.

Pressure (Stage 28, Lorne Cardinal Theatre at the Roxy)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Grace has somehow lost her footing on terra firma. She’s underwater, immersed in another element, fathomless, paralyzing, pressurized, where the ordinary rules of engagement do not apply. She knows how to swim, but the temptation to let go once she’s submerged, is almost overwhelming.

Pressure, a new and convincingly tough-minded play by the up-and-comer Amanda Samuelson, premiering at the Fringe as Nextfest’s first official cross-festival foray, looks for a theatrical way to explore depression. And the spikiest of the insights it sets forth might well be that the loving concern of everyone around Grace (Sydney Williams) — her stellar mom (Sue Huff), her patient partner and soon-to-be ex Ricky (Meegan Sweet) —  who do everything right and are standing by, hands outstretched, are pressure too.

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The play is unflinching in its presentation of depression as a self-fed all-consuming relentlessly inward gaze. And in Emma Ryan’s production, you believe all the characters.  Williams, a terrific newcomer, doesn’t shy away from that harsh light. She’s very convincing. So is Huff as a mother whose veneer of cheerfulness gives way to whole depths of terror. Sweet is excellent, too, as an empathetic partner. The fabric of the play is a long un-chronological series of scenes that are not easy to watch, in which Grace, ever more brutally, dismisses love, treats everyone around her badly, worse and worse, and knows it. Get out, she tells her people. “I need to be alone.” Further justification for guilt and self-loathing. Signs of success in her chosen field? Grace’s play has been accepted for an Off-Off Broadway production in New York (New York!). But that’s pressure too. “I feel like I’m a fake.” 

Grace’s horoscopes (she’s looking for signs of validation in the universe) are one of the framing devices of the play. They get grimmer. Today: “you are a big fat failure.” Tomorrow: “avoid being too emotional, and being a burden on others.” They’re a veritable  archive of self-loathing en route to, well, self-removal from the scene.  The other framing device is a series of un-mailed letters to her long-absent father, an angry and vicious guy you glean, who behaved terribly to his family. Is his awfulness an inherited trait? Grace wonders.

Emma Ryan’s production lets this incremental declension into paralysis take its time; it’s full of thoughtful and ominous pauses and delayed reactions (Grace only says “bye” after someone has already closed the door).

The experience is a bit exhausting, in truth, because, like depression itself, it moves slowly and sneaks up on you glacially. Serious depression takes time, and Pressure is fulsome and ambitious that way. Can Grace turn things around? And how? Is there a bottom to misery that isn’t suicide?

There’s a mystery attached to those questions. Did I fully understand it? Actually, no. But you need to see it through. No pressure.

 

 

 

  

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Meowsa! Grindstone gets its paws all over the sacred Broadway canon: (Thunder)CATS, a Fringe review

Posted on August 17, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

(Thunder)CATS, Grindstone Theatre. Photo supplied.

(Thunder)CATS (Stage 18, Luther Centre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In this inspired piece of Cats burglary, the forces that brought us Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer get their paws all over a musical theatre blockbuster that’s had way more than nine lives. As the New York Times ads used to say,‘Cats is forever’. They weren’t wrong, grammatical considerations aside. And that’s more than enough Lycra to reach to the heavyside layer and back.

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Grindstone Theatre’s Byron Martin and Simon Abbott, with Curtis den Otter, who evidently don’t think kitten-size, have created a rumpus of an original musical satire that marries the Broadway mega-mouser musical that everyone in modern society has seen to the obscure (OK, obscure to me) ‘80s TV cartoon Thundercats. 

Who would think of doing this? The sheer lunacy is pretty irresistible, in truth. And the plot Martin and co have concocted — Thunderians fleeing their home planet, hanging out waiting for instructions from the ghost of their leader and choosing a ThunderCat to be renewed, or “re-animated for modern TV” or something — makes at least as much sense as the ‘storyline’ (to speak grandly of something about as substantial as a kibble) in Cats. And probably more. Additionally, it’s a lot funnier.

Anyhow, sense is not what either Cats (conclusion: “a cat is not a dog”), or this cleverly silly musical satire, is after. It’s about singing and dancing, and big ‘80s cat hair and Lycra cat butts. It’s about inventively dropping unmistakeable riffs from the Lloyd Webber Cats cat-alogue, with spiky, raunchy new lyrics. On display are sexy feline moves ramped up (choreographer Sarah Dowling), a big battle, stage fighting with a mystical sword. 

“Limelight, turn your face to the stage light…”  Yup, plus a memorable version of Mammaries from Stephanie Wolfe as the Grizabella of the piece, past her prime time poor thing, “only seen in old re-runs.” Donovan Workun is the much-awaited Jaga The Wise (oh, was that a spoiler?). Kudos to David Son, Owen Bishop, Paul-ford Manguelle, Kristin Unruh, and the unstoppable blue “mechanical cat” Brennan Campbell.  

It’s not easy to parody something that’s already silly; you’ve got to be smart to pull it off. The whole kit-and-caboodle can sing, and they can dance in way that fully justifies all that Lycra. The three-member band, led by Abbott, is hot. This one’s got its scratch marks all over “hit.” An outrage really, in the best possible ways.

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