goestoshow

Flop! is a play about a man who has such a disastrous experience in his directorial debut in Toronto, that he moves back home to Okotoks, Alberta in order to rest and reboot himself. However, once there, he gets caught up in directing the high school play for his brother’s school.

What follows is a touching, excellently performed, play about the drive to succeed in the arts. How we push ourselves and those we depend on to obtain our piece of the big pie. Anton Lipovetsky switches roles with ease, giving each of his students a voice and demeanour distinct from his own. Even when he has to switch back and forth several times a minute, which he does frequently without any kind of hitch. And Anton sings the songs extremely well, with a full voice that fills the room.

Definitely check this one out if you get a chance. Our showing was pretty much full, but it seems like tickets are still plentiful for his remaining three shows. Go see it.

Lee Ann Keple tells all about her experience as a volunteer and then employee at the Edmonton Fringe in the early to late 90s. As someone who only started attending in the 2000s, it’s fascinating to me to hear about the ‘good old days’ from someone in the trenches. It’s really interesting to hear about what’s stayed the same and what’s changed. And also what stayed the same until just after I started attending, as I feel the transformation from 2006 Fringe to 2011 Fringe has been a drastic one in many ways.

Her love for and passion for theatre and the Fringe itself is evident in every word, every motion, and every slide of her show. She comes on stage looking like any Fringe-goer might look. A backpack with buttons on it, a jean jacket, and under it all clothes that indicate she might have come right from work. That just sets the tone to one of friendliness off the bat. She is really one of us on the other side of the fourth wall, and she’s telling us about our own experience.

Honestly, if you’re a long time Fringe-goer and you don’t go see this, you’re doing yourself a disservice. See it and laugh. As she points out, the jester in the Fringe merchandising doesn’t just represent the performers, it represents us, the audience, in our search for absurdity in the day to day.

I went into this one knowing pretty much nothing about what to expect from it. I mostly went for the provocative name. Alas, it didn’t really live up to its name in terms of kitten fire, but it did manage to be a decently funny mixed media standup/sketch comedy. I wasn’t exactly enthralled, but I laughed enough. The framing device for the story is actually much like [story of show]‘s, but with more of a funny side.

The actors in the show essentially play themselves planning the show we’re seeing right now. One of them has a vision of a dickensian (or kittensian, which is definitely cute wordplay) story in which a raggamuffin boy needs to save a town from an evil industrialist who does cruel things to kittens for unspecified reasons. His friend, the co-author of the play, thinks this is stupid and wants to do a more conventional comedy piece.

They go through a series of sketches and fantasies around these concepts, though it never seems to reach a meaningful climax. Unless the possession sketch was the climax. But that’s probably getting too far into spoiler territory.

(Real) Gone (Girl) isn’t really a play so much as an experiment. A really really interesting experiment. The experiment is that the actor doesn’t have a script to work from, has never seen the play performed, and has only practiced a few key movements as choreographed in advance. Instead of a script, she has an ipod telling her what to say and do.

Lines come out stuttered. More so at first, though Mari Chartier (the actor unique to our performance) quickly found a groove and was able to follow it most of the time, making her performance increasingly natural as the show progressed.

The whole performance seems designed to be as difficult for the actor as possible. It’s a physically demanding role, as the actions themselves are sometimes quite yoga-like, and are repeated endlessly until switched. But it’s also mentally demanding, since she has to figure out where things are going and develop her characterization of the people she’s narrating/speaking for as she goes along. This combines to leave her seeming exhausted by the end.

What this basically means, to me, is that we are watching her the way an actor might sometimes watch their audience (assuming they can see them past the stage lights). We are seeing her react for the first time to the story. Sometimes she laughs a little at something she’s being told through her ipod. Sometimes she hesitates, perhaps unsure of whether it’s reasonable to do what’s being asked of her. She always comes through and performs every action with gusto, however.

But what really fascinated me in this performance is what happened when something failed. Towards the end, it seemed the ipod cut out. Mari was left with no real idea what to do, so she quickly communicated through hand gestures to Andrea Beça, the playwright, her inability to continue.

What I though I saw (through my purely subjective lens) on Mari’s face was something I don’t feel I’ve ever seen in a play before. She seemed a little upset, and I first assumed that she was being asked to do something she simply could not do for physical or emotional reasons. And I realized that for an actor, not being able to improvise your way out of a situation like this, because you know the script or at least the story or the character, must be incredibly frustrating. Like something that might be in a nightmare for an actor. Standing in front of a bunch of people, no idea what to do, no voice to speak through, no mask to wear. It might feel a bit like being naked.

So to me, the experiment was entirely validated by this experience. I don’t have much to say on the content part of the play because I feel I would have gotten more out of it if I were more aware of the lives of the people presented in the play (Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and their wives). I suggest you scan some wikipedia pages about them before seeing the play if you aren’t already fairly aware of the events of their lives.

I don’t think this one’s for everyone, but if you’re into experimental theatre that tries to do something different and expose a side of theatre you might not ever see elsewhere, do check this one out. It’s worth it.

Today the Fringe passed the halfway mark. It’s a bit sad to think we’re getting into the back half, now. This is where it starts to get difficult to get tickets to good shows (right as it’s becoming clear what they are). It’s getting to be time to stop choosing plays as I go and start planning when I can see the ones that are important to me. All the major review sites are done their thing, so more casual fringe-goers will be looking through the Journal and hoping to snag tickets to all the 5 star plays.

Still, though. Attendance at individual shows continues to astound me, even during the day when it’s usually rare to see full houses. I suspect this will be a record year in pretty much every sense, which is kind of exciting.

One of the plays I saw tonight, “All I Really Needed To Know, I Learned At The Fringe,” put a lot of things in perspective about the growth of the Fringe and how it’s changed. But more on that in its review.

Mothership Down is a hilarious discussion on the state of politics in Alberta, as well as Canada as a whole. And I mean conversation. This is the kind of play that revels in audience participation, bringing people onto stage, demanding that you live tweet the play (which I imagine helps promote the show as well), and having you post things to your facebook wall in order to prove a point (and have a contest with a dubious prize). Overall it was a hell of a lot of fun and people should be going to see it. It’s way off the grounds, but it’s definitely worth it.

Though I’m not sure the play would be as appealing to someone who didn’t already align well with the political leanings of its author, I feel it still did a pretty good job of not being too strongly aligned to any particular viewpoint. At the very least, I think they would welcome the engagement disagreement might bring.

Check it out. It’s fun times.

Complicateded is the story of a love triangle. With a little extra complexity thrown in. Though it springs from a fairly typical seed, a unique, funny, and touching drama emerges. The performances are all solid, the set design is good, and the play manages to surprise you even when you think you know what’s supposed to be surprising you.

What perhaps carries this play above its common roots is the charisma of the two male leads, presenting a convincing friendship. However, though performed very well, the female characters seem a bit like afterthoughts. They seem mostly there to drive the action for the male characters’ own insecurities, and this brings the play down a notch for me. Haley (Kayla Manuel in particular seems just a little too insightful into the state of minds of the male leads, coming off at times almost as if she’s there to prompt them to fix their lives.

This is definitely one to see, and deserves to have more people checking it out than it seems to have. It’s a bit out of the way of the Fringe grounds, but not really too far. Check it out if you get a chance.

[title of show] is a musical about two guys writing a musical about two guys writing a musical. If that sounds very meta, that’s because it is. And it’s a delightfully meta show that, to me, is really about creativity, the process of expression, and the dangers/rewards of chasing your dreams. If it paints a mostly rather rosy picture, where the rewards outweigh the dangers, it seems as if that’s because that was the case for the playwrights of this play.

The play is autobiographical as to its own history, going from the moment they decided to make the play about the very words they were speaking to its eventual attempt to get on Broadway. The only thing missing would be an exploration of the people putting on this production (who are mostly students) deciding to put on [title of show], but that’s ok. It did kind of make me want to see a play about people deciding to put on a production of [title of show] called [title of a fringe show]. I hope that gets made someday.

As mentioned above, the performers are pretty much all students, but you wouldn’t know it. They clearly all have a passion for their craft and do an amazing job with their roles.

Definitely check this one out if you enjoy musicals and meta-narratives.

Today was my first day going to the Fringe during the day this year, and I saw three shows. I’ve had good luck this Fringe, having seen quite a few really good shows and none that I had a huge amount of trouble getting through, and today was no exception on that front. I did, however, finally see a couple of plays that weren’t completely full. To be fair, they were both (complicateded and Mothership Down) at somewhat distant BYOVs (particularly Mothership Down), but I really suggest anyone who’s avoiding leaving the grounds give these shows a chance. They deserve more butts in their seats.

Giant Invisible Robot is the story of a boy and his giant invisible robot. Or, perhaps, it’s a story about mental illness and the acceptance of those different from us. Through a series of short, sketch-like segments, we’re shown various points in the life of this boy and the man he becomes.

If you take it on its premise as a simple story about a boy and his robot, it’s a fun time. The sketches are funny and the story amusing, though not exactly meaty. Jayson McDonald does very good voices, differentiates characters really well, and is a very physically funny actor. There’s also a great sketch where we hear an inner monologue from the invisible robot itself where Jayson makes really effective use of props and darkness to make a very convincing, but also very simple, giant robot.

The shifts between scenes, however, can be a little difficult to follow in terms of the timeline of the character, and a couple of plotlines are left a bit dangling.

But a line, later in the play, stirred my mind a little more than I might have expected, and I kind of wish the idea behind the line had been explored more. The line is, roughly, “Why would you want to take something away that makes me happy?” To me, this line really evokes the question of how we treat and deal with people with mental illness, as defined by our society. The play leaves the issue, among other things, ambiguous. Whether it’s better for having done so, I’m not really sure.

I would really like to see a pure sketch comedy show done by Jayson McDonald. I think that would be a hell of a lot of fun.