| Last year, when I first pitched an article profiling Calgary artists at the Edmonton Fringe Festival, my editor jumped at the idea. After all, in the absence of Calgary’s own version, the second-largest Fringe in the world had been an important showcase for Calgary artists like One Yellow Rabbit since 1982.
An infectious atmosphere of bite-sized theatre, street performances, nomadic vendors and greasy treats (curry and sno-cones and donuts, oh my!), the Edmonton Fringe was a heady experience. As my all-too-brief time at the festival wrapped up, I began anticipating the next year.
However, that same year, a few months later, something fundamental was announced: Calgary suddenly had its own Fringe.
THE CALGARY FRINGE FESTIVAL
Calgary’s Fringe may be a smaller affair than its more established Edmonton counterpart (wholly understandable, given that Calgary was beginning from scratch, while Edmonton’s Fringe is currently celebrating its 25th anniversary), but with 36 productions in four venues, including the Epcor Centre and the converted church that serves as the Calgary Opera’s rehearsal space, it was still a daunting task to take it all in. In its first year, our Fringe already boasted about one third as many theatre productions as Edmonton’s, hailing from all around North America. Not half bad.
Do You Bite Your Thumb at Me Sir?!
Company: THEATREboom (Calgary)
It seems only appropriate that, with a local Fringe finally up and running, THEATREboom would remount a hometown production that has been a favourite addition to Mount Royal College’s Shakespeare in the Park and a successful touring show. Combining the best of Shakespeare’s fight scenes, Do You Bite Your Thumb at Me Sir?! is a funny, self-conscious romp that sees Joel Smith and Evan Rothery trying to improve Patrick MacEachern’s Hamlet by driving him as insane as the mad Dane himself. Action-packed, sharply comic and leavened with audience participation, Calgary audiences are lucky that a show with legs like these stayed put.
Drinking in America
Company: Fong Shui Productions (Calgary)
For those who missed David Trimble’s Betty-winning performance in Eric Bogosian’s 20-year-old one-man show (myself included), the Fringe remount was a perfect reminder of why Trimble is unquestionably one of Calgary’s finest talents. Leaping through 12 monologues on the excess and tragedies of the American Dream, this meaty piece of theatre was a perfect showcase for Trimble’s range and endearing humanity, even when his face was occasionally obscured by the night’s technical difficulties.
Josie with the Toes
Company: LoCO Productions (Toronto)
Lisa Olafson is, in a word, adorable – as the garbage-can-dwelling clown, Josie, her one-woman show is genuinely touching and undeniably funny. Following Josie from the breakup of her once-perfect relationship through her search for meaning over the insistent couch potato naggings of her hand puppet alter ego, Josie With the Toes weaves comedy, everyday angst, and a healthy dose of singing and ukulele music into a delightful 50 minutes.
Milo’s Dream
Company: Charming Puppet Productions (Calgary)
The Fringe is unjuried and uncensored. Inevitably, at least one show will prove it.
Offering the siren song of shadow puppetry and live music, Milo’s Dream was certainly the most agonizing 30 minutes of Calgary’s Fringe, as Nadine Charman stumbled tonelessly through a ridiculous canine dream sequence whose prose played like an acid trip recounted by an inept teenaged poet. Though, visually, the production showed promise, its principal saving grace was that it concluded 20 minutes early.
P.S. 69
Company: Watson Arts (New York)
Based on creator and performer Susan Jeremy’s real-life experiences as a New York City substitute teacher, P.S. 69 sees Jeremy assume the roles of teachers and students in this story of personal development and, well, the many familiar tropes we’ve come to expect from tales of struggling teachers and struggling students. Thankfully, in addition to being a consummate professional (continuing the show in the Martha Cohen lobby after an errant stage light ignited a curtain in the Motel Theatre across the hall), Jeremy is a performer with the range to bring life to the halls of P.S. 69.
Rearview
Playwright: Tyler Séguin
The festival’s sole bring your own venue (BYOV), Rearview’s inventive, site-specific premise places four people at a time in a moving vehicle. And yet, though the first sound of an actor locked in the trunk is invigorating, the next 10 minutes are an interminable sermon (literally), playing what might otherwise be an inventive comic premise into an overwrought drama. At $10 a ticket for 10 minutes of tedium, the show’s only redeeming quality is its inventive medium.
Tippi Seagram’s Happy Hour
Company: Colette Kendall
As her martini-sipping, movie star alter-ego, Tippi Seagram, Colette Kendall provides an evening of recollections and helpful advice for audience members. Having trouble feeding your child? Ship him overseas and feed him for pennies a day!
It’s in-character comedy served with a shot of kitsch that hits more often than it misses – light enough to be sipped as either Fringe aperitif or nightcap.
CALGARY AND EDMONTON: A TALE OF TWO FRINGES
Now that Calgary’s own Fringe comes a scant week before Edmonton’s, overlapping the Edmonton Fringe’s first weekend (and Calgary’s last), mirrored shows between the two festivals are inevitable. Shows will open in Calgary, proving themselves or flopping before they make their way to the biggest game in the province.
Death: A Comedy (In Five Stages)
Company: Redhanded (in collaboration with Random Beings) (Toronto/Calgary)
From 14th century Tibet to ancient Egypt, deathologists Logi (Nicola Elson) and Sprite (Melanie Windle) are ritualists for hire, inducting the dead into the afterlife with style. While Logi searches for clues on a quest that will ultimately lead her to accept a death that renders the rest of the production incongruous, the audience is left to watch Elson and Windle fill the stage with pantomimed drudgery – providing laughs that are not nearly as morbid as the title suggests.
Dragonfly: Episode IV Identity
Company: Theatre of the Living Statue (Calgary)
Melding the esthetics of a superhero world with the indulgent theatrics of dance, Dragonfly explores desire and humanity in a love story between two superpowered seekers: Dragonfly (Anita Miotti) and The Sentimental Thief (David van Belle). Evocative and surreal, Miotti’s choreography and Jonathan Lewis’s soundscape lend Dragonfly an arresting presence, albeit one that is sometimes weighed down by its overwrought script.
Jesus Christ: The Lost Years
Company: Monster Theatre (Vancouver)
If there is ever a surefire Fringe bet, it is Monster Theatre. A company that thrives in the confined space of a 50-minute show, Monster Theatre’s latest production addresses the untold story of Jesus’ early life with an irreverence and quick wit that justifiably brought audiences in droves. Shifting fluidly between characters, unaided by any props save a hilariously conjoined three-wisemen puppet, Ryan Gladstone and Katherine Sanders effect a transformation that is nothing short of a comic miracle.
Jihad Me at Hello
Company: Obscene But Not Heard (Calgary)
With a democratic tactlessness sure to offend every audience member on some level, Obscene But Not Heard’s latest sketch comedy show refuses to pull any punches. Any sketch troupe with the cajones to have a group of ersatz Jihadists go on an extended riff on the notion of martyrdom’s virginal rewards deserves every laugh they can squeeze out of a subsequent tangent into ball-licking. (And any audience members not prepared for Calgary’s leading sketch troupe deserve every shocked moment.)
See Bob Run
Company: Burn in Full Theatre (Edmonton)
Acclaimed Canadian playwright Daniel McIvor’s first play, See Bob Run, is a picaresque portrait of the play’s eponymous Bob (Elena Porter) and her escape toward the water where she is sure her abusive father is waiting. Melding fantasy and the stark reality of her world (embodied by the blazing headlights of Clinton Carew’s striking set design), Burn in Full Theatre’s production is haunting, powerful, and intimate.
The Aleatory Project: an experiment in fate
Company: Thought For Food (Toronto)
Though playwright and performer Helen Juvonen is upstaged by the considerable presence of Alan Lee, her "experiment" (what is the artistic obsession with appropriating that term?) in randomized theatre is nonetheless intriguing. Laced with metatextual homages to its own chance-driven conceit, The Aleatory Project is a play concerned with and governed by fate, even if much of its narrative drive is spent swirling in circles.
Maestropiece: A Severely Normal Show
Company: Inside Out Theatre (Calgary)
For the disabled actors of Inside Out Theatre, theatre is an outlet to improve self-esteem and self-discipline through a creative outlet. Maestropiece, for instance, addresses the often-unwelcome intrusion of those trying to help. Thankfully, through music, pantomime and comedy, we are in on the fun of that process.
THE EDMONTON FRINGE FESTIVAL
The most acute difference between the Calgary and Edmonton Fringes lies in their respective festival sites. Time has given the Edmonton Fringe an enviable physical presence, sprawling through Edmonton’s historic Old Strathcona, on and around Whyte Avenue, while Calgary’s 17th Avenue struggled with retaining passers-by in its first year as a festival site.
However, where Edmonton has had a quarter century of Fringe, Calgary is only just beginning, and it has already staked its claim to a unique mix that includes film and art. And just as Calgary artists always have, at least a few of Edmonton’s spots were claimed by Calgary productions; always good news for critics hoping to expense a trip.
Dough: The Politics of Martha Stewart
Company: Pot of Jam Productions (Calgary)
Its Edmonton production marks the third of Lindsay Burns’ one-woman shows, after runs in both Theatre Junction’s Random Acts Festival and Ground Zero Theatre’s Groundbreakers series. This season, Dough will run as part of Ground Zero’s regular season, bringing its total number of productions to four. Judging from its Fringe incarnation, a piece of production as slick and well marketed as any mainstage show (or home and garden phenomenon), it’s not difficult to see why the show has been such a success.
From maternal excess to a bittersweet story of divorce and sentimentality, Dough is no mere satire, but a full-flavoured recipe mixed from nine monologues and a single powerful performer.
My Morocco
Company: The Desert Bus Company (Calgary)
At one point in his one-man play, Ken Cameron points out that the emotions projected by an actor are really only imitations. Therein lies the weakness of My Morocco.
Though a factual recounting of Cameron’s trip to Morocco with his fiancé after receiving news of his sister’s sudden death, the narrative has a too-glossed feel, albeit one crafted with skill (Cameron’s impersonation of a fez-wearing carpet salesman provides the play’s most hilarious moments). Acutely self-conscious of the fact that he is exploiting his sister’s death as a premise for a play, Cameron’s performance feels like a self-administered pat on the back without a trace of pathos.
Calgary audiences will have a chance to gauge the gloss for themselves when My Morocco opens as part of Ground Zero Theatre’s Groundbreakers series.
The Epoch of Coming and Going
Company: Theatrophy (Calgary/Ottawa)
Last year, when I went into the King Edward School gymnasium, I was pleasantly surprised by what would become my favourite of that year’s Fringe productions. This year, I was fortunate enough to be surprised again.
From the broken carousel music delivered by white face performers to the dancing conclusion of this macabre cabaret, Jesse Buck, Nick Di Gaetano and Aron De Casmaker (an MFA student at the University of Calgary) provide an intensely physical, obscenely hilarious song and dance that revels in our own mortality. Insert your own punny word plays involving laughing and dying – you’re likely right.
DENOUEMENT
I am exhausted. This is not a complaint, but a heartfelt endorsement of this new place where two Fringes meet at their edges and go their merry ways.
For this year at least, I still wandered more through Old Strathcona than I did the 17th Avenue area, but I truly believe we held our own when the house lights came down. (I say "we," when of course I mean the hard work of volunteers and organizers like festival director Blair Gallant and artistic director Jason Rothery, but I do so with civic pride.) And I know that after this, I’ll need the year to rest. |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.