goestoshow

Tudor Queens was a great start (in terms of new shows) to the Fringe for this year. These women have great rapport with each other and it shows. They dance well together and apart, they exchange witty banter pretty much flawlessly, and they manage to make the play both sexy and informative.

Much of the play is dominated by three of Henry VIII’s wives, the bitter and angry Anne Boleyn (played by Elena Porter), the smug and doting Jane Seymore (played by Ellen Chorley), and fiery and drunk Katherine Parr (played by Morgan Smith. These three form the major part of the narrative, with all their bitterness over their treatment by their king and husband laid bare after 400 years of performing a show in purgatory.

Even so, Katherine of Aragon (Andrea Jorawsky), Anne of Cleaves (Karyn Mott), and Katherine Howard (Delia Barnett) all get their moment in the spotlight. In particular Katherine of Aragon and Katherine Howard get very good dramatic moments, while Anne of Cleaves gets (if historians are to be listened to, ironically) probably one of the sexiest performances of the show.

And all through it, some very sexy dancing from all very sexy women. This is what burlesque should be, really. Not just arbitrary titillation, but something more. I think with the recent rise of burlesque, this kind of show has been something lacking in the field. Tudor Queens rose to the calling and pulled it all off.

I highly recommend checking this one out.

[Once again, to get it out of the way, I got a comped into this play.]

All I really knew about this play going in was that Morgan Smith (previously reviewed here for her work Electra in the 2009 New Works festival) co-wrote and performed in it, and that it involved somehow a school mascot named Wally the Woodchuck who’s been saying creepy things on twitter all week.

So I expected anger, and I expected creepy, and I got both in spades. Mixed in there was a really nice story about teenagers dealing (mostly badly, but eventually somewhat successfully) with the ways they’re Different from their peers. In fact, the only character who actually comes across as relatively normal is the main protagonist, Wallace (David Johnston), who took on being the mascot at least partly because everyone was always calling him Wally the Woodchuck anyways.

His erstwhile girlfriend, Lydia (Elena Porter), seems more interested in his costume than in him. His best friend, Gina (Morgan Smith), is angry and bitter at everything in her life and seems in turns a bit interested in every single other character in the play. His and Gina’s tormentor, Vince (Brian Bergum), is deeply unhappy with his life as a popular football player because he wants to be good at other things but people keep insisting it’s the only thing he can do (something I can empathize with).

For the first half of the play, Morgan completely steals the show every time she’s on stage. Her personality is a whirlwind that completely overwhelms everyone else. But by the second half, as the other characters start revealing their quirks, it becomes more of an ensemble work and it really comes together. Some of the quirkier personality traits are played mostly for laughs in an as-if kind of way earlier in the play, and you could just hear the jaws drop in the house as they eventually proved to mostly be real things.

I definitely recommend seeing this play. It’s really really fun. If only for the hilarious choreographed fight scene between Wallace and Wally the Woodchuck in the middle of the play.

I just hope no one gets heat stroke from wearing that costume when King Edward School gets sweltering hot for the later shows when the weather gets better.