TUNE IN REAL FAKE NEWS
The Journal has a team of seven reviewers at Fringe ‘O’ Saurus Rex. We’ll print a selection of their best reviews every day through Aug. 24, but you’ll find most reviews at edmontonjournal.com/fringe.
TRAGEDY, A TRAGEDY ★★★★ Stage 3, Walterdale Theatre
Less of a tragedy and more of a smart satire, this is a timely show about fake news, but not the kind a certain president complains about.
The four-person news team here isn’t set to deliver a true or false story about corrupt politicians. Instead it’s about the shell of melodrama that’s used to fill time when there may be nothing going on at all, more akin to the kind of disaster reporting that you might see on cable news channels, but tailored to the parameters of a smaller city, a dire emergency, or maybe a nonevent.
The writing by Will Eno is spectacularly unspectacular (take that as a compliment), sometimes so caught up in intricate cliches and contradictions as to feel like poetic wordplay. Language is also key to fleshing out the empty intensity of each character.
Constance “at the home” (Sarah Ormandy) is geared more to the touchy feely angle, John “in the field” (Cody Porter) is the confused nerd focused on new details, Michelle “the legal adviser” (Cat Walsh) reports import from the steps of the governor’s residence, and then there’s Frank.
Frank, “in the studio” (Robert Benz) is the essential anchor to it all, co-ordinating the others, ready to add gravity and commentary when called for, which seems like most of the time, unless he misses his cue (when everyone gets a network break it’s pretty amusing what they get up to).
The energy started to flag around 1 a.m. or so, at the point where you start to realize that the real event being depicted is the tragedy that has befallen television news.
Well done team. Part of me wanted it to go on until sunrise.
Roger Levesque
THE SOLDIER’S TALE ★★★★★ Stage 5, King Edward Elementary School
A soldier is on his way home from war. He meets the devil in disguise, who tricks him out of his cherished fiddle in return for an apparently magic book.
The consequences of this meeting are spellbindingly unfurled in this near-ideal production of Stravinsky’s modernist chamber-scaled masterpiece, based on a Russian folk-tale, and delivered in the U.K. English translation of the original French. It feels as groundbreaking as when it was first performed almost exactly 100 years ago, when soldiers were indeed about to come home from the Great War.
It’s pure musical theatre, a combination of acting, dance, mime and an almost jazzy septet of instruments (here conducted by the ESO’s Alexander Prior) — there’s only a tiny brief moment of actual singing.
Farren Timoteo’s tight direction, with a minimalist black box set, faithfully honours the work, with one very effective change: the Devil here is a woman. Andrea House’s performance indeed ends up devilish, her facial and physical contortions evolving through the work, while Oscar Derkx’s Soldier has just the right combination of naivete and cocky self-assurance.
Camille Ensminger’s dancing counters the Devil’s machinations with her grace, while Davina Stewart is superb as the narrator, moving effortlessly from observer to participant.
The instrumental ensemble includes some of the best players in Edmonton.
Apparently (and surprisingly), this production is the first fully staged professional performance in Alberta, and it’s a must-see.
Mark Morris
WASP ★★★ Stage 5, King Edward Elementary School
The blindingly pink sky out the window and garish colours of the 1950s kitchen are smack-in-theface sign of the dystopia to come in WASP.
This 1996 Steve Martin play (yes, the famous comedic actor Steve Martin) smashes apart the illusion of the perfect 1950s American white suburban family by yanking each character aside for a spotlit monologue, or a heartfelt chat with a disembodied voice. Dad, mom, sis and son paste on their false smiles and chortle overwrought laughs for dad’s dull golfing anecdote, and the females are dutifully horrified when the son asks his dad whether heaven is closer than the moon, like his science teacher says it is.
Despite its famous author, WASP has an odd script that ventures beyond biting social commentary into downright confusing. Dad’s supposedly wisdom-filled speeches venture into gibberish, and the dissection of the fraud of suburban bliss leaps beyond artful into exasperatingly obvious. What’s supposed to be humorously disturbing is somehow neither. This WASP needs a stronger stinger.
Mercifully, Le Fixe Theatre has good actors. Jayce Mckenzie is sharp and bright in a soliloquy, where she divulges her secret self-confidence between obediently chirping out her soprano parts at a choir rehearsal.
Edmonton actor and playwright James Hamilton is a perfectly oblivious patriarch, peppering his Leave it to Beaver role with a dash of bumbling TV parent Tobias Funk from Arrested Development.
The audio cues are another clever touch that inject some sorely needed humour.
Janet French
JAKE’S GIFT ★★★★★ Stage 35, L’unitheatre at La Cite Francophone
It’s a feat to tackle multiple characters in a one-person show.
It is something more to be able to fully inhabit all of those characters, physically and emotionally.
Credit goes to Julia Mackey for jumping seamlessly from one character to the next — a precocious 10-year-old French girl, her grandmother, a school teacher, and Canadian Second World War veteran Jake — in Jake’s Gift, playing at L’unitheatre.
Over 75 minutes, Mackey takes the audience through Jake’s reluctant journey back to Juno Beach for the 60th anniversary of D-Day, his first journey back there since the war.
While in Normandy, he encounters lively Isabelle (“petite” Isabelle, as she shares her name with her grandmother). The two strike up an unlikely friendship, as the cantankerous Jake doesn’t seem all that interested in engaging the girl.
But, whether through a desire for a connection on what has been a difficult journey, or Isabelle’s sheer tenacity, she wears down his defences.
We see Jake struggle through the trip. He carries with him the loss of his wife, and his last surviving brother who had fought on the beaches with him, and their older brother Chester, who now lies in a Normandy grave.
Mackey brings all of her characters to life with full-bodied realism, and even when she’s bouncing back and forth between Jake and Isabelle, you can truly feel the emotion of each of them, especially Jake’s sadness, loss, and even his survivor’s guilt.
It’s as stirring a show as you’re going to see at the festival.
Dave Breakenridge
THE ALIEN BABY PLAY ★★★1/2 Stage 3, Walterdale Theatre
Bethany is about to have a baby.
As the title suggests, it’s an alien baby, and 15 months into the ordeal she’s feeling more than a little put out by the long gestation period.
There are little consolations, of course, like the occasional ghostly visits from the father, Gabe, and the fact that her little one actually glows in the womb, but that doesn’t quite make up for the intense stabbing pains, or the disapproval of her twin sister, Liz. Still, Bethany is determined to deliver, and she’s happy to have the audience along to witness.
Despite the paranormal underpinnings, The Alien Baby Play is less about extraterrestrial visitors and more about the scattered contents of Bethany’s mind.
Jessy Arden is excellent as the mother-to-be, musing on her otherworldly lover, changing body, and traumatic events in her childhood. More a shaggy dog story than a straight narrative, The Alien Baby Play works mostly because of Arden’s magnetic performance.
She’s also a dutiful hostess, if opening night was anything to go by; be sure to get there early enough for treats.
Tom Murray
A BRIEF HISTORY OF BEER ★★ Stage 2, Big Rock Backstage Theatre
Beer meets The Magic School Bus in this two-person comedy that takes the audience through the history of the popular bubbly beverage.
Now that combination does sound bizarre, especially since patrons are encouraged to buy a brew for the performance. No one in the theatre was under 18.
But actors Trish Parry and William Glenn, also the writers of the show, lead the lesson like Ms. Frizzle with cooky activities and young-spirited enthusiasm that seems more geared for a gradeschool history class.
The Wish Experience production, based out of New York, discusses the beginnings of beer, its rise to fame and how it has transformed. The actors take the audience back in time via a beer detector spaceship — awfully like the magic school bus — and dissect the different ways beer was discovered.
Technical difficulties were in abundance, which could be credited to opening performance knots, but both actors were visibly thrown off their game, modifying sound cues during the performance and even paying a visit to the technicians at the back of the theatre.
The concept is admirable and both Parry and Glenn weave in and out of different characters, clearly displaying their love and passion for the hoppy drink — and yes, they even enjoy a cold one themselves with the audience. But the story just doesn’t hold together as a performance piece for adults.
Dustin Cook