Review: (Winnipeg) Red Wine, French Toast, and The Best Sex You Ever Had (Fringe)

Visible Figures
by Edgar Governo
@pseudohistorian

When I opened up the programme for Red Wine, French Toast, and the Best Sex You've Ever Had before the show and read the preamble by director/choreographer Jake Hastey about its origins in a trip he took through Europe due to his First World Problems and the inspiration of the Salvador DalÌ painting Surrealist Composition with Invisible Figures, I was afraid it would be one of those shows: an inscrutable, incoherent mess made up of random thoughts which make sense to the show's creator and no one else.

Review: (Winnipeg) Wanderlust (Fringe)

The Voyage Home
by Edgar Governo
@pseudohistorian

There is a peculiar phenomenon familiar to Winnipeggers who endeavour to travel elsewhere for any length of time--a kind of invisible bungee cord that always seems to draw you back to this city eventually. While people who aren't from around here might also feel this way about their own places of origin, almost any worldly Manitoban will surely identify with it.

Kaitlin Aiello and Rachel Smith attempt to explore these contradictory impulses in Wanderlust, but the result is too much of an esoteric grab bag of theatrical techniques to prove successful overall. Although the programme is straightforward in explaining that the show is a work of Devised Theatre, this collaborative creation can't sustain one's interest for any length of time--just as one scene begins to draw you in and get interesting with elements that feel universal, another scene in a completely different style comes along which is just as alienating as the preceding scene was relatable.

Review: (Winnipeg) Nothing Serious (Fringe)

Thrice the Frustration
by Edgar Governo
@pseudohistorian

Before seeing Nothing Serious, I was unfamiliar with the work of New York playwright Rich Orloff, but there is seriously nothing in the three (mercifully) short plays making up this show which makes me want to seek out more of his work.

Playwriting 101: The Rooftop Lesson starts out promising to be an interesting metafictional look at the nature of dramatic conflict, but it says nothing particularly insightful and finishes with a gratuitously shocking 'twist' ending that isn't helped by having its characters pointing out the tropes as they happen.

Review: (Winnipeg) ChubRub Cabaret (Fringe)

Go Big or Go Home
by Edgar Governo
@pseudohistorian

Criticism of a show about accepting yourself just the way you are seems unfair.

I could say that some of the members (Ray Eskritt,  Melissa Granovsky, Johsa Manzanilla, and Heather Witherden) of this Winnipeg burlesque and cabaret troupe seemed more comfortable on stage, coordinated, or well-rehearsed than others. I could point out that ChubRub Cabaret often falls into the same trap as a lot of Fringe shows in terms of pacing, with long transitions between some sketches and periods of darkness that halt the show's momentum. I could even list my preferences for which dances or jokes or videos were most entertaining and which fell flat for me.

(To be fair, I could also say I'm trying to have it both ways with that last paragraph.)

Review: (Winnipeg) Significant Me (Fringe)

(photo by Dahlia Katz)

It's Not Me, It's Me
by Edgar Governo
@pseudohistorian

Significant Me is a relatively rare phenomenon at the Fringe: a straightforward sequel to Christel Bartelse's previous show ONEymoon, seen at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival in 2011, with the current show revisiting protagonist Caroline as she prepares to celebrate three years of solitary matrimony after choosing to marry herself over all other potential suitors.

As befits a sequel, Bartelse structures and performs the show in more or less the same style as before, including a mild amount of audience participation. (I didn't participate this time, but I was briefly brought onstage when I went to see ONEymoon to portray the role of Caroline's sexually adventurous ex-boyfriend. There are worse fates.) The odd mishap, such as a prop going astray, is handled smoothly with no interruption to the flow of the performance, and Bartelse has an easygoing charm that always makes her watchable.

Review: (Winnipeg) Executing Justice (Fringe)

Hatred on Trial
by Edgar Governo
@pseudohistorian

There hasn't been an execution in Canada since a double hanging on December 11, 1962, but Bill Pats takes us into a hypothetical Canadian future where capital punishment has returned, with Daryl Kane scheduled to be put to death on April 7, 2030.

On a personal level, I consider the death penalty to be cruel and unusual punishment--I'm glad it was abolished in Canada and hope this future never comes to pass. Regardless of where your opinion lies in this debate, however, there is at least one element of the story Pats has crafted in Executing Justice to give you pause. For every heinous crime Kane has committed, there is someone else who benefitted from it; and for every seemingly ignorant opinion, there is a fact to justify it.

Review: (Winnipeg) Eurosmash! (Fringe)

Rock Bang!
by Edgar Governo
@pseudohistorian

Anyone who has seen a concert by German siblings Astrid and Otto Rot (the alter egos of Australian non-siblings Clare Bartholomew and Daniel Tobias) will already know what to expect from Die Roten Punkte's latest appearance at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival, their first since 2010: rocking out and squabbling in equal measure.

Eurosmash! continues the fictional narrative of Astrid and Otto's rock career, with the pair finding themselves facing the classic musician's dilemma of art versus commerce. For all that they accomplished on their last album, Kunst Rock (Art Rock), the band needs to crank out some hits to pay the bills, so their newest tracks (such as show opener "Do You Speak Dance?") show a lot more of an electronica influence, and Astrid is quick to shoot down Otto's effort to include a socially conscious song on the new record.

Review: (Winnipeg) Fake News Fangirl (Fringe)

Tip of the Hat, Wag of the Finger
by Edgar Governo
@pseudohistorian

There are a lot of facts in Senior Fandom Correspondent Sharilyn Johnson's solo memoir at Venue 17 (The Fighting 17th!) about her personal and professional admiration for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Even as a regular viewer of both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report (enough of one to make all the references you'll see in this review, at any rate), I couldn't possibly better know a comedian than she does.

Review: (Winnipeg) The Surprise (Fringe)

Expectations and Separations
by Edgar Governo
@pseudohistorian

For all that The Surprise (as the title suggests) concerns itself with how to confront something astonishing when it comes at you out of left field, the thing I liked most about Martin Dockery's latest show was its return to familiar territory.

I feel a certain amount of guilt in admitting that. I've been very happy to watch other Fringe performers like Shelby Bond get out of their comfort zone in recent years, but neither of Dockery's efforts to do the same thing in 2013 did anything for me. (I was especially unimpressed by The Pit, his play with Vanessa Quesnelle which I also reviewed on this site.) Hypocritical though it may be, I can't help my personal preference for having him stick to his usual popular storytelling style.

Review: (Winnipeg) One Man Back To The Future (Fringe)

Where We're Going, We Don't Need Roads
When this baby hits 88 miles per hour...
by Edgar Governo
@pseudohistorian

Back to the Future is my favourite movie.

As such, I could've been a really tough crowd for Shelby Bond's latest show as it premieres at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival. I know the residents of Hill Valley like it's my hometown, and I have to resist the urge to include endless trivia (Eric Stoltz was the original Marty McFly!) in this review. It's possible I could recite the entire film from memory if I tried, so when Bond took up the challenge of adapting the words of Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale for the stage, it was people like me he'd have to worry about most.

Review: (Winnipeg) Undress Me (Fringe)

Taking It Private
by Edgar Governo
@pseudohistorian

Kevin P. Gabel writes and performs the role of Julian in Undress Me, and he has obviously put in a lot of work getting to the emotional core of the character around which this show revolves, but the coherence of its plot suffers for it.

The play is framed as a conversation between Julian and Beth, the woman on the verge of marrying his brother, but it's unclear why he's telling her certain things, giving a lot of 'as you know' exposition about events she took part in or witnessed. The most intriguing part of the programme writeup for me (and a lot of other people, I imagine) is Julian's job as a webcam performer, but the play barely gets into how that affects Julian's life or what motivated him to pursue that living--especially since he's doing it with his laptop alone, implying he doesn't take it seriously enough to invest in a separate camera or any other equipment.

Review: (Winnipeg) Crumbs (Fringe)

The Truth Shall Set You Free
by Edgar Governo
@pseudohistorian

Stephen Sim and Lee White are Winnipeg Fringe Festival institutions, having performed as CRUMBS at every Fringe since 1998. (In fact, when I went to double-check that date, I was surprised to discover they weren't already performing together when I first started attending the Winnipeg Fringe five years earlier.) As such, it's to be expected that their longform improv show is a well-oiled machine at this point, and Made Up Truths is no exception.

Review: (Winnipeg) Roller Derby Saved My Soul (Fringe)

Be Your Own Hero
by Edgar Governo
@pseudohistorian

To the best of my knowledge, Buffy Summers is never seen wearing roller skates.

Neither is Ellen Ripley or Princess Leia Organa, but Amy (playwright Nancy Kenny) desperately needs to tap into their heroic spirit to make her life worth living when re-watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer just isn't enough, and roller derby gets her there. While going through her own heroic origin story, however--and worrying about whether she'll live long enough to see herself become the villain--Amy must also learn that every hero is only as good as their team, in whatever form that takes: Fellowship of the Ring, Justice League, Rebel Alliance, or Scooby Gang.

Review: (Winnipeg) The Cockwhisperer - A Love Story (Fringe)

A Long, Hard Learning Process
by Edgar Governo
@pseudohistorian

When Nicholas Evans first wrote The Horse Whisperer and brought that term into the public consciousness, I'm sure he never imagined that people would also end up whispering to dogs and ghosts...and, eventually, penises.

Review: (Winnipeg / Theatre) The Valley

Alden Adair, Nancy Sorel (photo by Bruce Monk)

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
Climbing out of The Valley is never simple.
by Edgar Governo
@pseudohistorian

Depression and mental illness in general have a complex and often paradoxical place in our society, which criticizes people for not getting treatment or seeing the signs of a problem in others while also attaching a stigma to those who need therapy and/or medication to deal with such problems. Although there is a wide spectrum between being completely neuro-typical and having delusional psychotic breaks, people are often reduced to those who are on the 'right' and 'wrong' side of an arbitrary psychological divide.

The Valley revolves around a central encounter between Connor (Toby Hughes), a teenager who has returned home from university because of a debilitating mental illness, and Dan (Alden Adair), the Vancouver cop who has to confront him one day at a SkyTrain station. Playwright Joan MacLeod isn't concerned with creating a Rashomon-like story about ambiguity over what happened in that encounter, but with how our inner turmoils affect our take on reality; even when two or more people can agree on the main facts of a situation, each person's perception of its emotional landscape is different.

Review: (Winnipeg) The Seagull

Tom Keenan (photo: Bruce Monk)

I'm More Than a Bird

Unspoken regret is a Russian invention.
by Edgar Governo

It seems somewhat mystifying at first that the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre would schedule an entire playwright festival around Anton Chekhov, as he was a much more prolific writer of short stories--his three other major plays (The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters, and Uncle Vanya) are also being staged as part of ChekhovFest, but the bulk of the productions are more tangential adaptations and shows "inspired by" his body of work. Since Chekhov himself was continuously concerned with questioning the traditional art forms that had come before him, however, perhaps this is fitting.

The Seagull itself is concerned with these questions even more directly, as most of the main characters are people who produce (or wish they could produce) celebrated works of art. Boris Trigorin (Tom Rooney) is a noted writer of short stories engaged in love affairs with both the divaesque Irina Arkadina (Sharon Bajer) and later the aspiring actress Nina Zarechnaya (Bethany Jillard), who in turn is the object of affection for aspiring writer Constantin Treplyov (Tom Keenan), Arkadina's son. All of these artists and the others in their circle are at the estate of Arkadina's brother, Peter Sorin (Harry Nelken), who has retired after a long career in the Russian bureaucracy but wishes he could have spent his time writing instead.

Review: (Winnipeg) Jane Eyre

Gordon Tanner (photo by Bruce Monk)

Up in the Eyre
A novel and a play are two different things.
by Edgar Governo
@pseudohistorian

It can be intimidating to stage a new interpretation of an oft-adapted work.

Charlotte Brontës novel has been expanded upon and retold countless times since it was first published in 1847. On film alone, Jane Eyre has been tackled by everyone from Aldous Huxley to Franco Zeffirelli, with many acclaimed actors portraying both the fiercely independent Jane (Joan Fontaine, Susannah York, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Samantha Morton) and her love interest Edward Rochester (Orson Welles, George C Scott, William Hurt, Michael Fassbender), making one's own approach a daunting task.

As she explains in her notes for the programme, playwright Julie Beckman has chosen to face this challenge through Chamber Theatre--a form which emphasizes using as much of the original text in the adaptation as possible, often through explicit narration by the characters onstage. Beckman's stated goal is "to embrace the storytelling experience, to allow us to step into Jane's world," but this style has exactly the opposite effect, constantly taking the audience out of the story just as the characters are starting to feel like real people.

Review: (Winnipeg) Hirsch

The Master and MetaTheatre
by Edgar Governo

It's always hard to speak ill of the ones you care about. Even when you know you're right, even when you feel you're speaking truth to power, there is an element of pain to it, and a part of you wishes you had kept things to yourself.

Alon Nashman and Paul Thompson have clearly struggled with those feelings in their biographical play based on the life of John Hirsch, well-known enough in Canadian theatre but a legend in Winnipeg theatre.

Bringing their work to the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre (RMTC)  Warehouse -- that is to say, The Tom Hendry Theatre, named after the man who co-founded RMTC along with Hirsch, whose own namesake theatre is just down the street -- is fraught with potential tensions they wouldn't have had to deal with when it premiered at the Stratford Festival or when it played at the Edinburgh Fringe. For one thing, neither of those runs had to contend with a bronze statue of the man in question practically within earshot.

Review: (Winnipeg) Venus in Fur

Allison Brennan, Matthew Edison (photo by Dylan Hewlett)

Topping from the Bottom
How do I know when the scene is over?
by Edgar Governo
@pseudohistorian

When we go to the theatre, we are consenting as an audience to a particular dynamic with those who are putting on a performance, and this is unique in theatre compared to works of fiction in other media because the performers are there in the space with us as this dynamic unfolds--we give ourselves over to a suspension of disbelief while the cast is aware of us.

Although this is rarely negotiated explicitly, we attend a specific play with certain expectations, just as we do with a new partner, a new relationship--or a new kink scene. When a play does not meet our expectations, that can be a great thing (discovering an evocative piece of art is like discovering something new that turns you on) or it can be upsetting, whether we are merely disappointed or because we feel that what we have implicitly negotiated (through a play's advertising, for instance) has been violated. Some common examples of this are when a play turns out not to be in its announced genre and when a show unexpectedly includes audience participation; the latter can be especially unsettling because it also violates an understood boundary between performer and audience.

Review: (Winnipeg) Harvey

Cory Wojcik, Mark Crawford (photo by Leif Norman)

Rabbit Season
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
by Edgar Governo

Since my 11-year-old nephew had never seen a play at The John Hirsch Theatre in Winnipeg, I decided to have him join me for the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre production of Harvey--the whimsical story of the outgoing Elwood and his titular best friend, an invisible six-foot-tall rabbit. At the intermission, he turned to me and noted that Elwood acted "a lot like Doctor Sheldon Cooper."

What I already knew which my nephew didn't when he made that comment was that Jim Parsons, the actor who plays Sheldon in the sitcom The Big Bang Theory, had starred as Elwood in a Broadway revival of Harvey last year. As such, I sincerely hope that Mark Crawford was not deliberately choosing to play Elwood in the Parsons mode based on the same knowledge, but his seeming Texas drawl (which matches the accent of Parsons but not that of any other character in this production) and the mannerisms he employs in his performance are disturbingly similar.