HERE IS ART ON A SHOESTRING
From Orson Welles to Oscar Wilde, genius and talent are on display
And, they’re off: hundreds of performers taking to stages across the Main and beyond for the 27th edition of the Montreal Fringe festival, which runs till June 18. It seems apt that one of the first shows out of the gate centres on a man who spent much of his life struggling to make art on a shoestring.
Orson Welles/Shylock (Black Theatre Workshop, 3680 JeanneMance St., $8-$10) is a fast-paced docudrama that borrows from the News on the March sequence of Citizen Kane to chart the rapid rise and drawn-out fall of the great man. The title derives from Welles’s lifelong ambition to film The Merchant of Venice, a neat idea that gives playwright Matt Chiorini the opportunity to signpost Welles’s road to ruin with Shakespearean quotes. But there’s something decidedly off about comparing the persecution of a maverick artist with the antiSemitism endured by Shylock. This one misstep aside, it’s a spirited warts-and-all tribute, teeming with fascinating details.
Another fallen genius haunts OSCAR (Espace Freestanding Room, 4324 St-Laurent Blvd., $10). On the face of it, it’s a simple reading by Johanna Nutter, under Joseph Shragge’s direction, of three Oscar Wilde
fairytales. But the already elegant stories are further enriched by inventive little touches that make it a bittersweet commentary on lost innocence.
Nutter enters the stark performance space as though from a night on the town before relating the first of the stories her mom used to read to her. A dismantled mannequin stands in for the forlorn statue of The Happy Prince, and in The Selfish Giant (wryly introduced as “a story about a big man who wants to build a wall”), various chairs are used to construct the barrier the title character uses to keep children out of his garden. At the end of the show, Nutter employs a simple but potent device (which we won’t give away here) that adds yet another layer of poignancy to this charmingly eccentric experiment.
Also at the Freestanding Room is Memento Mori from Kaleidoscope Theatre ($10), the people who previously brought us two instalments of the superhero musical Captain Aurora. Writer/ director Trevor Barrette boldly goes in an entirely different direction here, setting up the premise of a support group for the recently deceased (complete with coffee, biscuits and name tags for the audience). It’s a delightful idea, and the inclusion of the audience in the support circle suggests a fun experience. But the “sharing” monologues, even when delivered by such impressive actors as Chip Chuipka and Leni Parker, don’t quite live up to the originality of the premise.
Finally, Invasive Species (Montreal Improv Espace B, 3713 StLaurent Blvd.) is an icky slick of Southern Gothic that hops from the natural history of the cane toad to a tale about an unhinged passenger riding the rail to Hell. The narrative occasionally gets lost in the swamp of its ambitions, but newcomer writer/ performer Gabriel Schultz demonstrates a fearless imagination that yields some truly grotesque imagery.
Johanna Nutter enters the stark performance space as though from a night on the town before relating the first of the stories.