WILDSIDE CELEBRATES 20 YEARS
Shigematsu performs one-man show
If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to stray from the beaten track more in 2017, Centaur Theatre has just the thing to start you on your wayward wanderings. The 20th edition of its annual Wildside festival, a two-week binge of hits from the Fringe and beyond, has just opened.
There’s a slightly sad air hovering over the proceedings this year, partly due to the inclusion of a latenight tribute to Leonard Cohen, but also because this is the last time Wildside will be co-curated by Roy Surette, who leaves his post as Centaur boss in June, and Johanna Nutter, who will be kept busy by, among other things, overseeing her new company creature/creature.
One of the festival’s most anticipated entries is the award-winning
Empire of the Son, which is stopping by as part of a national tour. It’s a one-man show written and performed by Tetsuro Shigematsu, who has been a CBC radio host, a reality TV star, a standup comic, even a Centaur Theatre usher. His show, which audiences all over Canada have enthusiastically embraced for its good-natured humour, clever stagecraft and painful honesty, tells of his troubled relationship with his emotionally reticent father.
“We never really had a single conversation beyond perfunctory exchanges like ‘pass the salt’,” Shigematsu says during a phone interview. “Initially I attributed his taciturn nature to his cultural heritage, but what I came to learn in the process of doing the show and having conversations with men around my age is that it’s more generational and more universal.”
Like Shigematsu, his father worked as a radio host — in his case at the BBC in London, after leaving Japan in disgust over its conduct during the war. Though a lifelong anglophile, he later moved his family to Vancouver.
Shigematsu’s father died just two weeks before the show’s première. Staying true to its mission of complete emotional honesty, Shigematsu incorporated, verbatim, some of the conversations he had with the undertakers, as well as his own feelings about the bereavement.
“Friends would sometimes check in with me and ask, ‘How are you doing with your father dying, being gone and all?’ ” he recalls, “and I would say, ‘I don’t think about him.’ That must have struck them as a callous answer. But in truth, the reason I gave myself for not thinking about him was that I knew I would be having these upcoming dates with him, spending over an hour with him every evening on stage in a kind of seance.”
Storyteller and one-time Parisian busker Nisha Coleman won the Centaur Best of the Fringe award last summer — an achievement that earns her pride of place in the Wildside festival. Self-Exile tells, with disarming honesty and vulnerability, of Coleman’s journey from a difficult swamp-surrounded upbringing in northern Ontario to a transformative experience on the streets of Paris. It was one of the most beloved shows of the Fringe, with audiences rising (almost) as one for ecstatic ovations. I’ll confess I glumly kept my seat: the show didn’t quite click with me. But I look forward to catching it again to see if — as with last year’s marvellous Fringe-to-Wildside show In Search of Mrs. Pirandello – I simply didn’t do it justice the first time around.
There’s a welcome return, too, for Backdoor Queens, from Café Cleopatra’s resident drag troupe House of Laureen. It’s kind of a verbatim theatre piece that records the dressing-room antics of the girls as they prepare for a show, but it’s about as far from the sobriety of docudrama as you can get. When I caught it during the Fringe, it initially seemed as though we were in for a brash but rather amateurish evening of self-indulgence. But as it progressed (and, let’s be honest, as the drink flowed), it transformed into something raucous, filthily funny, defiant, furiously entertaining, even magical. It will be interesting to see if its sassy cabaret atmosphere survives the move from its Café Cleo base. The inclusion of surprise guests should help.
One of the Fringe shows I didn’t catch in summer and is also getting a welcome extended life is A
Perfect Picture. It takes a surreal, shape-shifting look at the life and death of war photographer Kevin Carter, who was mostly famous for his incomparably disturbing Pulitzer Prize-winning image of a vulture calmly biding its time beside a starving Sudanese child. Written and performed by the young and very promising playwright-actor Laurent McCuaig-Pitre, it won the Kit Brennan playwriting award at Concordia.
Tina Milo, a Serbian performer and musician who recently made Montreal her home, has been refining her touring production The
Village since 2013. It’s a darkly humorous piece about an actress who is auditioning for the role of a depressed woman. Using the audience
as her judges, Milo springboards from this meta-theatrical conceit to explore various gender roles, incorporating physical theatre, live music and film.
There’s a sharp change of mood with the kids’-show spoof Hootenanny!, which purports to be the latest touring show from Australian children’s entertainers Anny (Kate Smith) and Hoot (Will Somers). Lurking within their happy-go-lucky songs, though, are dark references to child slavery and racist grandparents. Meanwhile, one of the duo harbours a secret that will sour the proceedings even more.
Last year’s Wildside featured the thoroughly enjoyable superhero musical Captain Aurora, and there’s a new musical this time around in the shape of Outta Here. Described as “a master class in authenticity” by Wildside co-curator Nutter, it was first performed at Montreal’s Summit School by a cast of teenagers with developmental challenges. The same cast comes to Wildside with this feelgood piece about a disabled student who, along with several of his peers, breaks free of school, heads for downtown Montreal and sparks a media frenzy in the process.
As well as the seven shows on offer, there are free (but hat-passing) shows in the festival’s Offside strand. Beginning around 10 p.m., they include a visit from the MTL Clown Fest on Saturday; puppet karaoke on Thursday; and that Cohen tribute to chase away the bad spirits of Friday the 13th.