Fringe fest shows vying for your attention
Here are some of the most eye-catching shows on offer
Montreal Fringe boss Amy Blackmore has good reason to feel that things are on a roll for this 27th edition of the festival.
It comes after Montreal played host to the World Fringe Congress last year, and after the Montreal Fringe and its organizing HQ MainLine Theatre made it to the finals of the Conseil des arts de Montréal’s prestigious Grand Prix.
“The momentum around the Fringe movement locally, as well as internationally, is really revving it up,” Blackmore explains while taking a break from preparations for the opening of the festival next Wednesday.
“For a couple of years I was starting to think Fringe in general was starting to plateau, because Fringes are popping up all around the world and we weren’t really talking to each other.
“So doing the Congress in Montreal was really important, because it meant that Fringe festivals from all over North America and Europe could come together. It really forced us to have a conversation about what we were doing.”
Although Blackmore and her colleagues are still mulling over that conversation, one thing she’s looking at is the possibility of bringing work from the Montreal Fringe to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2018.
Time will tell which of the more than 100 shows playing over the next two weeks might be Edinburgh-ready, so the following guide isn’t necessarily an endorsement of quality, more a subjective sifting of the Fringe brochure’s A-Z listings.
One of the surest ways of standing out from the teeming Fringe frenzy is to come up with an attention-grabbing title. How about A Woman’s Guide To Peeing Outside and other adventures …(Pompette), a storytelling show from Holly Brinkman?
Or maybe Old, Fat and F---ed! Now What? (MAI), Puelo Deir’s cri de coeur about being a gay 50-something in a milieu which, generally speaking, favours buff youthfulness.
There’s also the cheeky whimsy of Peter Pansexual (Café Cléopâtre), an adult panto which promises to blow fairy dust into the eyes of all things heteronormative.
And for pithy un-PC brazenness, there’s Crazy Bitch (The Wiggle Room), Ellie MacDonald’s autobiographically comedic take on the concept of princesses gone bad.
For all the arch wackiness of the Fringe, there are also plenty of serious matters to get your teeth into.
Paani (Studio Multimédia du Conservatoire) is a multidisciplinary look at the effects of Islamophobia, while At the Edge of the World (Black Theatre Workshop) is a play about medical volunteers in Haiti from Barbara Newman MD, put on by a company calling themselves Doctors Without Boredom.
The Fringe can also be an opportunity for the more traditional theatre fan to, as Blackmore puts it, “geek out.”
Several companies are trying their hands at more or less established plays this year, including Beige Theatre Co. with David Gow’s neo-Nazi drama, Cherry Docs (Montreal Improv); Monkeyshines Productions with Eric Bogosian’s acerbic Broadway hit, Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead (The Wiggle Room); and Parisian company La troupe des îles du vent Moorea with Les Créanciers, or Creditors (Studio Jean-Valcourt du Conservatoire), Strindberg’s wonderfully nasty chamber piece about volcanic sexual jealousy.
This last is a reminder of the significant francophone presence at the Fringe which, as Blackmore points out, has been increased from a 30 per cent quota to 35 per cent this year.
Patrons might be left feeling a little bereft at the absence of Fringe regulars such as Jem Rolls, Keir Cutler and James and Jamesy this year. This is partly because they didn’t make it through the lottery process (which, Blackmore notes, proves it’s all above board, despite some skeptics believing it’s fixed in favour of surefire Fringe hits).
It’s also partly to do with the fact that the Ottawa and Montreal Fringes overlap this year, and some acts have opted for the former.
But worry not — there are still plenty of familiar faces, such as last year’s Spirit of the Fringe winners Chocolate Moose, who this year spoof on the very timely subject of Russian spies (and upholstery) in The Thrill of the Chaise (Mainline).
The reliably sold-out SNAFU return with Interstellar Elder about a 96-year-old astronaut heading out to where no woman has gone before.
Affable Australian raconteur Jon Bennett is back with a show about Kylie Minogue’s forgotten ’80s screen partner in Jon Bennett vs. Jason Donovan (Petit Campus).
And one of the Fringe’s most familiar faces (and beards), Al Lafrance, turns up in The Ballad of Frank Allen (Petit Campus), alongside Shane Adamczak in a tale about a man living in Lafrance’s beard.
There’s also a reprise of Nisha Coleman and Jeff Gandell’s acclaimed storytelling show, Things Drugs Taught Me (Mission Santa Cruz).
And it’s good to note that part-time wrestler and delightfully eccentric funnyman James McGee joins the cast of Precinct: An Improvised Cop Story (Montreal Improv).
In the Fringe equivalent of turning up to a party wearing the same dress as somebody else, two shows find themselves attempting a multidisciplinary riff on Oscar Wilde’s short story The Selfish Giant. A Change in the Weather (Studio Jean-Valcourt du Conservatoire) uses it as the basis of an exploration of current events, while in OSCAR (Espace Freestanding Room) Johanna Nutter and Joseph Shragge incorporate it into a mature retelling of a trio of Wilde’s stories for children.
There’s also a strand of classic storytelling elsewhere, with Bill Zaget’s retelling of Dracula from the point of view of the Count’s bug-eating acolyte in Renfield or, Dining at the Bughouse (Studio Jean-Valcourt du Conservatoire) and We Accept Her: A Caravan Calamity (Mainline Theatre), an adaptation of Tod Browning’s notorious horror film, Freaks. And finally Orson Welles/Shylock
(Black Theatre Workshop) recreates the great cinema legend’s thwarted attempts to play Shakespeare’s anti-hero.
Outside of all the Fringe and Festival TransAmériques activities (the latter wraps up this Thursday), two dramatically contrasting shows open this week.
At the Segal Centre, the Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre follow up last year’s delightful coproduction of The Producers with another Broadway musical, It Shoulda Been You. A zany downthe-aisle comedy about a Jewish bride and a gentile groom, it’s being presented in Yiddish with English and French surtitles.
At the Centaur, for two nights only, there’s Reckoning, an incendiary “triptych in movement, video and text” from indigenous company ARTICLE 11. It explores the reverberations of the residential schools outrages and the limitations of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee.