Author Archives: Ephemeral Pleasures

The other mysterious island

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The Island was the main setting of the 2000s-decade JJ Adams tv show LOST.  It didn’t have a name.  Groups of attractive castaways found themselves on its shores, explored, encountered mysterious others, and were threatened and assisted by unexplained supernatural phenomena.  And the 5-season series had an epilogue or attempt at explanation that I never did understand.

And so, Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  Un-named island.  Old castaways, new castaways split up in the crash, magic and supernatural elements, backstory and old enmities, and a quick wrapup that I wasn’t quite sure about.

Until this weekend, I don’t think I’d actually seen a full production of The Tempest anywhere.  I’d known something about it because of references in other stories, notably the children’s book Roller Skates (Ruth Sawyer’s 1937 Newbery Medal winner) and the Robertson Davies classic Tempest-Tost and more recently John Lazarus’s play Rough Magic.  I’ve read the play, I’ve seen part of the movie version with Helen Mirren as Prospera (it’s on Netflix), and I’m familiar enough with it to recognize the same plot used in Forbidden Planet (the 1956 science fiction film mentioned in the Rocky Horror Picture Show theme song).

The production I saw this weekend was at the University of Alberta, directed by Ian Leung and featuring the actors of the penultimate year of the BFA Acting program.  (It’s got performances today, Sunday at 2pm and 7:30 pm, if I get this posted in time.)  Jaimi Reese plays Prosperine, usurped Duke of Milan, magic-user, and mother to Miranda.  Miranda is double-cast. I watched both Emma Houghton’s and Sarah Culkin’s interpretations of the isolated teenager, Culkin’s more dreamy and Houghton’s more sulky, and enjoyed seeing two versions of the girl’s first glimpses of the eligible young prince Ferdinand (Marc Ludwig).  The king’s (Jacob Holloway’s) wise old counselor Gonzales (Chayla Day) and the king’s sibling Bastiana (Emily Howard) were both switched from male characters of the traditional script, Gonzalo and Sebastian.   Having Bastiana be female added a convincing nuance of attraction to the snickering and scheming with Antonio (Jordan Buhat), Prosperine’s usurper brother.  The sequence where the two of them slouch on the auditorium stairs, muttering cynically about everything Gonzales says, was particularly good.

Prosperine has used her magic to compel two slaves, Ariel (Sarah Ormandy) and Caliban (Jake Tkaczyk), until her epilogue speech sets both of them free.   Tkaczyk’s Caliban was hunched over, growling and cowering and resentful like a larger version of Gollum.  I pitied Caliban and I was afraid of him and was amused by him.  In his version of the story, Prosperine and her daughter had nurtured him and taught him and then later began to exploit him harshly as a slave.  In Prosperine’s version, Caliban had been a trusted member of the household until he attempted sexual assault on young Miranda, and his bad treatment since then was a consequence of that.   I was reminded of the colonialist/xenophobic trope of needing to protect white daughters from the uncontrolled urges of savage others.  But Caliban’s salacious gesture and leer made me shudder and look away, convinced of his evil intent and unrepentance.

But the one who caught me by surprise was Ariel.  Somehow, the representations I’d encountered in the past led me to picture Ariel as sort of ethereal, a graceful gowned being singing gently, the young Griselda Webster in Tempest-Tost.  But this Ariel was a different sort 0f non-human.  Ormandy’s portrayal never let me forget for a minute that the spirit was powerful beyond her master Prosperine, gentle only by choice, and beyond human sentiment.  Her awkward postures, standing on one leg, never pointing her toes, and her blue morphsuit costume and face paint helped to place her more in the tradition of Puck than of Tinkerbell.  And her singing was strikingly powerful.

Stephano and Trincula (Philip Geller and Alex Dawkins), part of the king’s retinue who get separated from the rest of the ship’s company in the cast and spend most of the play sharing a butt of sack with Caliban, are the Shakespearean version of comic relief. Their first entrances, where Trincula discovers Caliban hiding from the storm under a tarp and decides that he must be a fish because of his smell, and then when Stephano sees both Trincula and Caliban with their feet sticking out from the tarp and concludes that they’re a four-footed monster, are particularly well done.  It is easy to see that students in the U of A BFA Acting program get a good grounding in the skills of clowning and physical theatre.

I loved the first scene, the choreography of the sailors and passengers aboard the ship.  I have been on sailboats in rough weather (and on a tall ship in calm weather) and I found it a convincing portrayal of struggling to work and hang on as the decks lurched and the sails flapped.  The simple staging customary for Corner Stage shows was sufficient to support good performances.  A few well-chosen design details stood out memorably (especially Prosperine’s ornate and heavy magical cloak) as I still remember the chilling shadow of the cross on the stage floor two years ago in Merchant of Venice when Shylock is forced by the court to give up his religion and abandon his Torah.  Like Merchant of Venice, some aspects of the story are uncomfortable for me as a 21st-century feminist trying to be conscious of colonialism and patriarchy (a parent’s investment in a daughter’s virginity is super-creepy, for example) but the language and imagery and character studies make it worth being uncomfortable.

Sunday April 10th, Corner Stage (second floor) in the Fine Arts Building at U of Alberta, 2 pm and 7:30 pm, admission by donation.

 

 

Memories of Leonard Cohen

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When I was in Grade 9, our English teacher played us some vinyl records with some Canadian poet/songwriters singing their stuff.  Buffy Sainte-Marie.  Leonard Cohen.  I didn’t like either of them as singers and I thought only teachers and other grownups would like that kind of music.

When I was taking Grade 12 English, we did a unit on Canadian poets and each group had to do a presentation on a modern Canadian poet.  My group studied James Reaney, who is clever but not especially accessible.  (Local theatre-connections:  he’s also a playwright, having written a trilogy about the infamous Donnelly family also featured in Jonathan Christensen’s Vigilante, and the writer of the Alice Through the Looking Glass adaptation that’s coming to the Citadel this spring.)  Another group studied Leonard Cohen.  Their presentation included one of his more sexually-themed works, which led our English teacher to a passionate defence of the subject matter as both appropriate subject for poetic celebration and a joyful part of an intimate relationship.  This was probably the best sex-ed lesson I had in school ever.

I really don’t know how I learned the tune for Cohen’s “Hey that’s no way to say goodbye” (it’s easy to learn because it’s very repetitive).  I used to sing it, mostly to myself, when I was an undergrad, and I had the words written up on my bedroom wall.

And then Cohen wrote for Jennifer Warnes (Famous Blue Raincoat, First We Take Manhattan), and sang with Suzanne Vega (whose own lyrics spoke to me with painful poetic truth in the late 80s), and then the Jeff Buckley Hallelujah turned out to be actually a Leonard Cohen song which everyone seemed to know and love and argue about, and I have no idea when it happened, but Leonard Cohen was actually cool.

So cool that now there’s a theatrical staging of his words and music, created by Tracey Power for Firehall Arts Centre in Vancouver and now touring to the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton, Chelsea Hotel.  The seven performers all sang and played instruments.  Jonathan Gould seemed to be playing Cohen, and the others (Rachel Aberle, Steve Charles, Sean Cronin, Christina Cuglietta, Benjamin Elliott, Tracey Power) seemed to be the voices in his head, the women in his memory, and his alter-egos.  I particularly enjoyed the performance of Suzanne, and the two versions of Hallelujah.

Other performances this season (Back to the 80s at the Mayfield, BOOM at the Citadel) have celebrated the music and pop culture of my lifetime, but tonight’s encounter withe Leonard Cohen’s music brought back different memories, because at the time I didn’t think the music was popular or know it was going to be important.

Chelsea Hotel continues at the Citadel to February 13th.

W;t at the Walterdale

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The drama W;t  (pronounced like Wit), opened tonight at the Walterdale Theatre.  I have been fond of that play since I worked on a scene from it in a Citadel acting class a couple of years ago.  The current production, directed by Anne-Marie Szucs, is wonderful.  As long as you are not in a life situation where watching someone on a stage dying from cancer would be too difficult, I will recommend this production to you.

Mary-Ellen Perley is wonderful as Dr. Vivian Bearing, the 50-year-old academic and Donne scholar who has cancer, “late-stage metastatic ovarian cancer”.   She is detached and wry, angry, lonely, thoughtful, blunt, and eventually in anguish, and it felt real to me.

The script (by Margaret Edson, and with a Pulitzer prize) and the direction and design of this production show what it’s like to be whisked around from test to test, technician to technician to research fellow, in a hospital.  The ensemble players (Kingsley Leung, Sarah Van Tassel, Macalan Boniec-Jedras, Katelyn Trieu), dressed in matching scrubs and clean sneakers, whisk various pieces of apparatus around the stage, deliver Dr. Bearing to each test by wheelchair, and speak a few rote sentences each time, all the while moving at high speed and never making eye contact with Dr. Bearing or with each other.   Glimpses of humanity in the medical setting are provided by her oncologist (dale Wilson) and by the nurse Susie (Bethany Hughes).   Her one visitor in the hospital is her old graduate supervisor Dr. Ashcroft (Syrell Wilson), also seen in a flashback scene showing Vivian as a driven undergraduate and Dr. Ashcroft as both academically demanding and encouraging the student Vivian to seek out balanced life.

Two particularly telling scenes late in the story and late in the progression of Vivian’s illness are conversations she has in her hospital room with Susie and with the research fellow Jason (Mark Drelich).  To Jason, she acknowledges that like him, she’s always been more interested in research than in people.   It is clear to the audience that Vivian now wants more human connection than people like Jason are giving, but she does not criticize him directly or expect him to change, or nor does she express any regrets for her own choices.   Susie is on night shift when Vivian wants someone to talk to.  Susie brings the conversation around to the prognosis and the hard decisions about end-of-life choices.   And in one of the most unguarded moments, Vivian asks, child-like, whether Susie will still take care of her until the end.

And the end is … the end.  Messy and unfair and ugly – until it isn’t.

 

Playing at the Walterdale until Saturday the 12th, 8 pm Tues-Sat and 2 pm Sunday, advance tickets at Tix on the Square and same-day tickets at the theatre unless they sell out.  Which they might.

 

She Loves Me!

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The other night I watched a musical that was new to me.  Not new to other people, She Loves Me (book by Joe Masteroff, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, and music by Jerry Bock) first hit Broadway in 1964, and is opening again next spring.  The Hungarian play on which it’s based was also the basis for the 1998 romantic comedy movie You’ve Got Mail.

The current production, in the Amphitheatre at Faculte St Jean (across the street from La Cite), by Foote in the Door Productions, is directed by Barb Mah, with music direction by Michael Clark.  The setting, a 1930s perfume shop in Budapest, was simply evoked with shades of pink and green in backdrops, counters, and sales-staff shopcoats.  The shop seemed like the equivalent of something like The Body Shop or Lush – selling a variety of necessities and luxuries, focusing on customer experience, and doing a huge business in presents before Christmas.

As in the usual workplace-set story, there’s a cast of characters that includes a boss (James Toupin) with some unreasonable demands and prejudices, an eager-to-please errand boy (Sam Banigan), and a loyal sidekick (Dustin Berube), and in this case there’s also some sub-plot material in the affair between co-workers (Christina O’Dell and Mitch Caddick).  The story soon focuses on Georg (Russ Farmer), a senior employee mistrusted by the boss, who confides that he’s been writing letters through a lonely-hearts correspondence club to Dear Friend.

On a busy day in the shop, then, in bounces Amalia (Ruth Wong-Miller), costumed in a beautiful peacock shade of blue that stands out dramatically from the rest of the show palette, and she quickly talks herself into sales work with a very funny demonstration.  Amalia is also a member of the Lonely Hearts correspondence club, and you can guess the broad strokes of where the story goes from there.

My favourite bits of the show were some of the ensemble numbers with dancing, the stylized couples in the restaurant with the snooty waiter (Kent Sutherland), and the Twelve Days of Christmas shopping crowds in the store.  Six musicians behind the scenes provided accompaniment, atmosphere, and extra entertainment, and the singing was delightful.  Ruth Wong-Miller has a strong pleasant soprano voice and is particularly well cast in this show.  The part with her jumping on the couch in pajamas is also charming.

The last show of the run is tonight (Saturday 28 November) at 7:30.  If you haven’t seen it yet, they should have tickets available at the door, and it’s a lot of fun!

Devour Content Here / Of Love and Wheat: dustbowl drama in the dust

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After Fringe and the Fringe Holdovers  – I saw Edgar Allan and In Search of Cruise Control.  They were both good.  I’ll tell you about them soon if I have time – my theatre world was quiet enough that I almost ended up going to a movie last week because I was bored.

Fortunately, the performance season is starting up again.  Next weekend Rapid Fire Theatre has four shows and Kaleido Fest has lots of interesting things on the schedule and it’s the Edmonton Burlesque Festival.

And this weekend Kristine Nutting is directing an original production in an old warehouse near the stadium.  I think the play was called Devour Content Here and it contained a play called Of Love and Wheat – but I’m not sure.  It had many of the challenges typical to mounting a production in an unconventional venue and requiring the audience to rove about – difficult acoustics, limited lighting choices, having to wait for the audience to move between scenes and being restricted in how they direct audience traffic by trying to stay in character.  An additional challenge of this space is that it is quite dusty.  Some of the audience members wore the provided dust masks, but the performers and crew did not.  I saw it on opening night and again last night.  The second night they were much more explicitly directive about showing people where to sit and stand, and they admitted fewer people, which also helped.

David Arial played a Narrator, but by the end he seemed to be part of the plot as well, with suspect motives of his own.  Or maybe he was two characters.  The ostensible setting was prairie drought dustbowl in a small town in the 1920s, but it had some mythical and fantastic elements.  The story was a little hard to follow, but fortunately a lot of it was fairytale archetype – the manipulative ambitious mother Liliette (Sarah Ormandy) wanting to make an advantageous match for her daughter (Sydney Campbell) with a visiting tycoon (Nathan Plumite), the daughter falling in love with the sewage man’s son (Steven Andrews), stories of leaving home for a better life and not succeeding, people being blackmailed or forced or tricked into various unappetizing agreements, etc.

There was a large chorus of despairing townspeople in makeup/costume/demeanour that reminded me of both bouffon and zombies, and there was a live band playing original music.  There were unexpected bits of circus-aerials performance, there were some solo songs and there were a few ensemble songs.  There were crass moments, horribly disturbing moments, ridiculously overdone and tongue-in-cheek bits, and a scene that shifted from absurd to compellingly intimate at different moments for each audience member (meaning that some people were giggling while I was nearly in tears).   And there were characters who seemed to be struck by nausea every time the word “economics” was spoken.

I liked the way that the young couple Harriet and Oscar seemed to be realistic awkward young people, surrounded by weirder-than-life characters speaking in some heightened or poetic register.  I appreciated Sarah Ormandy’s portrayal of the ambitious mother and former Chatauqua beauty queen, her jerky movements a parody of grace and her self-absorbed behaviour reminiscent of Snow White’s stepmother. (Late in the play, I thought I heard another character call her Lilith, which fitted.)  The best part of the music was the melodic motif “Come on down to the dark soul of the dustbowl, It’s the blackest place on earth”.  Other parts of the instrumental and vocal music suffered from the acoustic difficulties of the venue. 

If this sounds like your kind of thing, if you like performances that try out things that might not work, if you would rather see something original than something tidy, there is one more show Labour Day afternoon.  Doors open at 2:30.  Admission is by donation (they suggest $20 for the gainfully employed and $10 otherwise).  They provide dust masks, and some buckets and crates for patrons who don’t want to stand the whole time, and I saw them make accommodations for mobility impaired patrons.

More good plays

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Assassins (the Sondheim musical) was the first musical I’ve seen at this year’s Fringe.  With a cast of ten and a musical ensemble, it’s well placed in the Westbury.  It’s a series of vignettes about everyone who assassinated or tried to assassinate a US president.  As I wasn’t familiar with many of the stories and I didn’t get a program until afterwards, I probably missed the ones in the middle – I remembered about John Wilkes Booth (Jacob Holloway), John Hinckley (Maxwell Lebeuf), and Squeaky Fromme (Emma Houghton, with Nancy Macalear as her collaborator Sara Jane Moore), and partway through I started wondering whether I’d missed the part about Lee Harvey Oswald killing President Kennedy – but that was the climax which came near the end, since I guess it’s the most memorable one for a lot of living Americans too.  Scott Shpeley, who had been playing with the musical ensemble, also turned out to be Lee Harvey Oswald.  Chris W Cook, Jeff Page, Rory Turner, and Billy Brown played other assassins I wasn’t familiar with, and Dan Rowley, and Larissa Pohoreski other characters in the ensemble.

Typhoon Judy was also a performance focused on music, with Christopher Peterson playing an aging Judy Garland, in song, in reminiscence, in flirtation with accompanist (Nick Samoil), and in four fabulous costumes.  The portrayal was credible and touching.

MAN UP! was a wonderful dance show with social commentary.  It’s being held over at the Westbury next weekend, so you have a couple more chances to see it.  Four male performers dance in high heels, powerfully, poetically, and conveying a range of emotions.  Some pieces include all four (Gregory P Caswell, Joshua Wolchansky, Jordan Sabo, CJ Rowein) and some have smaller groups or solos.  Rowein and Wolchansky’s love duet was particularly moving, as well as Wolchansky’s barefoot solo on the side stage.  Monologues and video clips provide context and discussion-starters about the limitations of conventional gender expectations (as well as allowing time for costume changes).  I was fascinated to realize afterwards that the performance had been lacking the personal flirtation aspect of burlesque dancing.

Every Fringe I see Rocket Sugar Factory, the improv duo of Jacob Banigan and Jim Libby, because they are so much fun to watch.  Along with their local accompanist Jan Randall, they are masters of crafting long-form stories and playing them out with delightful characterizations.  This year their show involves creating the pilot episode for a new television show, and the one they created in front of me, Mister Jules Verne, was something I would watch if it existed.  I love the way these two switch characters seamlessly, borrowing mannerisms and language habits, and I’m also a fan of Jim Libby’s near-corpsing, letting his delight in the game show through the characters he’s embodying.  (One of the 2 For Tea performers, James, does this as well.)

I also made time to see a new comedy, Harold and Vivian Entertain Guests, written by University of Alberta acting student Jessy Ardern.  Take the premise of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf – the older couple full of malice entertaining a couple of starry-eyed naive newlyweds, and wield them as weapons in their battles with each other – and make it funny instead of horrible – and that’s the start of Harold and Vivian.  David Feehan and Kristen Padayas play the eponymous hosts, and Rebecca Ann Merkley and Eric Smith play Janet and Mike, the young couple who arrive with over-the-top optimism and PDA and gradually crack into full-on hostility as well.  Corben Kushneryk (also seen this Fringe in Who am I?…) is credited as director and designer, so he must be responsible for the delightful set conveying the reality of a starkly divided household before the show even starts.  I was especially taken with Padayas’s portrayal, the perfect pink bouffant homemaker with twitches of panic and surges of rage.   Eric Smith’s brand of pomposity and pratfall may also be seen in Death Comes to Auntie Norma (one more show, Sunday 8 pm).

 

 

Two solos and two physical duos

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Mike Delamont’s Mama’s Boy was a great example of autobiographical storytelling.  He has a good natural delivery and the comic timing which enhances Scottish Drag Queen helps this kind of narrative as well.  It was a loving, respectful, realistic, painful story about growing up with an alcoholic.

James and Jamesy’s 2 for Tea was a delight.  I’d missed this playful British duo last year and now I can see why everyone was talking about them.

Beau and Aero was another physical-theatre escape, very well paced so that one turn or game led directly to the next one.  They had particularly creative explorations of balloons, and some impressive acrobatic stunts.

Both 2 For Tea and Beau and Aero incorporated some audience interaction, and they chose people who participated with initiative and humour, especially the young girl who played a cardiologist and gave her thoughts on life in 2 For Tea, and the man who bopped them with balloons in Beau and Aero.

The other solo performance I saw yesterday was Naked Ladies, by Thea Fitz-James.  After the show, the performer acknowledged that a lot of intense material had been touched on, and invited audience members who had responses to connect with her later.  I appreciated the invitation to process – it reminded me of the similar invitation at the end of a performance in a funeral home a couple of years ago, acknowledging discomfort and giving people a chance not to be alone with their thoughts.   I didn’t have anything to say at the time, and I’m not sure I do yet.  The performance jumped around to different moods and concepts, and the performer kept reminding us that all stories are edited, all memories curated.  The parts that made me most uncomfortable – and I mean that in a good way – were the parts where she was reading from her childhood diary about trying not to masturbate.  That bothered me in ways that seeing the performer naked didn’t.

An 18+ Monday night

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Last night I saw two burlesque shows and went to the Late Night Cabaret.  I guess there are some themes there.

O Manada had five dancers (all male) performing as various Canadian archetypes, in solos and larger ensemble pieces, and the hosts were a 1975-era Pierre and Maggie Trudeau.  I have misplaced my program, so I can’t tell you who the rest of this Toronto-based troupe are, but Maggie Trudeau was Morgan Norwich.  The show was fast-paced and full of topical humour leading up to a hilarious speculation that followed naturally from the premise of the show.  The performers engaged some audience members (thank you!) and were a lot of fun to watch.

Burlesque-Prov is hosted by local improviser Lee Boyes.  He introduced the two regulars of the show, Kiki Quinn (who is also in Second Breakfast Club) and LeTabby Lexington (who is also in Die-Nasty this Fringe), along with tonight’s guest performers, one called Fiona who was from out of town, and one from Man Up (his name in that show is Tres Debonair but I think he was introduced last night as Givenchy or something like that).  Kristen Welker was stage kitten in a catsuit complete with claws.  Each performer did a solo act to music selected by the audience, with some kind of theme or limitation also provided randomly.  They also had a box of props to use as they chose. I don’t have the background to know how hard this is, but it was also fun to watch.  The show ended with all performers on stage alternating short bits with high energy.

Late Night Cabaret, hosted by Amy Shostak and Julian Faid, included some sketch comedy from Hip Bang, a story from Martin Dockery, a glimpse of Release the McCrackin, another burlesque performer (C.R. Avery, who is in Some Birds Walk for the Hell of It), and some risque country songs from Shirley Gnome.

What with visiting friends in the beer tent in between shows, I almost didn’t put my ID away all evening.  And that’s not a complaint.

Fringe Sunday

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Mild weather made it comfortable everywhere on site yesterday, from C103 to the beer tents.  I saw four shows for the first time, as well as working backstage at Death Comes to Auntie Norma and seeing Pinniped and Other Poems a second time.  Death Comes to Auntie Norma plays this afternoon (Monday) at 4 pm, Wednesday at 12:15, Thursday at 2:15, and closing Sunday at 8:00 pm.  The Edmonton Journal gave us 4 stars and the compliment of comparisons with classic 1980s sitcoms like Roseanne and Golden Girls.

I appreciated more of the subtle description and lyricism in Pinniped more the second time through.  Skye Hindman’s writing is epigrammatic, the erstwhile love interest (Alex Dawkins) is wry and controlled, and the three actors playing the ineffectual protagonist (Emily Howard, Connor Suart, Jake Tkaczyk) have intriguingly similar mannerisms.  Suart seems to be portraying JR Morse in the past, Tkaczyk in the present, and Howard … I’m not sure if her persona is a future one, a dream one, or simply another aspect of Morse’s self.

My favourite show so far this Fringe is Kiss Around Pass Around, a delightful solo physical theatre piece by Yanomi.  Unlike in some of the wonderful physical theatre pieces I’ve seen in the past, like Loon and 7 Ways to Die, the character in this show does speak, engaging with the audience in simple accented English to enhance the impression of being juvenile and alien “Are you human?  Are you kind?”  Music and props add to the magic of the character’s journey to find her father.

Deadmonton was written by Andy Garland and directed by David Johnston, and it is very different from the last work I’d seen from this team, the tongue-in-cheek film-noir pastiche And Then, The Lights Went Out. Deadmonton is a serious portrait of what might happen when two serial killers encounter each other, as well as a look at credible backgrounds for people who are compelled to kill.  Carmen Nieuwenhuis and Alex Forsyth are both disturbingly convincing, and the props and effects are simple enough not to pull me out of the story.  There was one supremely disturbing moment when I was excruciatingly aware of a weapon being close to hand for Gil, Forsyth’s character, willing desperately for him not to use it in that particular situation, despite the spoken text not even mentioning that possibility – which is when I realized that the story had sucked me in completely to their horrifyingly twisted reality.

Who Am I:  Unauthorized stories from the Varscona Parkade was a typical Toy Guns Dance Theatre show, unpredictable, playful, funny, and full of unlikely props.  The unusual venue – the top floor of the parking garage beside the Varscona Hotel – meant that they did less floor work than usual and there were fewer classical-dance elements, but they made very creative use of several couches.

No Belles is a storytelling show from Portland Oregon in which performers use a variety of speaking styles to tell the stories of eight women scientists, women who won Nobel prizes and women who didn’t.  The narrative style and content were something between a very good lecture (like a TED talk) and a typical Fringe storytelling, but I was riveted the whole time, and brought to tears twice.

Second post from the Fringe

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Since I last wrote, I’ve had a Fat Franks dog, a New Asian Village butter chicken plate, a Rustixx California pizza, and a Rock Creek pear cider, so my eating-and-drinking festival experience is well under way.

I’ve also seen five more shows and done some volunteer shifts, been rained on, been too hot, and been too cold.

Seven – a dance show by a group from Victoria BC, with seven dances loosely representing the seven stages of grief. I particularly enjoyed the rhythmical unison parts of the dance, and the effect of having several helium balloons taped to the floor and lit.

God is a Scottish Drag Queen III – Mike Delamont’s latest show was exactly what I expected, and funnier than last year’s show.

Come and Go – This puppet story was set late in the age of vaudeville, and the main characters were a couple of vaudeville performers, Jim and Mabel, who disagreed about what to do next with their lives – settle down conventionally or head to Hollywood via work in burlesque.  The story had historical resonance but also touched on some familiar themes in male-female relationships.  “But what would I do there?”  “You’d be my wife”  “… and then I’d kill myself”  “With what?” Ianna Ings and Sophia Burak wrote the script and were joined in performing by Matt Newman.  Scenes with Jim and Mabel were interspersed with vaudeville-performance numbers – a singer, a dancer, a cat playing drinking-glass chimes (my favourite!) and dogs doing tricks.   Jim and Mabel also do a vaudeville-team comic routine which the writers credited to George Burns and Gracie Allen.

Subway Stations of the Cross – Ins Choi, the Toronto playwright of Kim’s Convenience, performs a solo show which starts out as a conversational narrative, explaining the different forms of his name that he’s used over the years and discussing how his family is full of preachers and his mother had hoped that would be his destiny as well.  It gradually shifted into a less realistic and more poetic mode, interpreting encounters he had on subway platforms with mythical import and Christian symbolism.  I appreciated both styles.

Tangled Up in Blue – This short (45-minute) two-hander was delightful and subtle, a contemporary glimpse of long-time friends (Spencer Jewer and Katie Fournell) and the repercussions of a brush with romantic connection.  I appreciated the playwright’s choice not to conclude predictably, and I found both characters very believable.  It reminded me a bit of last year’s Letters to Laura.