Fringe Festival has an eclectic vibe
Shows vary widely, from musical biography to all-women melodrama to a surreal road trip
The 34th annual Vancouver Fringe Festival is as eclectic as ever with 90 shows from local, national and international theatre companies — or increasingly, individual theatre artists — competing for attention. My goal: to see a range of shows as different from one another as possible.
WOODY SED
Where: The Cultch Historic Theatre
I’ve long been a Woody Guthrie fan — for his incredible corpus of songs, his radical politics, his influence on Dylan. Vancouver’s Tom Jones skilfully plays and sings Woody in this musical biography that traces his life from 1927, when he left Oklahoma to hobo around the America that his songs helped define (This Land Is Your Land), to his 1967 death.
Jones peoples the bare stage with characters Guthrie met on his rambles: musicologist Alan Lomax, folksinger Ledbelly, Woody’s 3-year-old daughter. Jones is a good actor and an even better singer/ musician, channelling Woody vocally and showing great chops on the guitar marked with Woody’s famous slogan, “This machine kills fascists.”
With so many songs to sing and such a rich life to chronicle, things get spread a little thin. Less biography, especially toward the end, and more of that terrific music would make this fine show even better.
THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT
Where: The Cultch Vancity Culture Lab
In this bold, quirky choice for inclusion in the Fringe’s Dramatic Works Series, Vancouver’s Midtwenties Theatre Society stages a 1972 all-female melodrama from German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A successful fashion designer and fulltime diva, Petra bullies her silent assistant and falls in love with a young woman who ultimately rejects her, leading to a series of freakouts and hysterics.
The melodramatic scenes are played without irony (“I love you, I need you to be the
centre of my being, you stinking little whore!”) on a stage dominated by a nude female mannequin. The gender politics are fascinating in their confusion.
Nadya Debogorski does very good work as Petra and the entire cast is solid, playing rich, spoiled German women. A clever Platters soundtrack (The Great Pretender, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes) and très chic fashions give added dimension to a play you’re unlikely to see anywhere but at the Fringe.
MAGICAL MYSTERY DETOUR
Where: Studio 1398, Granville Island
The UK’s Gemma Wilcox plays 23 characters in this rousing, oddball tale of a woman’s road trip from London to Cornwall to commemorate her mother’s death and watch the transit of Venus; with Van Morrison, Hendrix and the Beatles on the radio and a few too many detours along the way. While trying to create an ad slogan for Marmite, Sandra makes a wish to the nasalrinse fairy and takes off with her dog Solar. What transpires is a shaggy dog story in more ways than one. Solar gets almost as much stage time as Sandra. Other major charac- ters include Sandra’s car (that speaks in a Scots brogue), a fly, a tree and the Queen.
Wilcox is an attractive, energetic actor. Even her extensive use of mime is fun to watch, and her journey, despite the enigmatic destination, is well worth the ride.