We go to the wild and crazy experts for Fringe Festival picks
Magic acts at this year’s event appear to have our voting artists spellbound
With the 25th edition of the Fringe Festival kicking off on Monday, it’s time to plunge into the seething maelstrom that is the brochure’s A-Z guide and see if we can’t emerge with a few wriggling tidbits between our teeth.
But rather than lording over the picking process myself, why not turn it over to the artists? After all, back in 1991 my predecessor Pat Donnelly summed up that very first Fringe as “democracy around a beer tent.” And who better to go first into our virtual voting booth than Keir Cutler, the man whose solo shows (Teaching Shakespeare, Rant Demon, etc.) have been a festival staple since 1999?
This year he has written, but isn’t performing in, 2056: A Dystopian Black Comedy, featuring four actors. His top picks are Jem Rolls’s The Inventor of All Things (“I’ve been following Jem on the Fringe circuit since 2001. This year he’s doing something different from his phenomenal poetry, telling the story of a forgotten man in history.”); The Orchid and the Crow, a storytelling show from Daniel Tobias of famed Fringe duo Die Roten Punkte; and magician Keith Brown’s Exchange. (“I love magic on the fringe,” says Cutler, “which is magic at its very basic level.”)
Magic acts seem to be particularly popular this year. Brown himself has picked a couple of them: Obscura, from Beyond the Mountain (“Christian Cagigal is a magician I’ve followed for years and he’s always been a source of inspiration”), and Unpossible! from Travis Bernhardt, which is also a Jem Rolls vote-winner. Brown has also gone for Fringe favourite Shoshinz, a.k.a. Miss Hiccup, who follows up her hit My Exploding Family with Kiss Around Pass Around, a solo physical comedy about a mysterious creature looking for its daddy.
Unpossible! is on “chanteuse provocatrice” Shirley Gnome’s radar, too. Gnome, whose own show Real Mature was also picked by Rolls, assures us that we’ll be “laughing between bouts of amazement” at Unpossible! “Bernhardt’s quick wit is as quick as his hands.”
She also chose yet more magic with Jon Bennett’s It’s Rabbit Night!!!, as well as a British comedy duo who seem to be attracting a particularly loud buzz this year: James and Jamesy. They’re doing two shows — James and Jamesy in the Dark and High Tea. The latter is yet another Jem Rolls pick, and Jon Lachlan Stewart’s as well.
“They’re laugh-out-loud fun for those who love the WEIRD!” says Stewart, who also put his X next to the francophone show Sexe, drogues et Kurt Weill from Les Kurtettes.
One of the three Fringe shows Stewart is directing, Miss Katelyn’s Grade Threes Prepare for the Inevitable (he’s also directing The Colour of Life and Cutler’s 2056), was chosen by Marie Barlizo, whose own play Stroke is premièring at the festival. Barlizo is also looking forward to Bar Kapra the Squirrel Hunter from Scapegoat Carnivale (“Joseph Shragge tackles big ideas and writes intense plays,” she says) and In Search of Mrs. Pirandello from Michaela Di Cesare, whose 8 Ways My Mother Was Conceived was a big hit a few years back.
Other first-past-the-post shows include Peter N’ Chris with Here Lies Chris, picked by Daniel Tobias; the sketch show Happy — What You Need to Be, chosen by Gleams Theatre’s Ira S, who is directing C.S. Hanson’s Where Were You When I Was Coming; and 5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche, voted by Leah R Vineberg, whose own show Tuesday Seeds of War: Draft 1: The Hunt promises, in true Fringe spirit, to shape-shift nightly according to interaction with her audience.
As for the rest, you’ll have your own opportunity to cast your vote, or at least holler enthusiastically, on Monday when the free Fringe-for-All festival launch gives all participants two minutes each to whet your appetite at 7 p.m. at Café Campus, 57 PrinceArthur St. E.
As the Fringe opens, the Festival TransAmériques draws to a close next week. Among the final shows are new productions from two New York-based iconoclasts.
Eternal, from director Daniel Fish, is basically a filmed record of two actors providing variations on the last scene of Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. On the face of it, it seems a little out of place in a festival dedicated to live performance. But admirers of the show have insisted that its cumulative effect transcends the usual screening experience.
Playwright-director Richard Maxwell’s Isolde is about a married actress who hires an architect to design her dream home and finds herself drawn to him. As you might guess, it’s loosely based on the Tristan and Isolde myth, but it didn’t start out that way.
“I started off writing about an actress who loses her memory and put her into a love-triangle scenario,” Maxwell says. “I think it was around then that I had a dream. All I remember from it is the word ‘Isolde.’ I’m not sure if I even knew the specifics of the story, but it is a kind of archetype
for the love-triangle story.”
Wagner famously adapted the myth, but don’t expect any operatic emoting here, given Maxwell’s penchant for encouraging a stripped-down acting style. One critic described him as “the bard of downtown deadpan,” though Maxwell bristles at that term.
“Yeah, I don’t like that. My asking performers to avoid expression or showing feelings, it’s not a dead thing. I guess I know what people mean, but in a way, it’s too accurate — it’s an identifiable style. And if something becomes identifiable, then it IS dead in a way.”
With Isolde, Maxwell is challenging himself and his team of four actors, all of whom he has worked with many times, to try to rediscover what first put the fire in their belly, theatrically speaking.
“You don’t go on stage to be comfortable,” he insists. “That’s not what it’s about.”