Tag Archives: fringe

Superheroes and amazing drums

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Between my beer tent shift and getting ready for Sonder’s evening show, I fitted in two performances Sunday afternoon.

Harold of Galactus is a longform improv show with local improv stars Chris Craddock and Mark Meer.  (“Harold” is the name of a common thematic longform improv structure, and Galactus is a comic-book character).   In the show I saw, the performers asked an audience member for the name of a comic-book superhero, and a front-row fan said he’d once made up one called Mortar.  Chris and Mark then had a brief conversation on stage about comic-book tropes and how they might play out for a superhero called Mortar, and then created a series of scenes and stories about the character and how he’d be portrayed in the different eras of comics, from 1942 to near-contemporary.  This let the audience have the fun of noticing all the quirks of Golden Age comic stories (“Is Hitler a hero because he killed Hitler?  But he also killed the guy who killed Hitler!”) and the tropes of more recent comic-book storytelling  (a sidekick who is invincible but nervous, very few women except the occasional supervillain, a league of criminals, and so on), bouncing between eras and landing at a satisfying resolution just before the time was up.  I love watching improv partners who have played together for a long time, because they pick up on each other’s cues so smoothly they seem to be telepathic.  Later in the week I have tickets for Rocket Sugar Factory (Jacob Banigan and Jim Libby) and for Scratch (Arlen Konopaki and Kevin Gillese), so I will get to admire that some more.  Chris Craddock occasionally fell out of character to grin at what was happening, which did not distract me from the story and just added to the sense of the performers having fun that is a mark of good improv. Fun and clever.

Then I managed to slip out quickly, dodge crowds, and get from Strathcona Library to King Edward School in 15 minutes to see Godzilla vs. Led Zeppelin, an hour-long performance of taiko drumming from Fubuki Daiko, an ensemble of four amazing drummers from Winnipeg, Hiroshi Koshiyama, Bruce Robertson, Naomi Guilbert, and Giselle Mak.  They were as exciting to watch as they were to listen to, and the show I saw was sold out.

 

Sonder’s next show is today, Monday at 12:15 pm, and the next one after that is Wednesday at 11:30 pm, both at Venue #5, King Edward School.

 

 

 

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Fringe Saturday

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Ritchie Community League (Venue 36, 7727 98 Street) is a new BYOV.  They have five shows playing in their intimate auditorium with multilevel stage and licensed concession.  There is convenient parking,washrooms, level access, and cash ticket sales on site.   I started my day at the Ritchie Community League with Kurt Man: buyer and seller of souls, a new solo work by Brendan Thompson.  As the program description suggests, the story starts when Kurt Man, who has had a business buying and selling souls, takes early retirement and tries to find meaning in his life.  What made this quirky story interesting to watch was that it was told through the device of having other performers speaking lines while projected on a screen on stage.  The backgrounds of the video suggest scene changes and locations.  I recognised most of the video performers, but as the show didn’t have printed programs, I was distracted by trying to figure out who they were or what I’d seen them in before.  End credits moved too quickly for me to catch all of them, but they included Colin Matty, Ellen Chorley, Emma Houghton, Katie Hudson, Mark Vetsh, Holly Cinnamon, Eva Foote, Clinton Carew, and Mark Stubbing.

Letters to Laura is also new work, written by local actor Elisa Benzer (last seen in Honk!) and directed by Perry Gratton.  Benzer and Evan Hall (last seen in a small but essential part in Clybourne Park at the Citadel) perform in a gentle realistic contemporary story of people who meet, cautiously move toward romance, and awkwardly figure out whether their new relationship is sustainable long-distance.  I loved it that the story portrayed the use of electronic communication in a natural way rather than making fun of it.  Editing on the fly and accidentally sending an unplanned text message, not being prepared for the immediacy of a video call, the first escalation of hot messages in public and the awkward dance of backing off on that … all of that felt familiar and affectionate.   I liked the way both of them narrated some of the story directly to the audience, and I liked the parallels in the two viewpoints, especially as seen in Laura’s phone calls with her friend Beth and Marc’s phone calls with his mother.  The notes I took during the show also said “sex scene – pretty socks” which is not to imply that the rest of the view was unattractive at all, just that I also noticed that Marc had attractive patterned socks.

The Wonderheads‘ new show The Middle of Everywhere was, as expected, a wholehearted delight.  The troupe of Kate Braidwood and Andrew Phoenix also included Emily Windler (Poe and Mathews) for a three-character story in mask with light and sound effects.  A little bit of voiceover at the beginning and end provided extra enjoyment but would not have been necessary to follow the story.   A lot of the story was just a fun exploration in a variety of fantasy settings.  I loved figuring out each new setting from the minimal clues, and at one point I was moved to tears by having bought in so completely that I’d forgotten it wasn’t a real possibility.  The Wonderheads are based in Portland Oregon, and they trained at the Del Arte school of physical theatre in California.

The last show I saw last night was The Show, or The Show to End All Shows (I’m not quite sure of the title), a new original work.  It was lightweight and short and it made me laugh.  It reminded me of a sort of vaudeville of various talent performances, strung together by the loose plot of what happens when most of the performers don’t show up for a show.  The Producer and Director (Rumi Jeraj and Roman Anthony) along with one of the techs (either Berkley Abbott or Griffin Schell) do a funny routine of putting on clown costumes before concluding that none of them know how to clown, for example.  An Opera Singer (Aniqa Charania) and a Musician (Sam Banigan, whom I last saw in Exposure, a Cradle to Stage production at the Walterdale last year) do a very funny duet of Averil Lavigne’s Skater Boy.  The program said that most of the performers are local high school students, but Jake Tkaczyk (U of A BFA class of 2017) was a late addition as Actor, bringing a hilarious manic energy as well as pomposity and vanity to the role.  Rumi Jeraj’s song-and-dance routine at the end was a delightful surprise.  The Show plays at Old Strathcona Performing Arts Centre, the one that advertises its air conditioning.

 

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The Fringe continues until Sunday August 24th.  Sonder‘s next show is tonight, Sunday at 9 pm at King Edward School. 

Fringe Day Two: five more shows

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Turns out that on a day I’m not volunteering and our show isn’t on, it’s easy to see five shows and still stop in at home for a snack and a shower partway through.

The first one I saw yesterday was Beware Beware, new work by David Walker, featuring Thomas Barnet and Sarah Feutl, all young local artists.  It was a fairly straightforward drama about two friends, each with some current trouble on his or her mind, meeting up for late-night drinks at a campfire site in the river valley.   Both characters were interesting to watch and credible troubled people.

Next was Flora and Fawna’s Field Trip at the Varscona, which was adorable.  Flora, Fawna, and their new friend Fleurette (Darrin Hagen, Trevor Schmidt, and Brian Dooley) play three little girls who have started a more inclusive alternative to Brownies and Guides.  The show is framed as the orientation meeting for the audience who are prospective members of the group, and the fun starts as the costumed cast members hand out materials to the audience in line outside the theatre.  There was a little bit of audience participation, and a lot of laughing and awww-ing.  The three cast members each plays a child with distinct quirks and awkwardnesses, and the interactions among the friends (“we don’t even exclude people for being too bossy” says Fawna (Trevor Schmidt) with a sidelong glance at her friend (Hagen)) were very funny.  Brian Dooley was particularly charming as a young Francophone glad to be included in her new neighbourhood even though she doesn’t quite understand what’s going on.  The uniforms of tunic, tights, beret, scarf, and badge sash were appropriately awkward.

Next up was Zanna, Don’t! by Three Form Theatre, a light musical by Tim Acito which played Off-Broadway about 10 years ago.  It’s full of pop culture references and uses all the familiar tropes of high school stories, in some kind of parallel alternate universe where same-sex relationships are the norm and heterophobia is a thing.  Music Director Mackenzie Reurink directed a small instrumental ensemble, and some of the singers were hard to hear or understand over the accompaniment.  Sarah Ormandy’s portrayal of bossy Candi was especially funny.  Mark Sinongco, who I last saw in Putnam County Spelling Bee, was the eponymous Zanna, and Adam Sanders (Full Monty) and Madeleine Knight were the scandalous opposite-sex couple.

Dogfight is another musical by a young local company, in this case Linette Smith’s Strathcona Alumni Theatre.  Chris Scott and Emmy Kate Whitehead play the leads. I’m going to see it again later in the week and I’ll have more to say about it then, but if you are interested in seeing it you should buy your tickets early, as the uncomfortable seating in Strathcona High School often sells out.

Last on my schedule for the day was Butt Kapinski, a solo show by Deanna Fleyscher from Los Angeles.  The performer takes the audience with her into creating a film-noir world, full of cliches played out in unexpected ways.  The performer, a hardboiled private eye, chooses audience members for the roles needed in the story, from murdered bodies to residents of various districts in the dark city, mostly cast cross-gender.   And now I guess I can finally say that I was on stage at the Fringe.  The show was cleverly crafted and satisfying, and I’d like to go back if I can find room in my schedule.

Parade, mosquitoes, camels, and opening night!

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It’s the Fringe!  The site gradually filled up all day until there was a crowd of high-energy  costumed performers gathered outside Strathcona Market for the opening parade around the site, and more people watching along the short parade route and waiting in front of the outdoor stage.  Shows started after that.

Our show Sonder opened at 10pm in King Edward School, venue 5.  It’s so fun to start sharing our work with audiences, after working on it in quiet studios.  It’s a great venue and the technicians and front-of-house volunteers were great.  In the warm humid weather the mosquitoes descended with dusk, so waiting outside the venues was a frustration of swiping and slapping, and walking across the ballfield was an attempt to outrun them.  It looks like the weather will be a little cooler on the weekend so I hope that will discourage the bugs.

After a quick drink with the company, I then started my week of watching plays with Camel Camel, a wonderful piece of physical theatre from Meghan Frank and Janessa Johnsrude, both graduates and staff members of the Dell’Arte School of Physical Theatre in Blue Lake, California (I think the Wonderheads trained there too).  They were very funny and there were no slow spots.  I had actually missed some of the plot tying the scenes together until I read more about it on their website this morning, but I enjoyed it a lot even without.

Fringe as a way of life

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My first experience with any Fringe festival was the week I moved to Edmonton.  I got off the train with some of my stuff on a cold grey Monday morning after Folkfest, even though everyone I’d met from Edmonton had encouraged me to arrive in time for the folk music festival.  I didn’t want to wait a year to start experiencing the festive life of my new home, and fortunately I found out that there was some kind of theatre festival taking place the next weekend a few blocks from where I was living.  My first blog posts about the Fringe (they were semi-private journal entries at the time; I wasn’t publishing this blog yet) mention seeing a show recommended by a friend from Montreal Fringe, encountering handbillers, talking to strangers in the beer tent, and eating my first green onion cake.  But it probably took me until my second Fringe year to realize that one of the best things about the Fringe is that I don’t just pick the kinds of theatre experiences which sound safe and familiar.  Something about the format, where it’s possible to see lots of shows in a weekend or three in a single evening, and where none of them cost more than $15 total, lowers the perceived risk of choosing what to see.  My Fringe day wasn’t going to be wrecked if one of the performances wasn’t quite what I was looking for.  And in fact, my day was going to be more fun if all the performances were different from each other.

So I started expanding the range of what I was willing to try.   I didn’t think I liked one-person performances, but after seeing some brilliant multiple-character narratives and storytelling shows, I was hooked.  I didn’t think I liked clowns or mimes, but after watching some world-class physical theatre and Canadian Pochinko-tradition clown stories I wanted to see more.  I sought out dance shows, dramas, theatre of the absurd, musicals, and improvisational theatre.  Like music and food and drink and poetry, I discovered that I liked a lot more things than I would have guessed, and I got better at figuring out how to describe what I like and don’t like.   Eventually I fell into living the rest of the year with a Fringe mindset too.   My Broadway vacation was Fringe-like in my enthusiastic immersion, but the shows were a lot more expensive and the street food wasn’t as interesting.

Having become more involved in the year-round Edmonton theatre scene in the last couple of years, taking class, volunteering backstage and front of house, and seeing a lot of shows from a lot of companies, my decisions of what to see at the Fringe now include consideration of a lot of shows where I recognise the names in the program book, as friends, favourite directors, or performers I’ve enjoyed watching in the past.  This makes it even harder to decide what to see.

But here’s my first list.  I expect to see more, and I’ve got a long backup wish list waiting for Fringe bucks, Daily Discounts, artist comps, and/or space in my calendar.  These are the for-sures.  They’re not in priority order.  (I’m not linking any box-office pages; you can find those yourself.)

  • Camel Camel
  • Sonder – this is the one I’m producing
  • Beware Beware
  • Flora and Fawna’s Field Trip
  • Zanna, Don’t!
  • Dogfight – a Scona Alumni Theatre musical
  • The Show
  • Butt Kapinski
  • The Middle of Everywhere – this is the new show from Wonderheads, the mask troupe out of Oregon who did Loon and Grimm & Fischer
  • Harold of Galactus
  • Little Monsters – written and directed by Kristen Finlay
  • This is CANCER – I haven’t seen Bruce Horak’s show before but I’ve heard a lot about it
  • Off Book the Musical – this Rapid Fire troupe is even better at the Fringe than in a regular Saturday show
  • En anglais, s’il vous plait
  • Ask Aggie – I saw Christine Lesiak’s show last year and liked it, and I’ve heard there’s new material in it
  • Fugly
  • Rocket Sugar Factory
  • The Real Inspector Hound
  • 3… 2…1…
  • Real Time – scripted comedy by Matt Alden of Rapid Fire
  • The Story of O’s
  • Einstein
  • Scratch
  • Gordon’s Big Bald Head
  • Bible Bill
  • Fruitcake
Cast of Sonder, postcard style

Sonder and the Fringe

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The Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival is my favourite festival.   And counting down to the Fringe is like counting down to Christmas.  When I was a child, I used to ask my parents, Don’t you wish Christmas was tomorrow? Mum would sigh and Dad would grumble in their grownup ways saying that they didn’t wish Christmas was tomorrow because they weren’t ready.  I would explain that if Christmas was tomorrow they would be ready!  They didn’t buy it.

Anyway, every year as soon as Folkfest is over I start getting excited about the Fringe.  I already have my program and some show tickets, and my volunteering schedule for the beer tent.  I drove by the grounds last night and saw the barricades on some of the roads.  I’m clicking Maybe on all the Facebook events and trying to figure out how many I can see.  I’m looking forward to the parade, the food stands (especially Rustixx pizza), the out-of-town visitors, the excitement … but at the same time I’m feeling like one of those grown-ups who has a to-do list that has to happen first.

One of the things on my personal to-do list is to get caught up writing about other performances I’ve seen, so I can start the season fresh.  That will appear here in the next few days.

The other things are about getting everything ready for the new show that I’m producing, Sonder, with our company The ? Collective (you can pronounce that however you want, but we usually say “the question mark collective” – our twitter handle is @theqmcollective).  A friend and I put together a lottery entry last fall and were lucky enough to get selected to perform in a Fringe lottery venue, King Edward School.  That’s Venue 5, the elementary school, the low white building closer to the Fringe grounds, as opposed to the Academy which is the older brick building across the street.  My friend, Jake Tkaczyk, took on the roles of director and creation facilitator, gathering a small group of Red Deer College students to explore themes of interconnectedness and meaningful moments in a collaborative creation process.  The title Sonder came from the tumblr blog Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, in which the writer, John Koenig, coins many words for interesting concepts – in this case the realization that each random passer-by is living a life as vivid and complex as one’s own.  As the work slowly took shape, Collette Radau contributed as dramaturg, Alex Boldt responded with original music and soundscapes, and all of us told and listened to many stories.

What we’ve come up with uses the techniques of performance art, movement, recitation, and narrative scenes real and surreal to show a series of moments in different people’s lives, from the everyday to the magical, funny and poignant and sometimes disturbing.   We’re excited about showing our creation to the Fringe community, and we’re also excited about experiencing the Fringe from the inside.   I’m the only one who’s been involved with a show in the past (as stage manager for WaMo Productions’ God on God 2013, 3 stars in the VUE and the Journal).  Some of the company members will be attending their first Edmonton Fringe, and I’m almost as excited about showing them the festival that made me fall in love with theatre in the first place.

But as I said at the beginning, I’ve got a to-do list between me and opening night (Thursday Aug 14th at 10 pm by the way).  The rest of our company arrives in town today, and our tech rehearsal is this afternoon.  We have posters to hang, handbills to hand out, programs to print, buttons to sell, and a parade to entertain you in (Thursday Aug 14th, 7:30 pm, Fringe grounds). We have a blog, a website, a Facebook event and page, a twitter account, and an indiegogo campaign (running til the 21st).

And we have tickets at the box offices for all our performances, $11 adult, $9 student/senior.  We’d love to see you there!

  • Thurs Aug 14th, 10 pm (opening)
  • Sun Aug 17th, 9 pm
  • Mon Aug 18th, 12:15 pm
  • Wed Aug 20th, 11:30 pm
  • Thurs Aug 21st, 4:00 pm
  • Sat Aug 23rd, 6:45 pm (closing)
Sonder cast rehearses family scene. Erin Pettifor as the mother comforts her children (Julia Van Dam, Evan Macleod).

Sonder cast rehearses family scene. Erin Pettifor as the mother comforts her children (Julia Van Dam, Evan Macleod).

Sonder cast creates funeral vignette. Evan Macleod as Doug the deceased. Mourners left to right: Julia Van Dam, Emily Cupples, Tyler Johnson, Brittany Martyshuk.

Sonder cast creates funeral vignette. Evan Macleod as Doug the deceased. Mourners left to right: Julia Van Dam, Emily Cupples, Tyler Johnson, Brittany Martyshuk.

Eleven solo shows

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I saw eleven one-performer shows at this year’s Fringe.  I used to avoid them, preferring to see the interaction among characters rather than watching a single performer tell or recreate a whole story.  But the genre has grown on me, first with my admiration for storytellers and then extending to performers who act out their narrative with props and multiple characters.

Ask Aggie – Christine Lesiak’s departure from her clown persona to be an “advice diva”, answering audience questions about romance and sex, interspersed with stories and songs about her experiences with five husbands.  Funny, easy to listen to, and actually full of advice I didn’t disagree with.

They Call Me Mister Fry – Jack Fry tells stories about his first year of teaching elementary school, in inner-city Los Angeles.  He shows slides of some student work to illustrate some of the stories.  Reviewers seemed to like it more than I did.  It was well delivered, but it’s a genre of story that I’m very familiar with.

RiderGirl – Colleen Sutton tells about becoming and being a part of RiderNation, the community of Saskatchewan Rough Rider fans, along with other changes in her life, such as leaving a military band appointment to study acting.

Nashville Hurricane – Chase Padgett’s narrative was held over for one show yesterday, which is no surprise.  It was one of the best and most polished shows of any kind I saw this year.  His characters were very distinct from each other, compelling and not all likeable.

Borderland – Izad Etemadi, from Victoria BC, used first-person narrative and three point-of-view characters to tell a story in tribute to people he’d encountered through a Toronto-based group Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees.

Dykeopolis: Queer Tales and Travels for our Times – Kimberly Dark’s anecdotes, questions, and thought starters were a perfect example of the saying “the personal is political”.  Through stories from her own life, starting from the first girl she was attracted to in high school, she illustrated important points about gender and sexuality in ways that the audience connected with.

Zack Adams: Zack to the Future: – Shane Adamczak, from Australia tells a silly story about time travel to the future.  Many of the audience seemed familiar with his character from previous shows but it was my first time seeing him.

Canuck Quixote – Colin Godbout plays guitar and sings, and in between talks about the musicians and the songs and how they fit with themes of ethnic minorities and quixotic journeys.  I like some of the music and I wasn’t familiar with all of it, and I still didn’t find the show compelling.  Maybe his understated stage presence and lack of eye contact were too reminiscent of the title character of Nashville Hurricane.

Roller Derby Saved my Soul– Nancy Kenny recounted how discovering the sport of roller derby had changed her life as a 30-something single woman who “thought I’d have a more interesting job by now” and who struggled to get along with her mother and sister.  The stage floor had a bit of derby track taped onto it.  During the show she puts on roller skates and derby gear, and then delivers part of her story while skating.  This was not as distracting as you might think.  I really enjoyed it and found it inspiring.

Bad Guys Finish First – Gavin Williams starts off giving a self-help seminar about how to be successful by not caring about other people.  His character is so over-the-top mean that it’s clearly not sincere, but he still made the audience uncomfortable.  Of course there is a twist before the end, but it happens a bit too fast for credibility.  This show is a fascinating example of, I’m not sure if it’s the literary device of unreliable-narrator or the theatrical device of dramatic irony or something in between, though.

Limbo – Andrew Bailey tells stories about being a teenager and university student with obsessive-compulsive disorder.  His director Britt Small also directed Ride the Cyclone.

Death at the Fringe

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Several of the shows I saw at this year’s Fringe examined the theme of death in some unorthodox ways.

Grim and Fischer was a mask show by the Wonderheads, the troupe which presented LOON last year.  It’s a repeat of a show that was at Edmonton Fringe a few years ago, but I missed it then.  Since I loved LOON, I was excited about seeing the troupe again, and I wasn’t disappointed.  The three characters were Mrs Fischer (Kate Braidwood), a determined energetic old widow with a lopsided smile and a sense of humour, Death (Andrew Phoenix) a long-faced persistent figure in a black overcoat, and Doug the Nurse (Andrew Phoenix).  Death checks his pocketwatch and attempts to deliver a summons to Mrs Fischer, but she isn’t ready to go yet.  Mrs. Fischer’s physicality and posture are very effective in creating the impression of someone who is active but very old.  After the show, the performers told us that they are developing a new show and hope to be back next year.

Life After Breath is a clown show I’ve already mentioned, a charming and poignant look at how two characters (Neelam Chattoo as Squee, Amy Chow as Nona) cope after the death of a loved one who used to take care of them, and how they have some underworld adventures in an attempt to re-connect with the person who died.

Into Oblivion is a set of musings, monologues, and mood vignettes on death created by the three young local performers (Isaac Andrew, Graham Mothersill, Jordan Sabo) and their director Nick Eaton.  In the program, the director writes that he was moved to think about death after the cyclist died on Whyte Avenue shortly after last year’s Fringe (he’s not named in the program, but it was Isaak Kornelsen).  My favourite thing about this show was the ways they used some audience interaction to add to their effectiveness without disrupting the thoughtful somber mood of their presentation.  They greeted audience members beforehand as if we were funeral attendees, and finished by welcoming us to stay for refreshments as we shared memories (and the refreshments turned out to be tasty cookies).  In other portions of the show, they identified the oldest audience member and asked polite questions about her mortality, used an audience member as prop in reflections on decomposition, and most unnervingly invited an audience member who claimed not to fear death to sit on stage and be blindfolded, after which they handed him a handgun.

You Killed Hamlet, or Guilty Creatures Sitting at a Play was a bouffon style piece (mockery and physical comedy), performed by Nathaniel Justiniano and Ross Travis of Naked Empire Bouffon Company of San Francisco.  It wasn’t exclusively about death; the topics bounced around as much as the performers did, but there was a lot of material about death, culminating in the personification of the play Hamlet in an audience member who lay on the stage and was then carried off by pallbearers.  It was funny, it was disturbing, it was fast-paced, and it had the most aggressive interactions with the audience of any show I’ve seen this year.  Another audience member told me he’d seen it twice so far, and that people who were too uncomfortable had walked out both times.

And as I’ve mentioned before, Off Book The Musical had a graveyard location the night I went, meaning that one character is a woman who has recently become a ghost (Jocelyn Ahlf), and one storyline involves a grandmother’s (Joleen Ballendine) death and her grandson (Kory Matheson), son (Matt Alden) and other mourners.

 

 

Finish your Fringe with God on God

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I’ve seen lots of Fringe shows that I haven’t told you about yet, but the one I want to be sure to mention before it closes is the one that I am too close to to review.

This was my first year being involved with a Fringe production.  I’ve been stage managing an original comedy called God on God, written by Dan Moser and Jordan Ward, and performed by Moser, Ward, Kay Schultz, Nate Collins, and Colby Crossley.  It’s been fascinating, educational, and a lot more fun than I expected to help the show come together, tinker with details to make it run smoothly and on time, and watch people laugh from my seat in the booth beside our quiet organized sound and light tech Joey Roach.

We’ve been running at Venue 51.  Didn’t know there was a Venue 51?  It’s the Avenue Theatre, on 118 Avenue (Alberta Ave), between 90 and 91 Streets.  And while it would be fun to be closer to the main Fringe site in Old Strathcona and we’d almost certainly get more drop-in playgoers, it’s also been neat to be part of expanding the Fringe to a different part of Edmonton, and handy to have free convenient parking and little traffic nearby.  We’re the only show in the venue, which means that we’ve been able to stay set up between shows, which makes my job much easier.

Our last show is tonight at 8 pm.  Tickets will be available at the door unless we sell out ($12 cash only) as well as through the Fringe box office and yeglive.ca.  Our advertised running time is 50 minutes, so if you want to get to the volunteer wrap party afterwards or just get into bed early before going back to work on the post-Fringe Monday, you should still be able to fit us in.

Cast of God on God relaxing between shows

Cast of God on God relaxing between shows

I’ve watched it 13 times, and it still makes me giggle.  I try to do it quietly, but you don’t have to.  Finish your Fringe with God on God!

Some of the long-form improv at the Fringe

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As usual, there are lots of opportunities to experience improvisational theatre at the Edmonton Fringe.  Edmonton has lots of improv performers and fans, and improv works well with Fringe audiences.  And the way improv works is that you can never see all of it, because every performance is different.

This year I saw three long-form improv shows, Scratch, Rocket Sugar Factory, and Off Book the Musical.  Long-form improv creates one (or more) coherent (more or less) narratives throughout the performance, and wraps them up by the end of the show.  (Or else it leaves enough loose ends to make you come back for a sequel, as in the local improv soap-opera Die-Nasty.)  As you can see from that attempt to define long-form, improvisational theatre starts with some rules or guidelines but doesn’t necessarily stick to them.

Rocket Sugar Factory is the company of Jim Libby and Jacob Banigan, North Americans who currently perform in Austria.  I loved their show at last year’s Fringe so I made a point of fitting them in this year, and they didn’t disappoint me.  They started by getting suggestions from different sections of the audience – starting with audience suggestions is one of the improv traditions.  The performers built affectionate rapport while collecting suggestions in the intimate setting of the Walterdale Theatre, and because their separate conversations were simultaneous the result ended up more of a surprise.  In the show I saw, they concocted a horror tale (which was more of a classic ghost story) set in 19th century England.  Both performers made effective use of accents and body language to distinguish among their characters and delight the audience.  They switched roles frequently, occasionally confusing me but mostly following each other’s lead to build a funny creepy story.  Jim Libby’s occasional corpsing (falling out of character momentarily to laugh at what was going on) did not detract from the audience’s amusement and illustrated that they were having fun.  Rocket Sugar Factory has one more show, tonight at 6:30 pm.

Scratch is the show of Arlen Konopaki and Kevin Gillese, both of them Rapid Fire Theatre alumni who are currently working (separately) in the USA.  It’s playing at the Princess Theatre, to packed houses of fans.  The theatre isn’t an ideal venue, because it’s long and narrow, making it hard for the performers to hear audience suggestions.  Both of them wear cordless mics during the show, and they were easy to hear thanks to tech Cadence Konopaki.  Their style is very physical, and I could see that the mics were inconveniencing them, though.  In the show I saw, very physical included climbing Mount Everest, flying around as Game of Thrones dragons, playing piano, lumbering around as a yeti, and a lot of admirably athletic simulated sex.  Like the performers of Rocket Sugar Factory, it’s clear that Arlen and Kevin have been playing together for a long time, the way that they pick up each other’s cues, switching roles seamlessly and spinning around to signal a transition into another scene or set of characters.  In Scratch, most of the show had scenes alternating among three separate stories, with some fitting together at the end.  Scratch plays tonight at 10 and tomorrow at 3. 

Off Book is a completely improvised musical-theatre performance.  It’s a Rapid Fire production at the Yardbird Suite, which seems to be a great venue for performers although it is probably visually a bit unsatisfying for people sitting at the back since there aren’t any risers.  The acoustics are good though.

Rapid Fire Theatre hosts Off-Book performances sometimes as part of their regular season long-form improv offerings on Saturday nights, so if you enjoy this show you can watch the Rapid Fire website and Facebook group to see when you can see more.  The troupe is led by Matt Alden, and accompaniment is provided by the talented Joel Crichton on keyboard.  Other performers in the show I saw were Amy Shostak, Joleen Ballendine, Kory Mathewson, David Walker, Vince Fortier, and I think Jocelyn Ahlf.  Starting from the audience suggestion of a graveyard as location, they generated all the tropes of musical theatre from a catchy ensemble opening number “It’s a great day to be dead!” to a romantic plot with supporting sidekicks, impeccable rhymes, occasional dance numbers, harmonising two musical themes, a deathbed solo, and a tidy ending recalling the melodies explored earlier.  I thought that the performance I saw was particularly strong, and I thought that the venue was more conducive to appreciating the nuances of the lyrics than Rapid Fire’s usual space in Zeidler Hall at the Citadel.  Off Book plays today at 2:30, but is probably sold out.