goestoshow

I actually saw this one a couple of years back, in 2009. You can find my prior review here. Not much was different about this version of the play, except that it was updated to follow US politics (Canadian Alliance becomes Tea Party, Progressive Conservative becomes Republican, and, if I remember correctly, Preston Manning becomes Sarah Palin). This is only really a superficial change, but probably one that needed to happen given the Canadian Alliance hasn’t existed as an independent entity for close to ten years now.

Amanda Bergen did a very good job in the role, switching easily between the different roles and giving them separate voices at the same time. There were a few slipups, but they seemed like opening night issues more than anything and I suspect they’ll clear up soon.

The only other thing I have to say about it is rather peripheral: They used the chair from Moving Along, another Chris Craddock play from 2009 as their lighting board. Which is both weird and genius.

Since I’d already seen it, I don’t have a lot to say on the subject matter. I recommend seeing it if you haven’t already, it’s a very fun play. I may convince the person I went with to post a guest blog post about her thoughts on the play later, so keep an eye out for that.

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 is the kind of play that results from a collection of improv actors writing a scripted play. Much like good improv, the play is hilarious because it is chock full of hilarious standalone moments. I couldn’t even count the number of times this play had the entire audience laughing uproariously at something happening on stage. A line that stood out for me, as being both funny and a defining line of the entire play, was “it’s eat or be eaten in the Enchanted fucking Forest!” There were much much funnier lines and sight gags, but that really covers the whole concept of a modern retelling of Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs, and Jack and the Beanstalk complete with drugs, sex, murder, and every other sin under the sun.

Where it falls short, though, is in the frame story around all those hilarious moments. The mashup of those three stories into one is, unfortunately, largely incoherent, overly complex, and generally just a little too twisted (though that supplied a lot of its best moments). There were a couple of points where one of the actors even self-consciously pointed out the lack of funny in some of his lines (it’s entirely possible that’s part of the script, but either way it feels like an admission of discomfort at doing scripted theatre in this group).

I also found it a bit frustrating that at various points, different actors would play the same character. This is fine in short improv sketches, but in an hour long play it can make things a bit more difficult to follow.

I feel a bit conflicted at knocking the play for this, because it really was really really funny. But, at the same time I feel like it didn’t really achieve its goals. It might have been better left as improv with some audience participation to decide how the mashup would have worked. As is, I just felt like I was just seeing some improv that I had no way to participate in.

I think I’ll be seeing this group’s actual improv show (Scratch) at some point during the Fringe, and this play has made me more excited to do so. And I think the script shows promise, it just needed to be narrowed down in scope a bit.

Moving Along becomes Chris Craddock’s catch-phrase in this play as he regales his audience with stories from his life. What makes this play more special than your average stand-up monologue, though, is the set design.

Crammed into the corner of the tiny little Wunderbar BYOV space is what looks like a cross between an electric chair and a dentist’s chair. Mounted on and around the chair are lights of various intensity (some on dimmers) and direction. As Chris performs, he controls which lights are on through a Star Trek captain’s chair-like control panel on the arm.

As he switches from topic to topic, and from persona to persona (think split personalities) the lighting is used to incredible effect to portray him, literally and figuratively, in a different light.

The stories are funny, especially when he starts asking the audience if they’ve “ever felt that way” about something, always met with a perfect stony silence from the audience, and a resigned “oh” from Chris. Sometimes they’re a little sad, but he always keeps it from getting morose by switching the lights and saying something absurd to lighten the mood.

The main character sums it up when she says “everybody loves a sexy librarian.” This is a hilarious and touching play about a girl who finds out she’s famous for a sex tape her ex boyfriend made of her (in his apartment, where they always had sex with the lights on, and not normal lights but studio lights). Not only that, but her mother is an MP for the Alliance party (this play takes place mostly in 2000).

Anne Wyman gets the mannerisms that would make for a perfect sexy librarian — think Fred from Angel. She mumbles and jabbers and says things both dirty and absolutely normal in a voice of such innocence and naivite that you can’t help but like her and laugh at nearly everything she says.

The B-plots, which tie in to the main plot towards the end, focus on a sex advice columnist who’s seen and done it all, and the main character’s sister who committed suicide at 14 and currently resides in hell. It is this latter b-plot that prevents this play from being perfect, as it seems to not really impact the main plot in any meaningful way. It also pulls the play away from being an unlikely tale to being an impossible one, and to no gain, as it doesn’t tie in until the very last scene.

It kind of feels like this plot is a remnant of an earlier draft where it was more important, but it’s impossible to say. Overall, this is an awesome play and definitely worth seeing.