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Grace Bokenfohr and Daphne Charrois in The Spotlight’s Shadow, Light in the Attic Productions. Photo supplied

The Spotlight’s Shadow (Stage 14, Café Bicyclette Stage at La Cité francophone)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

This ambitious new musical from Light in the Attic Productions getting its start at the Fringe is set backstage in a dressing room at the Ziegfeld Follies in the 1920s. And in a series of scenes, with exits onto the unseen stage, it chronicles a fraught love story: two Ziegfeld girls in love and up against it in a homophobic world.

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Vigilante secrecy is one option, a careful life in the shadows. The other is boldly stepping onto the well-lit public stage. The story, by the playwright team of Daphne Charrois and Dan Charrois, unfolds in a series of short scenes, many with songs. The theatrical conceit in Vanessa King’s production is that every exit from the scene is an entrance into a more public world — the rehearsal hall or the show stage. And every entrance into a scene in an atmospheric backstage “closet” is accompanied by a change in a glorious profusion of silky costumes (with great vintage underwear and shoes).

The story is meaningful in the history of gay rights (charted elsewhere at the Fringe in The Pansy Cabaret). But if the narrative arc feels leisurely instead of urgent, it’s perhaps because the scenes unroll with such steady regularity, along with repeated and predictable reversals in the dynamic between Nettie (Grace Bokenfohr) and Vera (Daphne Charrois). First one, then the other, wants to play it safe, with objections from the other. But there is  an escalation to a crucial moment of decision: honour love at any price, or figure out a conventional work-around. Both have heartbreak potential, as the musical recognizes, in a series of exchanges that carefully explain that very subject.

Maybe the script doesn’t quite trust the wordless power of these two appealing actors. But in this first outing of the musical the dialogue often sounds “written” rather than spoken by the characters. “Every word you write makes me realize what we could have if things were different.” Or “I cannot bear to see you in another’s arms.”

The period is evoked by musical references to the vintage 20s songbook (“let me call you sweetheart” and others). The original songs created by the playwrights (and well-sung by the cast) aim at this atmosphere, but there’s a certain sameness to them, and they tend to illustrate what we’ve just seen within the scenes. Honourable exception to the catchy finale anthem.

The premise and the story are worthwhile and have big drama potential. Future versions will, I’m sure, give this brand new musical the lustre it deserves.

Rain Matkin and Eli Yaschuk in Victor & Victoria’s Terrfying Tale of Terrible Things. Photo supplied.

Victor and Victoria’s Terrifying Tale Of Terrible Things (Stage 11, Varscona Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“What if we aren’t awake?” wonders Victor, half a set of Victorian twins, terrified and a bit thrilled by the nightmare he’s been having.

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In this clever, escalating thriller by Nathan Cuckow and Beth Graham, which plays after dark in the eerie Freudian landscape, Victor and his twin Victoria are inventing exhilarating ways to scare themselves. “Would it frighten you if I were undead?” The mysterious absence of their parents provides further fuel for their macabre childhood gambits. What if Mother and Father get lost in the woods? What if they’ve gone mad? “What if they don’t want to return?”

With Victoria in the lead, the games they devise to amuse themselves, even charades or their own creepy invention, In Mother’s Womb, have an unsettling Victorian morbidity about them. They discover, by accident?, a strange volume, containing a gruesome and ghostly story of love and abandonment, a terrible storm at sea, a vestal virgin waiting in vain in a lighthouse. And they begin to read. Gradually, their fears take on something more sinister, in fantasies that seem somehow familiar. And that little frisson of doubt in your own ribcage just won’t subside. Facing your fears might have a downside too.

The script, 15 years old now and a gem of gothic engineering, is executed with huge zest, style, skill and care in the production directed, designed, and lighted by Jim Guedo. The sound effects are stunning, too. And the perfectly interlocking performances of a pair of fine young actors, Eli Yaschuk and Rain Matkin, with matching bobs and sleeping smocks, are high-precision. Their quick-silver child-like energy, and their inventive physicality onstage, are fine-tuned. You can’t, you dare not, take your eyes off them.