goestoshow

It’s fitting that one of the last plays I saw at this year’s Fringe included some fake phone sex calls. It opened and closed with mock phone sex calls, the first to a phone sex service for vacuum cleaners (where the other end is a sofa or something like that) and the second to a phone sex service for gazelles (which had a lion calling in who wanted to be dominated). Both were hilarious, and possibly the highlight of the show.

It also included a guy in a rooster hood (and literally nothing else) playing guitar while a really weird monologue played over him, to which he cocked his head whenever it said something strange.

But more seriously, the play is about “the psychology of the penis.” Other than the little bit of shock humor, the play is a series of anecdotes along those lines, with the female perspective represented by Keira McDonald and the male by Sage Price. I would have really liked more of the male perspective from Sage Price, personally, but it was interesting nevertheless. I did find that one anecdote from Keira, about a boyfriend of hers in the navy, kind of dragged on a bit and didn’t really link back thematically to anything else in the play. It unfortunately dominated the back half of the play.

Funny, entertaining, but not exactly the most amazing treatment of the subject I can imagine.

After being overloaded by plays with an activist theme last year, I had intended to avoid theme this year. I guess this one was my exception for this year. Mostly this play was good. It started off fairly strong with decent performances from the young actors and pretty good singing. The songs were all well written and very listenable, but I think they maybe had a little too much range for the actors who struggled with the highs and lows.

Where the play kind of fell apart a little bit was in the ending, where the main character, up to that point a street urchin with a heart of gold, seems to make a rather selfish decision and abandons the one person he could have — and should have — helped. I had a lot of trouble understanding this decision and the play didn’t really help me make the leap. I also found the apparent sentiment of the last song — that the problems of a street kid can be somehow resolved by uprooting and moving somewhere else (north, in this case).

I’m just not really sure what moral we’re supposed to take out of this play, but I still felt like I was being moralized to. I found that a little frustrating.

This play is already a holdover, so it should come as no surprise that it’s pretty damn good. I was expecting a little more levity out of the play from the description in the guide, but I wasn’t disappointed with the somewhat more melancholy experience I got at all. The songs and dance moves were all expertly performed, the frame story was interesting if a little light and obvious, and the climax poignant.

I only knock it down a little bit because not every story held me enthralled. A couple of them had my interest fading, and one of them I don’t remember anything at all from. I also can’t say that the parts I really enjoyed were as good as those from Shorts, which I gave 5 stars in spite of one part of it not holding my interest.

One really random thing that stood out for me, though, that is completely irrelevant to the review, is that one of the actors was wearing Vibram Five Fingers. Which is awesome, because they are awesome, and I never would have expected to see someone on stage wearing them. That was win.

Supervillain Monologues is pretty much exactly what you’d expect out of the title. A series of sketches on supervillains. Some of them are good, some of them not so good. My favorite was one about a villain named The Edmontonian, who’s thing was trying to destroy Calgary (“who do you think tinkered with your city planning to make your streets make NO SENSE?!”). Also the Portuguese Hamburgler, who’s thing was stealing and then fornicating with Big Macs.

But there were several stories that I just found incredibly dull. Unfortunately including the linking story, Dr. Impossible. It didn’t really go anywhere and never held my attention. I just wanted the next sketch with puppets to start.

This play is interesting. It’s a fairly typical story of a boy who likes a girl who doesn’t like him the same way, but told in a somewhat non-linear fashion and with a frame story that ties in to its ending. The biggest problem for the play, though, is that the characters are both extremely unlikeable. The girl is a jerk and the guy is a spineless (in the end that’s more true than you might expect) douche.

That makes it really difficult to sympathize. There’s a whole Nice Guy vibe going through the play that I just found kind of unsettling. And you really have to wonder why someone would stay friends with someone who repeatedly kicked them in the nads, up into adulthood.

I also found the ending, which involves the death of the male character, kind of unnecessary. It didn’t really add to the message of the play and just left it feeling more maudlin than it already was with the unrequited love.

I give it as many stars as I have because I saw potential in it, but it really needed more work on the characterizations especially.

Ok, this play should be awesome. And it so nearly is. But its flaws are unfortunately fairly severe. There are approximately 10 minutes of the play in which you will completely forget all those flaws, and they’re at the end. I won’t tell you anything about those ten minutes, because that would be a spoiler, but those ten minutes are incredibly awesome in a totally random sort of way.

For the rest, it’s just too stretched out. The zombies appear too late, too slowly, and other than some mildly amusing gags nothing really happens. The singing is also, unfortunately, not that great. A couple of characters in particular really have trouble with their singing lines. But none of this really makes it unwatchable, it just means there’s more build up than necessary for the ending.

Also, they give out buttons. I <3 Brains buttons. Which is pretty awesome.

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.