Tag Archives: kevin sutley

Starting the Fringe 2022

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Crack in the Mirror – This Guys in Disguise show is set at a late-1970’s Women’s Group meeting in a suburban home. Strident divorcée Ruth (Jason Hardwick) shows up at Melanie’s (Trevor Schmidt) finger-foods and wine event with earnest brochures and speeches about Gloria Steinem, but both of them are disappointed when nobody else comes except for the older, naive, Ginger (Jake Tkaczyk). I once heard Trevor Schmidt speak at a script reading and he said in his writing, he favours choosing kindness when possible – that there’s still lots of scope for conflict and interesting stories with characters who don’t set out to be mean to each other. And I didn’t realize it at the time – I was laughing too hard – but Crack in the Mirror is a good example of that. Varscona Theatre.

Meatball Séance – John Michael of Chicago’s solo show is infused with so much manic awkward energy that the themes of loss at its heart didn’t bring it down. Lots of audience participation bits, always with an option to decline. Sue Paterson stage at Campus St-Jean.

Mules – Directed by Kevin Sutley and with a good cast of actors from U of A Augustana (that’s the campus in Camrose), I bought a ticket for this because of the playwrights, Beth Graham and Daniela Vlaskalic. It was dark, it was twistedly funny in parts, and it managed to evoke some really disturbing things without actually showing any of them directly. It is a longer play (90 minutes), but I was really engaged with what was going to happen with these characters, played by Miracle Mopera, Kyra Gusdal, and Frank Dion. Walterdale Theatre.

Late Night Cabaret – I don’t make it to this Fringe midnight event very often, because I usually need some sleep more than I need a variety show with an amazing house band (Zee Punterz), amusing hosts from Rapid Fire Theatre, and glimpses of many of the Fringe artists and phenomena that I hadn’t yet had time to catch up with. But in the scaled-down masked-up Fringe of 2021, I managed to score one ticket to the limited run of Late Night Cabaret and when I walked in to the Backstage Theatre that night, its perfect blend of nightclub energy and community acceptance was something I hadn’t known I’d been missing. Last night’s hosts were Joleen Ballendine and Joey Lucius of Rapid Fire and the guest performers included Ingrid Hansen (Epidermis Circus), Tymisha Harris (Josephine, Josie & Grace) and Rachel Comeau (Josie & Grace), and Johnnie Walker (The Heterosexuals). Backstage Theatre.

White Guy on Stage Talking – I am stage-managing this, an innocent operations production with Jake Tkaczyk and Meegan Sweet. Like Tkaczyk’s previous innocent operations work, it includes a series of images and explorations devised on a theme, many of them topically pointed, excessively silly, or just absurd, and never takes itself too seriously. It’s fun to show audiences the things the performers and other creative contributors have been building. Walterdale Theatre.

This year’s Fringe has kept some of the innovations we first saw last year. The option to do paperless ticketing, and the move to one-step sales in the beer tents instead of the old get tickets here, give tickets there ritual. The bigger liquor-licensed area covering the old South Beer Tent and the whole of McIntyre Park (Gazebo Park) which eliminates a lot of the crowding/bottlenecks. The “no handbills” rule was easy last year as reducing the interactions between artists and patrons on site felt appropriate, and it eliminated a lot of paper. This year I think it’s more of a challenge – performers do need to engage to sell their shows, and it’s probably harder when there’s no tidy way of taking a card to wrap up the conversation. I’ve seen performers wandering in costume and wearing billboards and T-shirts with their QR codes.

The gravel parking lot (formerly Farmers’ Market parking, rebranded a few years ago to Theatre District parking) has increased in price to almost $20 for a full day, which will change my strategies a bit. Lots of my favourite food vendors (the wood fired pizza, the grilled cheese people, Fat Frank’s, the spaghetti in a cone, and the green onion cakes) are back, along with Native Delights (bannock burgers!) and something I need to try based on recommendations, BF Korean Chicken. Some people are wearing masks – more indoors than out, more performers than guests. There has obviously been some festival planning to eliminate pinch-points and bottlenecks and other non-intentional crowding, which is helpful in many ways other than reducing covid transmission.

Happy Fringe!

Fringe solos and classics

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Edmonton Fringe 2017 is somewhere around half over.  Around this time I start realizing I can’t see everything I should see – I can’t even see everything I want to see.  I don’t think I can fit in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, and I can’t find a time to see Turn of the Screw either.

But one of the great things about Fringe is that we don’t all see the same shows – and even when we do, we don’t all see the same performances.  So we have lots to talk about.

Wednesday I saw two touring solo shows along with two scripted plays at the Varscona Theatre.  None of them was classified as new work.

Redheaded Stepchild – Johnnie Walker tells a story as a 12-year-old boy, Nicholas, as his wellmeaning-but-weird stepmother Marianne, and as his more suave alter ego Rufus Vermilion.  It’s suitable for families as well as adults, as Walker catches the 12-year-old’s voice and physicality very well without mocking him, and his problems are easy to identify with.  And the stepmother – first we see her quirks through Nicholas’ eyes (that awful laugh!) and her acknowledgement that she never wanted to be a mother and isn’t cut out to be a stepmother, but then we see her understanding that she messed up and offering Nicholas a kind of low-key companionship which he accepts.  Walker and director Morgan Norwich have created an entertaining and inspiring tale with good pacing and interesting visuals that fits the one-hour time and the King Edward School stage perfectly.

No Exit – Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist philosopher, wrote No Exit in 1944.  All I knew about it beforehand was one famous line, but as it’s somewhat of a spoiler and comes late in the play I won’t write it here.  Ron Pederson, Belinda Cornish, and Louise Lambert are the three disparate characters stuck in an ugly room together.  George Szilagyi has a small part as the bellboy.  The colour palette of the show is mostly the faded maroon of old blood and worn-out formality.   It was funnier than I expected, and the unhappy characters made me intrigued rather than restless.  Kevin Sutley directs.

The Exquisite Hour – I don’t usually manage to see the Teatro la Quindicina show at the Fringe, but this year I made time to see Jeff Haslam and Belinda Cornish in an older Stewart Lemoine two-hander.  Cornish’s luminous self-possessed presentation works well in this gentle tale of a socially-awkward bachelor (Haslam) getting a visit from a mysterious stranger.

Ain’t True and Uncle False – Paul Strickland, another touring solo artist, comes from Covington, Kentucky.  He launches headlong into a set of affectionate tall tales about characters in a trailer park, one unfolding into the next and calling back to a throwaway comment earlier, the kinds of stories that would be funny enough on a page but are even more entertaining with guitar accompaniment and dialect and the physicality of his bowlegged uncle rocking back and forth licking his teeth.

Love’s Labours Lost, at the Studio Theatre

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One thing all the U of Alberta Studio Theatre series productions have in common is interesting set and costume design with satisfying attention to detail.  Earlier this season I enjoyed the stark spareness setting the mood for pool (no water), and then the period costumes of Pains of Youth and Bloody Poetry.

The designs for Love’s Labours Lost were playful and full of joy, with bright colours and silliness conveying the frivolous not-quite-real background for this comedy, set by the text in the Kingdom of Navarre.  Apparently there was a real place by this name, located on the French border of Spain.   Visitors to the kingdom included a “fantastical” Spaniard, Don Armando (Oscar Derkx), with exaggerated and very funny Hispano-Quixotic gestures and accent,  and the daughter of the King of France (Mariann Kirby) and some members of her court (Merran Carr-Wiggin, Zoe Glassman, Cristina Patalastc, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Sarah Ormandy).   Georgia Irwin plays the clown Costard with a consistent Scottish burr, for no explainable reason other than to make her character distinct from the local noblemen – but it’s funny.

The premise of the main plot is that the young King of France (Adam Klassen) convinces his male courtiers to join him for three years of studying, following a near-monastic rule with restrictions on food and sleep and a proscription on contact with women.  Berowne (Neil Kuefler) is particularly reluctant to sign on to this plan, although he eventually agrees along with the characters played by Kristian Stec and Graham Mothersill.  But almost immediately after they agree, they find out that the Princess of France and her attendants are on their way for a visit.  So they decide to keep the letter of the agreement by meeting the visitors in a park rather than in the palace.   And of course as soon as they meet, the men of Navarre are immediately struck with admiration for the women of France, conveniently aligned in non-conflicting pairs.

Meanwhile, bits of broader comedy (i.e. wacky hijinks) keep intervening, with the random cocky Spaniard and his saxophone-playing page (Andrea Rankin),  a country girl (Braydon Dowler-Coltman), the aforementioned clown Costard carrying messages and mixing them up, a constable (Brandon Nearey), a schoolmaster (Merran Carr-Wiggin), and a curate (Mark Vetsch).

The play runs almost two and a half hours (not counting the intermission) but I found that the time just flew by.

The story suits modern sensibilities and recent trends in popular culture by showing the Princess as competent with an air of authority, speaking mostly in prose, and in one scene hunting a deer with a bow and arrows.  I was most intrigued by the characters of the Princess and of Berowne, the courtier most willing to dispute with the King and then to declare his affection to Rosaline.  Berowne is also a leader in some affectionate trash-talking competition.

Love’s Labours Lost is directed by Kevin Sutley.  It is playing at the Timms Centre until Saturday, including a 2-for-1 ticket deal Monday (tomorrow).   If you click here on the Department of Drama website within the next few weeks, you can see a gallery of photos from the production showing the colourful costumes (the academic gowns and hoods are University of Alberta doctoral/faculty style).   And I’ll also offer you one more related link to click, the indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to help the young performers of this BFA Acting class take a modest audition tour together after they graduate in the spring.