goestoshow

I think I wasn’t the target audience for this play. I think to really get something out of it you probably need to be at least christian, and probably also gay. Possibly if you’re christian and you know someone who’s gay and have been having issues dealing with it, it might then be a really interesting piece that could help you process those issues.

Because it really covers the gamut of those issues. It has someone for everyone within that range to identify with. So if that does describe you, I really think you might want to go this play.

But as a straight atheist, it really doesn’t align with anything I’ve ever experienced, nor does it pose any questions that are actually relevant to me and my life. The play was interesting from an abstract perspective, but that was all and it didn’t really shift my mind in any direction.

Thankfully, the play had a skeptical christian. The setting, a bible college dorm, allows for this point of view through a character who starts out the play railing about the lack of need for divine intervention in order to justify moral code. His teacher (who is also a sort of guidance councilor, and is absolutely perfectly cast) wants him to include something to indicate that at the very least God had a hand in creating a world in which a moral code could develop, but the character refused.

The ending, however, leaves me feeling a little frustrated. Characters make rather rapid shifts in how they act on their beliefs (though never their core beliefs, thankfully) and so the final scenes leave you wondering why people made the decisions they did. It also leaves you with little idea where things are going next, which has proven a bit of a recurring issue for me with plays this year.

So I may be a little late to this party, but I have just read Mack Male and Sharon Yeo‘s posts about their experience literally being heckled by a performer (Jeff Haslam, who is no small fry. He’s the Director of Programming at the Varscona Theatre) in the Edmonton theatre community for having the gall to review their plays and not be completely glowing in their reviews.

Obviously, as someone who casually reviews plays on this blog, this hits pretty close to home for me. Especially as someone who is not an expert in theatre, nor insulated by connections to people in the theatre community. I see the shows I want to see, I pay for my tickets almost every time, and I’m as entitled to say my piece about those shows as anyone else who does the same. I have been fortunate enough to only receive positive feedback from artists who I’ve reviewed, but to be fair because I tend to avoid plays I know I won’t like my average rating for shows I see is probably higher than most.

But I do call it like I see it when I see a play that I don’t enjoy, and while I know that reviews like that are very painful for people who put time and effort into the work they do, I feel that it’s very very important to respect your audience. Respecting your audience means accepting that sometimes they won’t like your work. And that means sometimes your play won’t do very well, because you miscalculated or because of the weather or because that glowing review you needed didn’t come in until late in the run.

To lash out at an audience member who paid you for the seat they sat in in your theatre is not respecting your audience. Though those of us who blog about our theatre experiences may make ourselves more obvious targets, what you’re telling everyone in your audience by lashing out like this is that they are not entitled to their opinion because they’re not educated enough to “get it.” These are the people who pay your bills.

I’m going to go one step further than Mack and Sharon. I’m not attending any performance at the Varscona until somehow this is resolved. Not for the rest of this Fringe, not for the next theatre season, and not at next Fringe. I’m sure my warm butt in their seats won’t be missed, because the Varscona is always home to popular shows (probably in part due to their pulling out of official Fringe venue status to become a BYOV so they can hand pick their shows), but I can’t support a theatre with a Director of Programming who apparently loathes his audience. That’s just not acceptable.

And that’s a shame, because there were things I was looking forward to seeing there still and it’s a great venue. But really, my money can go to artists who respect me.

Since this is the part of The Fringe where a bit of melancholy tends to set in for me, since tickets to well reviewed shows start selling out days in advance and it puts a crimp in my way of fringing, I want to take some time out to highlight the things that I’ve really enjoyed this Fringe that are *not* indoor shows.

Cellolitis

I’m a huge sucker for violin/cello music, so when you get a guy playing a cello using a loop pedal to make him sound like a whole string quartet plus rhythm section, it sure does give me happies. I haven’t liked every song I’ve seen him perform at the Journal main stage, but I have liked a lot of them.

Wood Fired Pizza

Image from Mel Priestley’s blog, I plan to replace it with one of my own asap.

This is some seriously delicious pizza, guys. Though I’ve had a couple of pizzas from them that weren’t so hot (because the crust wasn’t fully cooked to its proper cracker-like consistency), when they’ve been good they’ve been really good. And even at their worst they’re still better than pretty much any Fringe food I’ve ever had. It’s a bit expensive compared to other Fringe food, but it’s also potentially shareable.

Geekware

Picture from the geekware facebook page. How can you not want to buy this stuff?

I pimp this place out as much as possible every year, and I’m really happy to see it succeed as well as it has. It’s now a full size booth conveniently shaped and located to hide from the rain, and it’s got way more stuff than ever before. Since she’s come to The Fringe, I haven’t gone a year without buying something from her. This year, a little robot guy made out of printer cable adapters that I got last year broke when he fell on the floor and she’s been kind enough to repair him no questions asked. That’s great service.

So here it is, my first five star review this Fringe and it’s not even really a play. Like Die Roten Punkte, there’s not a lot to say except that it was brilliantly well done. It’s also the first time I’ve seen something in B-Scene and it has not felt horribly claustrophobic. They had only one mic on stage for the entire band (which was entirely acoustic), and the levels were just right for the small space even though we were *right next* to the speakers.

The music is a mix of folk, bluegrass, and maybe a little bit of gospel, with bits of spoken word thrown in. In a lot of places it reminded me a lot of the music from O Brother Where Art Thou. Normally none of these genres appeal to me, but I found every one of these entertaining. The humor and the subject matter was entirely modern and relatable while maintaining the oldschool sounds appropriate to the genres being used.

Really, this is one show I recommend unreservedly. See it, you won’t regret it.

There’s not really much you can say about this one. It was hilarious, it’s musical performance, with a mix of funny satirical standup and really well performed songs. It’s not really the sort of thing I tend to go out of my way to see at The Fringe, but it was a really good time and you can tell these guys are seasoned performers and that the audience was packed with enthusiastic fans from previous shows.

There was also a really interesting loop pedal piece that was done with fairly random sounds and came out sounding really good until it was interrupted by the story again. Not that I’m complaining, the story bit was funny too.

The History of Lost and Found is about a man and a woman who are slowly becoming a little kookie as they work in a city bus service’s lost and found department. As the story goes on, we discover that they’re both at risk of being fired over an incident involving a lost cat. This part of the story is really more of a mcguffin, though. The important thing is the little flights of fancy these two dream up as they explore the items left behind. Most of them involving some dynamic duo of crime fighters or ragamuffins.

The scenarios are funny, and the play itself is entertaining, but the love plot at the end kind of comes out of nowhere. That’s possibly made up for by the fun song they sing at the end, though, which is well performed (and makes you wonder why they didn’t sing a little more during the play itself). I was also pretty disappointed that they never actually revealed the reason someone would leave not just one pair of panties on a bus, but 12 over the course of a week on one bus. The mystery is introduced early, and then never resolved.

Sometimes the play dives into darker territory, like showing that they occasionally take lost prescription medication (with the help of a medical book on drug side effects), but never really delivers on the promise of actually exploring that darker side. It dives in and then pulls right back out.

It’s a good play, but not a great one. It doesn’t quite live up to its own potential, and only the really solid performances and good comedic timing by the two actors gives it any real life. It’d make a good random “because it’s on” pick, but I wouldn’t go out of my way.

This is the first play of this Fringe to break the 4 star barrier for me. It’s also the first play that really moved me this year so far. I started off worried, since it turned out to be more standup than play, which is usually something I don’t enjoy so much, and he started in on a story inspired by African folk tales that I had a lot of trouble focusing on.

But once he got into the stories about people instead of spirit animals, I was able to pay attention again. And these stories had me pretty well enthralled. I feel like I learned more about South African culture in this one hour than I ever had before, because these weren’t just facts about a country. They were personal stories rich with the little details that make up a culture.

For example, one story involves him and a couple of his friends hitchhiking across South Africa shortly after Nelson Mandela was freed. In this time of turmoil for the future of his country, he relates that it was common for white people to get into discussions about “those black people,” followed inevitably by some question about how well they could run the country or some terrible slur or something like that.

In this one car they hitchhiked in, a brand new Mercedes Benz, they were told by a man that things’d be so much easier if when the Europeans had arrived, they’d just shot every black man in the area. But then he sees a pregnant black woman by the road who seems in distress. He stops to see what the trouble is, and when she says her water broke, but she’s bleeding a lot and needs to get to a hospital, the man apologized to Erik and his companions, but he has to leave them here so he can take this woman to the hospital.

It’s that kind of story that’s just so crazy, so hinged around some kind of disconnect that exists in real people’s brains, that you can’t help but feel the authenticity of these stories. And all of that set the stage for the story that brought tears to my eyes. One about his own father, who is ill, dropping him off at the airport. I won’t spoil the story except to say that it was clear that Erik was having trouble getting through this story, but that as a consummate storyteller he managed it with gusto anyways. And I’ll also say that it showed that Erik’s father respects his son’s talents a great deal, and that this hit me right where it counts.

I didn’t get what I expected out of this play, but I think what I got was better. I’m really happy I saw this one.

Today appears to be the day for me to see plays that are loosely connected sets of shorts. First Sh!tshow, later Shorts, and just now Seeking. Seeking is a set of short stories regarding people looking for love in the newspaper. The stories actually turn out to be somewhat more connected than they originally appear, as they all come together at a halloween party/art gallery opening and then diverge again.

The play was funny. As a comedic highlight, it had a really excellent integration of audience participation through a part where a character is at a speed dating event and brings audience members in. It was even called back to in later dialogue. I also really loved the exploration of an older couple dipping their toes into swinging and questioning their own orientations. It’s always nice to see shows touch on these kinds of issues that are treated as taboo in more mainstream venues.

But what keeps it from real greatness is a few small technical issues. I had a lot of trouble, at character introduction and transition, telling the assumed gender of the character. Until the stories merged, I was a bit baffled at the choices of actor mapping to character in terms of gender, but it became clear that it was just the only way that scene could work. This didn’t make it any less frustrating, though. Not enough was done to differentiate the characters from each other (except for a couple) to smooth those transitions, either.

I also had some issue with the lack of resolution to the two main stories. I’m all for open endings in general, but somehow here it felt unnecessary and arbitrarily cut off.

There’s a really good play here, I was just a little disappointed by the execution.

This play was actually a lot more fun than I expected. The title and description seem designed mostly to shock, so I expected it to be just an hour and a half of shocking bathroom humor. Don’t get me wrong, there was a fair amount of that in there as well (most notably the — well researched — bit about how all cute animals eat poop, complete with slide show), but there’s also some really creative storytelling, like a choose your own adventure where you have to decide how the main character deals with his bowel issues when he’s on a date. Still a very gross, very embarrassing story, but at least creatively and enthusiastically told. That one particular variation ends with the main character ending up in a skirt and succeeding in convincing the girl it was a kilt makes the whole thing pretty awesome.

And as they say in the opening, it’s not just about poop, in spite of the title. It’s about how much our lives revolve around things that happen in the bathroom. One particularly poignant story that runs through the whole play (the only multipart one I can think of) involves a woman discovering she’s pregnant, and her boyfriend finding the test in the garbage, and how they deal with that. It really demonstrates the theme of the play, that the bathroom isn’t just a dirty place we all fear, it’s in a lot of ways the centre of our lives.

If you find the kind of humor that runs through this play amusing, and won’t be too grossed out by the things I’ve mentioned, I do think this play is well worth a watch. It’s got a good mix of funny, fun, and dramatic. I have hesitation giving it a really high star rating, though, because I do feel that it kind of uses the shock humor to make things a little easier for itself.

I don’t really have much to say about this play. It’s a musical in classic film musical style complete with singing and dancing naval officers and quaint ideas about gender (including the standard musical comedy tropes around crossdressing). And that’s really all there is to say about it. It’s amusing enough, I laughed a fair bit, but never found myself all that engaged or engrossed. Mostly I just felt like I was watching something that was trying to be a spoof but was not willing to go far enough to make it one, or tone it down and just be an homage.

I should note, though, that the audience gave it a standing ovation (though it was not instant and uproarious) and other people in the audience seemed to enjoy it a lot more than me. It’s possible this is just not really my thing, since I can’t really point to anything specific that I could say “this would have made me like it better.”