While summer brings a glut of festivals of every stripe imaginable, the annual Fringe Festival of theatre stands out for its unpredictability and inventiveness. With a record 128 plays in dozens of venues (everything from the usual theatres to parking lots) over two weeks, half the fun is trying to get to as many different offerings as possible to try to suss out what’s hot and what’s not.
We sent the Varsity’s intrepid theatre reviewers to the 16th annual Fringe-here’s their take on the highlights (and low points) of the fest.
Jack and Jill
The Poor Alex Theatre
Rating: V
Haven’t been in a turbulent relationship recently? Are you missing the pointless strife and absurd negotiations that accentuate any ‘healthy’ relationship? Don’t mind being bored to tears by a poorly-written, badly-directed and blandly-acted script? You should have gone to see Jack and Jill. Billed as a “realistic multicultural revision of the Mother Goose rhyme,” which according to the program featured a “partial striptease,” the play finds a Korean-Canadian named Jack (Lee Kim) grappling with the consequences of his hasty marriage to Jill (Eileen Marlowe) who is… not Korean (making the show bi-cultural instead of multi-cultural, but whatever).
The script, penned by Kim, progresses in a painfully predictable manner as Jack must choose between the financial stability ensured by completing his doctorate in English, or pursuing his passion as a filmmaker. Jack and Jill’s new union is tested when Jill becomes pregnant and Jack idiotically decides to bring his ex on board to produce his film.
Nothing about this play was interesting in the slightest; even the “partial striptease” turned out to be G-rated. Choices made by director Jin Huh didn’t help at all: Jack’s constant stumbling over a particular portion of the carpet was supposed to be a comical, metaphorical representation of his emotional shortcomings and at the same time act as a symbolic reference to the Mother Goose nursery rhyme. However, Kim’s stumbles were so wooden, obviously rehearsed and totally unrealistic that the slapstick just wasn’t funny. Slapstick is supposed to be painful for the performer and funny to the audience-this whole play was the other way around.
[Best line: “What about my calamari?”]-JB
Simple.Celibate.Sober
The Poor Alex Theatre
Rating: Vv
In this one-woman show, veteran local actor Soo Garay plays Shawnya, a disillusioned 40-something with the heart and mind of a 25-year-old. A former exotic dancer, Shawnya has seen it all, and now from her small and barren apartment she retells and relives the trials and tribulations which brought her to this point, where all she wants is to be simple, celibate and yes, sober. Can you feel the tears of sympathy welling up in the corners of your eyes? Yeah, me neither.
Although Garay made good use of a set made up entirely of cardboard boxes, the production was repetitive and boring. Most of the writing was contrived, self-indulgent and oversexed for no good reason. Even after Garay exposed the heart and soul of this ‘tortured’ woman, I found myself unable to care about what happened to her in the end. If anything, I was anxious to watch her continue to unravel into total insanity after her back story caught up to the present day.
Unfortunately Garay stops just short of something truly interesting and instead continues her overly expository diatribe about the glory of her past self-destructions. Parts of this piece, directed by Nigel Shawn Williams, seemed under-rehearsed and disorganized, particularly the sound cues. The last time I checked, you pull the trigger of a gun and then it makes a bang, not the other way around.
[Best line: “I can make men do things.”]-JB
Inanna
Royal Saint Georges Quadrangle
Rating: VVVVV
Hats off to Claire Calnan. Her hour-and-a-half stage adaptation of an ancient Sumerian myth (one of the oldest known stories in existence) was funny, captivating, innovative and among the best shows at the 2004 Fringe. The production was one of this year’s Bring Your Own Venue (BYOV) shows, so the story of Inanna, the Goddess of Heaven and Earth, was told against the red brick walls of Royal Saint George’s College and in a myriad of surrounding areas visible from the quadrangle.
The myth follows Inanna’s ascension to power (at her wicked sister’s expense), her ambitious quest for special powers and a complacent suitor. About halfway through the play the audience was told to abandon their folding chairs and walk about 100 metres to a second location to view a section of the play set in the Sumerian underworld. After Inanna ascends back to the world of heaven and earth, the audience returned to their seats to watch the remainder of the play.
Besides the intelligent and entertaining adaptation, the show’s strongest point was the ensemble cast. When the multi-talented cast members were not playing one of their multiple roles they were busy adding to the play’s musical atmosphere, playing or singing music written for specifically for Inanna by actor/composer Robert Perrault. The vocal and percussion-heavy arrangements created an air of ancient timelessness and ranged from atmospheric subtleties to complete songs performed by the whole cast. Standout performances were given by the whole cast but extra praise for Gray Powell, whose hilarious performance as Dumuzi had the audience in stitches.
[Best Line: “Plough my vulva!”] -JB
Jailbait
Royal St. George Theatre- July 7, 3:30 p.m.
Rating: VV
The show began with a playback of a mother saying goodbye to her husband and daughter as she heads to work-her profession remains a mystery until later on. A great hook to start the play, but all of a sudden we moved into ‘reality’ and were presented with various characters as they performed monologues on why they were in the show-complete with audience interaction. This attempt at comedy, where pin-drop silence echoed loudly after each ‘joke’, was poorly written and badly paced.
Finally the ‘real’ show began and we met two of the characters (a hooker and a 12-year-old school girl) in a jail cell. At this point, the show begins to border on the edge of interesting, but again, the plodding pacing soon had me searching for the exit.
Unexpectedly, when all hope seemed to be lost, the 12-year-old girl revealed she is a teenage madam and is now 16. She continues flipping through her multiple personalities and ultimately we see the hooker and a hobo who has joined them in the cell are really undercover cops trying to trick the madam into a confession of her wrongdoings.
It’s difficult to blame the actors in a show where there is so little interesting writing to the point that the script is left with many holes of pointless banter. Cassie MacDonald as the hooker and Sonja-Kari Kristiansen as the school girl tried hard to salvage the show and were to some extent successful in entertaining the audience at certain points. Unfortunately, though, even the most talented actors cannot make up for a lack of compelling plot. – SH
The Passion of the Chris
Tarragon Theatre MainspaceJuly 7, 7 p.m.
Rating: VVVVV
This play brought to life the witty, contemporary writing of the talented Chris Durang. Durang’s short sketches manage to pull comedy out of seemingly everyday situations. The various sketches included a conversation between an optimistic woman and a pessimistic one; a happily married couple who upon hearing their baby cry spring for divorce; an unfit physical education teacher addressing his class; and a confrontation between a self-absorbed principal and one of his teachers, just to name a few. Durang takes these seemingly simple situations and juxtaposes them against absurdity.
Although credit goes to Durang for the content of the show, the successful execution of his work is most deservingly attributed to the director and the cast. A pleasant surprise was that there were no individual stand-out performances and no sketch was particularly more entertaining than another. Each actor was so strong in their various roles that the audience was not drawn to any specific person and could thus focus on the clever writing and the overall concept of each piece.
But the best part of this show was the perfect comedic timing coupled with the upbeat pacing, features which were not necessarily inherent in the script, but the purview of the actors and director alike. Many successful Fringe shows often get a chance for a wider remount following the festival-hopefully that’s also the path for this excellent production.
– SH
Light Explorations of a Darker Nature
Factory Theater Mainspace – July 10, 6 p.m.
Rating: VV
Remember those kids in high school, the pseudo-misfits dressed in expensive ‘mourning’ black, preening their existential despair before hopping into their mom’s mini-van for a family stop at Red Lobster? Hell, maybe you were one of those kids. Remember how dramatic it all seemed back then? And how silly it all looks now that you’ve escaped high school’s tunnel vision? If you haven’t quite mustered the motivation to make the transition to a more polychromatic worldview, Light Explorations might have offered a certain clarity of insight; unfortunately, for most of us, ‘light’ in this case would sadly mean ‘trifling’, rather than ‘illuminating’.
Confrontational, kinetic pairings, a focus on sharply sweeping motions-Edouard Lock has made a career of this sort of thing, but his La La La Human Steps company has the benefit of both the budget for and interest in multimedia innovation, not to mention serious star-power in its regular soloists. The Chimera Project was hampered by a late-night lounge soundtrack and a startling unevenness in its performers, ranging from bland butterfly type to a stiffly menacing behemoth. Only one of its members ever marshaled any real presence.
The performers’ unevenness was exacerbated by choreography that emphasizes distinct groupings-bodies bounced off each other but otherwise choreographic units remained strangely unrelated. Repetitive movement idioms and ‘glare and stare’ characterizations resulted in choreography as uncommunicative and sulky as the most sensitive of teenagers.-LC
Cuppa Joe
Artword Theater – July 11, 7 p.m.
Rating: VVVV
The spotlight catches her twisted at the front of the stage, legs one way, arms and face another. Her limbs akimbo and hair slightly wild, she’s an impressive opening visual; but it’s her expression’s ambiguity that makes the image, seemingly both frightened and perplexed at her own fear.
The image was a perfect preview to the common thread linking the three short pieces on the program, which shared a gestural language that alternated expansiveness with contraction, and capped stage-spanning sequences with abrupt halts and pauses. The effect was one of cautious, interrupted emotionality-passionate demonstrativeness interrupted by wary moments in which the external environment is reassessed for threat.
Which is not to say that the dancing was at all tentative; rather, it was like watching someone have an intense, visceral dialogue with themselves, only intermittently aware of a not necessarily sympathetic outside world.
Care was taken in organizing the hour so that the performance seemed to open gradually towards the audience, moving the mood from fear to pathos to whimsy without losing overall coherence. From the intimations of threat in a ‘Just a few broken columns’ it was ‘A short voyage’ to the cheerful ‘walking thru myself’, in which dancer Jolene Bailie stepped around a stage scattered with foam letters, flirting with the audience and finding wonder in her own body. The distance travelled from fear to cheer was apparent when the spotlight reappeared to signal conclusion, closing the show on a cursive ‘The End.’ LC
Madga’s Beauty Secrets
Tarragon Extra Space – July 8, 5 p.m.
Rating: Vv
Few of Magda’s secrets, whether beautiful or otherwise, could be much of a surprise to anyone who occasionally looks up at the world beyond the pages of Cosmo magazine. True beauty comes from inner goodness, people discriminate on the basis of appearance, a pretty face will not protect you, etc. etc.
The titular Magda, a Polish ex-spa owner who spent her adolescence doing forced labour on a German farm, relates her traumatic experiences in flashbacks during a twenty-fifth anniversary ‘Beauty Secrets’ lecture. Magda toils beside a Nazi Youth beauty, whose good looks are first a source of hurt to Magda and finally a source of danger to herself.
Appearance has potent power to hurt and heal, of course, particularly when viewed through gendered and racialized ideologies. Unfortunately, the theme was poorly served by the uninspired direction and appalling script-some lines are barely better than, “Gee, wow, that moisturizer reminds me of how scary the SS men were down on the farm!” Ugh.
The saving grace of the production was Corinne Conley, who managed to evince surprising conviction and believability in her cardboard character. But why? Why risk belittling the tragedy of the Holocaust with the trivialities of this play? Why pass up an opportunity to examine the politics of appearance in favour of an after-school historical special? What was an accomplished, talented actress doing in this mess? And what were the playwright, director and editor(s) of this play thinking, anyway? -LC
The Rap Canterbury Tales
St. Vladimir’s Theatre- July 5, 7 p.m.
Rating: VVV
In recent years the Fringe Festival has (oddly enough) become the stomping ground on which white boys can transfer classical tales into hip-hop and turn them into theatrical hits. Following on the success of the Job boys in years past, poet/actor Baba Brinkman turned to some truly old-school material and transformed Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales into a one-man rap show.
With a clever set-up that had Brinkman as a fanboy caught in the middle of a hip-hop battle in which a lineup of star rappers must tell a story-in freestyle-each of the famed tales are told in language that today’s Chaucerian scholars would find far more familiar than the original Middle English. Overall, the adaptation is sharp and amusing, but Brinkman is a little too… well, white, and lacks the charisma needed to fully pull off the whole urban vibe. The ending of the piece was also a let-down, with a lacklustre audience vote determining the final outcome. Not quite a hit, but entertaining nonetheless.-YS
Shakespeare’s Comic Olympics
Trinity College Field – July 9, 7 p.m.
Rating: VVV
Well-known on the Toronto Fringe circuit for their laugh-out-loud athletic twists on Shakespearean lore each summer, Upstart Crow Theatre definitely knows the meaning of good timing. With the Athens Summer Olympics fast approaching, what better time than now to turn the Bard’s comedies and romances into a comic romp through ingeniously conceived faux-Olympic events?
With teams from England, France, Italy and Scotland representing various plays (from the well-known As You Like It and A Midsummer’s Night Dream to the rarely performed Cymbeline) and their characters, a mammoth cast of over 30 actors raced across Trinity Field competing in events such as Infidelity Aquatics and Clown Decathlon, with UCSN (Upstart Crow Sports Network) commentators Jack Falstaff (Stephen Flett) and Ben Jonson (Rob McKee) helming the proceedings.
The banter is clever, with Shakespearean verse and modern pop-culture references easily intermingling, but the size of the cast and span of the field held the production back, causing projection issues for many of the actors and messy staging not quite suited to the theatre-in-the-round audience set-up. Still, local audiences should be sure to stay tuned for one last Upstart Crow sporting event next year, rumoured to be a trip to the rink as Shakespeare goes NHL. -YS
Cyrano de Bergerac
Trinity College Garden – July 9, 9 p.m.
Rating: VVVV
The busiest actor in this year’s festival, Chris Coculuzzi not only directed and helped conceive the skits for Shakespeare’s Comic Olympics, but also took on the leading role in Red Letter Theatre’s edited version of the Edmond Rostand classic Cyrano de Bergerac-with less than an hour between shows. No one could guess it from his performance, a tour-de-force emotional roller coaster that captured the heart and soul of the lovelorn hero with the nose as long as his sword. While the rest of the cast, particularly Roxanne Deans as Roxane, the woman Cyrano loves from afar, paled next to Coculuzzi, his star turn elevated the production from a solid rehash of an oft-performed tale to a must-see, one of the strongest of this year’s Fringe.-YS
One Man Lord of the Rings
Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse- July 10, 4:30 p.m.
Rating: VVVVV
It takes a unique combination of salient factors to produce a good Fringe show-talented, charismatic performers, solid writing and directing, and, most of all, material that captures the imagination of an intelligent and discerning audience. Charles Ross, best known on the Fringe circuit for his One-Man Star Wars Trilogy, returned to the Fringe with a one-man show based on another trilogy that has recently captured the hearts and minds of moviegoers across the world-J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
The fact that this show became the hit of Fringe 2004 almost instantly, with completely sold-out shows and five-hour lineups for tickets, is a testament to Ross’ brilliance, both as a writer and as an actor, and his ability to pare Tolkien’s story, as told in Peter Jackson’s acclaimed films, down to its beating heart.
Over one hour, Ross commanded the stage, playing every character, humming through bits of soundtrack, creating sound effects and settings with his voice and body alone. His characterization was bang-on, particularly his take on the memorable oddball character Gollum, and his story, though obviously a bare-bones version, poked fun at plot and characters while respecting its emotional core.
After an instantaneous and prolonged standing ovation, Ross further endeared himself to his captive audience with a sweet little speech urging them to always follow their dreams. Tolkien himself would have been proud.-YS
