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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‘There’s always a heartbeat’: the original magic of Salsa Lesson, a Fringe review

Posted on August 16, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

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

Salsa Lesson (Stage 25, Spotlight Cabaret)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It may be true, as the singer tells us, that “there’s always a heartbeat even when you can’t hear it.” But you can, you can…. The irresistible rhythms of salsa pulse through this enchanting original multi-lingual “storytelling concert” from Stardust Players (Chasing Willie Nelson, Forget Me Not). 

The joint creation of the multi-talented actor/singer-songwriter Andrea House and jazz composer/pianist Chris Andrew, Salsa Lesson is a story that’s both expansively open-ended and as intensely precise as the houses on your block of your junior high classmates. It’s something you could never expect to find anywhere at the Fringe; you just have to be happy when you do.

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Salsa Lesson is of this place. Its music (and musicians and dancers) are cross-cultural. Its story has Edmonton locales, the drive past 23rd to Millwoods, past the Superstore and the MacDonalds…. Performed in Spanish mostly but also French, and English by House — an artist who wraps her supple voice easily around jazz, Latin, blues — the songs emerge in a strangely apt way in a story about divorce, aging, middle-aged uncertainty, chances lost, memories unearthed. And the story is told, in a kind of rhyming spoken-word rap — the program calls it, amusingly, “mom-rap” — to a musical score.  

The hot passionate pulse of salsa is led by the superb three-member band — pianist Andrew, percussionist Raul Gomez Tabera and bassist Rubim De Toledo — and accompanied by dancer/choreographer Brittany Ward partnering with guests from the Latin dance community. It heightens the stakes, and emotional possibilities, of a tale that the teller fears is just a cliché: crappy childhood, middled-aged, cheating husband, younger woman, “shit happens,” divorce … you know. “I’m a predictable stereotype,” she tells us. “I just really over-shared there.” 

The storyteller’s kids post her plight online behind her back— “our mom is sad and needs a boyfriend.” And she meets a Chilean man that way. Oscar tells her that they went to junior high together and he was in love with her. And here’s the spark of ignition: a friend with “a Groupon coupon” propels her into a salsa class. “I don’t want to feel bad no more … I don’t want to be sad no more.”

The writing is witty, the rhymes are fun, the spirit is rueful, the memories of her awkward junior high self are wincingly funny. “This isn’t our first rodeo,” she says of a brave foray with a girlfriend to a junior high Valentine’s Dance, in borrowed boobs. “It’s our second.”

Then passionate, emotionally exuberant Spanish songs of love, longing, and heartbreak, erupt and frame things in moonlight.  

Director Davina Stewart figures out how to put it all together, and House’s performance is both sly and open-hearted. You’ll feel lucky to be there.  

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A girls weekend in Sin City: what could go wrong? Destination Vegas, a Fringe review

Posted on August 16, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Destination Vegas, Whizgiggling Productions. Photo by Justin Gambin.

Destination Vegas (Stage 1, Westbury Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The premise of Trevor Schmidt’s new comedy is right there, amusingly (in front of a cactus) for all the world to see, from the first lights-up moment of Destination Vegas. 

Three women, in their sparkly on-the-town party dresses, are onstage, handcuffed together. Now there’s a tickling sort of stagecraft challenge for the playwright, who also directs this Whizgiggling production. An action adventure in which the participants are chained together, start to finish?

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It implies, strongly, that the question ‘what could go wrong?’ has already been answered. And it hints, also quite strongly, that what happens in Vegas does indeed stay in Vegas. They’re in the middle of the desert in the middle of the night, digging a shallow grave big enough for three, highly motivated by a man with a gun. (Gratuitous life coach suggestion: maybe they should have seen a Cirque du Soleil show instead of hitting the casino). 

It seemed like a good idea at the time, three employees of Pennywise grocery deciding to have a girls weekend in Sin City to use up their vacation time owing before it’s yanked by the forces of conglomerate capitalism. 

Paula (Cheryl Jameson), who has an enigmatic tattoo possibly acquired behind bars, is a dab hand with numbers (and, you know, counting things, like money or maybe cards); the getaway is her idea. Charmaine (Kristin Johnston) is a Russian emigré with an exotic accent, and a dark history as a serial widow. She’s looking for Mr. Next while “I’m still young and very beautiful.” 

Marcie (Michelle Todd) is the naif of the trio, a mom loathe to leave the twins with her hubbie. But hey, it’s not her first Vegas rodeo. “I used to be a dancer in a Vegas magic show,” she reveals. Her dimbulb reactions to every dark development, accompanied by “shut up Marcie!” from Paula, have a hilarity all their own. 

Destination Vegas is a sort of backward-spooling caper, that involves blackjack tables and sinister guys named Sting or Snake. The plot doesn’t have the intricacy of last Fringe’s Whizgiggling production, Trevor Schmidt’s Destination Wedding.   

It’s light and fun, though. The writing is funny. The staging of necessity involves amusing choreography (it pretty much nails the concept “ensemble”). And the interplay of three skilled actors is something entertaining to seek out, like a mai tai with an umbrella.

I mean, no one goes to Vegas for King Lear, right?   

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From the shower into the fray: Underbelly, a Fringe review

Posted on August 16, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Nayana Fielkov in Underbelly, Ragmop Theatre. Photo supplied.

Underbelly (Stage 4, Walterdale Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Some days are like that, don’t you find? What starts gaily with singing in the shower has a way of turning into a day when your monster hat becomes an actual monster, swallows you, and horks you out whole with mighty retches of digestive turmoil.

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Come to think of it, Underbelly is a clown show with an oral fixation. In the course of this mouth-centric free-associative fantasy by and starring the malleable clown Nayana Fielkov of Ragmop Theatre, singing turns into gargling. In magnified projections on the light-up shower curtain that’s the stage centrepiece, a formidable range of jagged teeth will be brushed, in close-up. Lipstick will be applied slo-mo to lips that become giant kissy lips. A nose is picked with a toilet brush. Miles of string will emerge from a mouth. Severed limbs will be gobbled up. Light-up eyes will be disgorged. Finger food that’s  fingers will be consumed. Inner rumblings and retching and spewing are a major part of the soundtrack.

The doorbell rings from time to time. Is a hot date at hand? “Coming!” trills our protagonist who doesn’t, distracted by her own fantasies. 

Clowns seem to be, by nature, free-associaters. By the time our protagonist arrives onstage in the flesh from behind the shower curtain after a lengthy set-up, the toilet brush that’s been up a nostril will become a  microphone, and red lipstick and shower-singing will transform her into a Frenchified chanteuse (gargling turns into those sexy Piaf rrrrr’s). Or the brush is a conductor’s baton and the audience will turn into the orchestra.

In Underbelly, the performer, playful and inventive as she is, works awfully hard at engaging the audience. Too hard, maybe. It’s one thing to acknowledge the audience, but the more the character labours to involve us, the more she seems to step outside the fantasy framework of the show. And the more we see it as a best-of demo series of clownly inventions. 

They’re well done, of course; Underbelly is a chance to see an expert clown at work. And there’s amusement in that.  

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Redemption in the loop of time: How I Met My Mother, a Fringe review

Posted on August 15, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Jon Paterson, How I Met My Mother. Photo supplied.

How I Met My Mother (Stage 16, Sue Paterson Theatre at Campus Saint-Jean

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight,ca

As we know from the moment in history we’ve touched down in, something’s gone haywire with time. It stands perfectly still, awaiting the Restart button. Or it loops backwards, takes its own timeout, then lurches forward. Or else it’s weirdly compressed into the present moment.

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All of these things happen in Jon Paterson’s How I Met My Mother. It’s the first solo show the 25-year Fringe veteran has ever written by himself, and it’s a show for two. In it he tells the most personal of stories: how his unruly teenager self, desperate to be bad-ass cool, cruelly tests the remarkable patience of his long-suffering mom. And how that self-centred kid, who’d get so mad he punched holes in the wall when the Winnipeg Jets lost to the Oilers, eventually became his mother’s care-giver for a time when she was stricken with early onset dementia. 

It’s a story of redemption. And the charismatic Paterson, who’s always had a dangerous energy onstage, doesn’t spare his younger self, as he recounts, in vivid detail, his transgressions. Lies, food fights, joy rides, and worse…. In the production directed by Vanessa Quesnelle, he re-creates a party that turned out to be a nightmare of destruction. 

In a counterpoint of scenes, these tales of a terrible youth alternate with scenes in which Paterson struggles to be a care-giver and make amends. By that time he’s an actor on the Fringe circuit — “trying to make a living as an independent theatre artist, don’t laugh” — and the only person in his family who doesn’t have A Real Job. One of the touching things about How I Met My Mother is seeing how an  artist applies his creative wits to making the world entertaining for someone whose abilities to understand and react are on the decline. Little things, like a trip to Starbucks, grow as his mom’s frontiers shrink. And there’s real valiance in Paterson’s effort to improvise small-scale excitement in an ever-flatter landscape of a life. 

Which returns us to the subject of time. As it slows down to an eternal present moment for Paterson’s mother, whose memory bank, emptied of short-term content, flips directly into the past long-gone, his own memories unspool. They return again and again to family Christmases, and to the Fringe. 

Paterson’s mom, his biggest supporter, stage managed, promoted, helped with his productions across the country. And now, it transpires, we’re in a Paterson show at the Fringe, sitting in the Sue Paterson Theatre at the College Saint-Jean, named after her. It’s a conjuring turn, Paterson’s homage to the mom he regained only to lose her again in the wordless mists of dementia. She seems to have returned to the theatre; he thinks so.

You won’t get a warmer welcome into a theatre anywhere at the Fringe.   

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Madcap and moving: The Margin of the Sky from Teatro, a Fringe review

Posted on August 15, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

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

The Margin of the Sky (Stage 11, Varscona Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s somehow fitting that this 2003 Stewart Lemoine comedy about the mystery of inspiration and creation is revived by Teatro La Quindicina as the finale of their 40th anniversary season, (and their last appearance at the festival where they were born).

The Margin of the Sky, one of my favourite Lemoines, follows its characters through a dizzying day of  impulsive adventure in L.A., land of perfect sunsets on the edge of the world, concepts waiting to be pitched, dazzling possibilities. It starts in chance encounters.

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A woman sits on a park bench, by chance chokes on a chicken salad sandwich, and gets rescued by chance by a passing Canadian. He is, by chance, a playwright struggling to write a screenplay for his L.A. soap star brother-in-law. And in the course of the day with his new friend Alice (Jana O’Connor), Leo (Mathew Hulshof) will make a huge discovery about the infinite horizons of his work. 

Meanwhile, the soap star (Josh Dean), sitting in a chiropractor’s office, has his mind blown by a piece of music and the stranger (Celina Dean) who provides it via her earphones. He isn’t used to eye-watering experiences, or being “overwhelmed.” 

Josh Dean in The Margin of the Sky, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

That the music is Gurrelieder, a monumental orchestral setting by the German composer Arnold Schoenberg of a Danish poem that gives the play its title, is pure Lemoine. And its lush emotional vastness is a life-changer in different ways for the quartet of characters, in the course of a day that feels heightened somehow, giddy, a bit like a dream, or a hallucination. The margaritas in Santa Monica are real, though, not that slushy kind.

It’s an expansion of vision, I guess, the possibility of seeing the world from other, perspectives or other worlds beyond — an exchange of sunglasses over sunset drinks, as one scene sets it forth. 

In a terrific and subtle comic performance by Hulshof, Leo gradually discovers that his fine-tuned Canadian sense of irony will only get you so far in creation. (note to self: something to ponder at the Fringe). Dean is very funny, too, as a star, just a bit fatuous in his assumptions and used to the easy path through the world of daytime television and fandom. He gets diverted off the glossy main route, and he’s startled by his own capacity for not being shallow.  

Mathew Hulshof and Jana O’Conner in The Margin of the Sky, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

The women are a delightful contrast in performances from O’Connor and Celina Dean: Alice the good-natured bookkeeper whose natural reaction is to say yes to adventure and be wonderstruck; Sheila the crisper high-end dress shop owner whose LA. self-possession gets a little shake-up, too. When Leo, in a magical moment of transformation, declares them “absurdly lovely,” he’s dead serious.

The ending is a framing surprise, so I won’t spoil it. I’ll just tell you that it makes you understand the excellent adventure in a new way. It’s madcap and it’s moving, like those margaritas, “serious drinks in whimsical glasses.” Like Spence your eyes will be shiny.   

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The affectionate speedy fun of Six Chick Flicks in 60 minutes, a Fringe review

Posted on August 15, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

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.

Six Chick Flicks or a Legally Blonde Pretty Woman Dirty Danced on the Beaches while writing a Notebook on the Titanic (Stage 1, Westbury Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If you’re under the impression that the term “chick flick” is a gold seal of approval for movie greatness, it’s possible that your mind will be blown by Six Chick Flicks….. What? No! You mean that there are romance narrative loopholes, cornball sexist clichés, and melodramatic improbabilities in chick flicks we know and like and re-watch? Who knew?

For everyone else, however, the fun of this high-speed two-person send-up of six favourites is mainly in the comic sparkle of its likeable performers (Kerry Ipema and KK Apple), the precise physicality of their character transformations, and the stage virtuosity involved in delivering half a dozen annotated re-enactments in 60 minutes.

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The script by Ipema and TJ Dawe is amusing in pointing out what we already know: big box-office movie successes about women written by men don’t have anything to do with a woman’s lived experience (whoa, there’s a shocker). This “analysis” of the male perspective is woven, at breakneck speed, into the physical comedy.

Six Chick Flicks… traces The Rose Effect, christened in honour of the Kate Winslet character in Titanic (who’s OK with posing nude and has an orgasm the very first time she has sex) through the six movies. There’s a through-line in the six-pack, as they note cheerfully, in “orgasms and unrealistic expectations.” a succinct summing up of the male gaze in Hollywood.

Ipema and Apple amplify in zesty montage sequences: “Death Montage,” “Falling in Love Montage,” “Shopping Montage.” And, speaking of shopping, sometimes the heroines get to speak for themselves. Legally Blonde’s Elle, for example, who’s articulate since she’s a lawyer, explains the gist of her situation, a real time-saver: “I’m blonde, I’m rich, I’m pretty, and I’m blonde.” 

The celebrated Dirty Dancing lift is re-created for our entertainment, along with iconic moments in all their absurdity, through women’s eyes. The show stops for a moment to consider the terrible social implications of the Roe v. Wade decision before it resumes. 

We’re not talking satire here, or parody. As in Seinfeldian comedy, the show’s playground is the familiar: movies whose faults we already know, shrug off, and like anyway. An affectionate and entertaining send-up created in the spirit of fun. Dénouement: the  audience roars to their feet.   

 

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Playful and teasing, absurd and serious: White Guy On Stage Talking, a Fringe review

Posted on August 14, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

White Guy On Stage Talking. Photo supplied.

White Guy On Stage Talking (Stage 4, Walterdale Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Surprise! Here’s an entertainingly hyperactive, inventive performance piece that takes live theatre at its word.

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C’mon, there’s is no known way to predict what will happen next when a 21-scene hour-long show starts with Ass Song, starring a butt puppet smoking to Don’t Rain On My Parade (great moments in musical theatre), and includes Souls For Sale (audience collaboration on a list of things you’d sell your soul for), and a comic meditation on the sketchy service at The Last Supper. No wine (supply chain issues), only water.  

White Guy On Stage Talking, starring Jack Tkaczyk and Meegan Sweet, is, title notwithstanding, far from a lecture or a monologue. It’s a barrage of theatrical sass and ‘trigger warnings’ come to life,  before your very eyes. It’s both literal-minded and playful, smart and dumb, teasing and serious, goofball and satirical —sometimes in the same scene. The pair onstage touch down on, or bounce around on, or lift off from, a wide assortment of thoughts about modern life, its habits, its irritations, its absurdities and specious claims, its bullshit. 

And this is fun. 

There’s shame and catharsis, both involving easy-going audience participation (with champagne as a reward). It’s theatrical free-association at a sensory-overload buffet. In Happy Pride, scene 5, you can hear the vicious anti-tran rant written to Canmore Pride by the owner of disgraced Valbello Gourmet Foods. In scene 7, Creative Process, an amusing little piece of self-mockery from theatre artists, Sweet gets wrapped in plastic gauze, as Tkaczyk in a pumpkin head does close-up eye contact with the folks in the first row. 

I don’t want to give away the show’s vision of Heaven, except to say it involves a plastic swimming pool and an electric toaster. As in surrealist imagery, you pretty much have to unhinge the lobe of your brain that craves meaning, then hook it back up for scenes that make fun of fatuous modern practices like makeovers, or wonder about the queasiness that Juliet is 13 when she hooks up with Romeo.  

And modern theatre, you know, like White Guy On Stage Talking, takes some shivs too. How can you resist the spirit of performance art that water-boards “first-person theatre” in a pool. “Where’s the plot?” the torturer demands to know. “How will people know the meaning?” 

Have yourself a Fringe experience, and meaning will kind of seep into you. Don’t take anyone prissy.   

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The quest for the inner goddess: Guys in Disguise’s Crack in the Mirror, a Fringe review

Posted on August 14, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Trevor Schmidt, Jake Tkaczyk, Jason Hardwick in Crack in the Mirror, Guys in Disguise. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Crack in the Mirror (Stage 11, Varscona Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In honour of their 35th year at the Fringe, Guys in Disguise, who cast their sharp-eyed long-lashed gaze on women’s roles, make a return to suburbia, the traditional home turf of the married, for the third of their Orchard Crescent trilogy. Crack in the Mirror, by the Guys in Disguise team of Darrin Hagen and Trevor Schmidt, is the funniest (and most insightful) of them all.

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The trilogy began in the ‘50s with a prickly comedy of nuclear paranoia Prepare For The Worst. The formidable ‘60s wedding planner mother in Don’t Frown At The Gown undertook to dispense lessons in the social proprieties of that decade. It ended with a mysteriously unapologetic single bridal shop owner saying “There’s a new kind of modern woman coming.”  

And now it’s 1977 and that new modern woman is struggling to emerge from the suburban girdle, so to speak. That’s what ladies support groups are for. And at the meeting of the Ladies Auxiliary of Orchard Crescent the apprehensive participants are about to undertake an early feminist ritual. “Mirror mirror on the floor,” reclaim your inner goddess, says the feminist manual. And objects in the mirror, as a character will later observe, are closer than they appear. 

Feminism approaches, but the suburban battlements are well-fortified. Melanie (Schmidt), the beleaguered mother of five teenage boys (she answers the phone “lady of the house”), is the big-haired pill-popper hostess who knows exactly what to do with Pillsbury crescent rolls. “Everyone loves it when I’m in charge of snacks.”

Ruth (Jason Hardwick), a divorcée, arrives shorn at both ends just to spite “that bastard Larry.” She is woman, hear her roar. Ginger (Jake Tkaczyk) is a widow (the respectable way to be single), back from the Betty Ford, and strictly old school. “You’re so pretty you don’t need to be a lesbian,” she tells Ruth, who’s reported an abortive date with one Ray who turned out, alas, to be Rae, and A Girl. Mrs. Bradley hasn’t heard of Gloria Steinem, but wonders if she lives on the cul-de-sac.  

Guys in Disguise has never met an entendre they could resist doubling, and the script has its own giddy sense of humour. There’s a  scene built entirely on extreme pronoun entanglement, a la ‘who’s on first?’. You’ll laugh, I know it.   

The performances in Trevor Schmidt’s production will crack you up. Schmidt is the perpetually dazed Melanie, with her whispery little girl voice and instinct for conciliation. Her double-takes and pauses for reassessment are amusing in themselves. Hardwick’s Ruth talks loud, trying to be all brave and modern and brash because she craves validation for splitting with “that bastard Larry.” 

And, in a performance of inspired deadpan, statuesque Tkaczyk is Ginger, trotting with a forward lean on her high heels, genuinely perplexed by modern developments in thinking. And also modern developments in sitting: watching Ginger try to figure out how to sit on throw cushions is a little gem of physical comedy. 

Crack in the Mirror treats her affectionately though. The men of Orchard Crescent, wherever they are, should be very nervous.   

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