Fringe 2015 - Part 1

Unlike last year, we are actually in town for this season's Toronto Fringe Festival.  We plan to watch eight shows plus maybe a couple of "Best of Fringe" winners, assuming that we haven't already picked them as part of our festival selections.  The chance of this is almost nil, since it is so difficult to guess which of the hundreds of choices will be the good shows based on brief descriptions.  Also, due to differing tastes, the shows we find entertaining may not coincide with the ones chosen by the Fringe jury.  In fact, last year we only attended Best of Fringe shows and only liked half of them.  So far this year, we are 1 for 3 in terms of choosing shows that we thoroughly enjoyed and would wholeheartedly endorse. The other two had their merits but each were lacking in some way.

Photobucket photo of Deadmau5

We were delighted by the musical comedy deadmouse: The Musical, a parody based on Canadian house music (electronic dance music) producer/disc jockey Joel Zimmerman (a.k.a. Deadmau5) whose trademark image includes appearing on stage wearing a mouse head helmet.  In the musical, an actual mouse named Joel Zimmermouse dreams of becoming a house music DJ using the stage name "Live Human".  He is supported by his friend, the goofy, sex-obssessed David Gouda (a play on French DJ David Guetta) and his love interest Cat, an attractive female mouse (obviously named after Deadmau5's former financee Kat Von D).  They live in a fantastical  world where mice and humans can talk to each other, setting up the underlying themes of prejudice and racism (or speciesism - which I didn't realize until now is a real word!) when Joel is discriminated against since "mice can't be house DJs".   When the famous human DJ Avi-cheese (spoof on Swedish DJ Avcii) kills Joel in order to steal his hit song, the mouse convinces St. Peter (also a mouse) to send him back to earth as a human DJ named deadmouse.

The premise is wacky but fun and the performances are excellent.  Funny dialogue, great songs, good acting and well-choreographed dancing make this a very entertaining show to watch.  The costumes are simple but effective—the characters are dressed in casual street clothes, but if they sport mouse ears, they are mice; otherwise they are a human.  There was only one technical glitch on the first ensemble song where insufficient miking made some singers' voices difficult to hear, but this was quickly resolved for the rest of the show.  We were also impressed with the professionalism of the actors, who had great comedic timing and good singing voices, especially the actress who played Cat.  During the big finale group number, one of the actresses dropped a large earring, but carried on with the dance routine without letting on.  I only noticed because I was sitting right in front of her in the first row.  The way these minor issues were handled was all the more telling when compared to similar situations in the other shows.

Even before Fringe started, deadmouse: The Musical was in the news when Deadmau5 issued a cease and desist order and threatened to sue for copyright infringement.  The matter was swiftly settled when Deadmau5 indicated he was satisfied after the show "put up a disclaimer and called it a parody".  That seems so ridiculous since the show was so obviously a parody, with or without a disclaimer.  This feels like a marketing ploy to get some publicity for the DJ, but I guess it works both ways since the musical benefited as well and the performance that we attended was packed.  It also feels hypocritical that Deadmau5 would sue for copyright infringement when he himself was sued by Disney for imitating Mickey Mouse with his big-eared mouse headgear and logo.   One of the funniest lines in the musical even made a meta-reference to the "frivolous lawsuit".

We went to The Women of Tu-na House with high expectations based on its past credentials—a seasoned actress performing a show that was previously a Best Solo winner in Hollywood Fringe 2012, and received glowing reviews from San Francisco Fringe (2013) and New York City Fringe (2011).  The one-woman show features actress and playwright Nancy Eng performing a myriad of Asian women working in an New York City massage parlour in what appears to be the 1950-60s even though the program specifies the time as "Now".   Considering some of the characters make reference to living through the Japanese invasion and the China's Cultural Revolution, this would make for very old hookers.  Through quick costume changes, accents, speech patterns, posture and actions, various characters come to life including the aging Madame who owns and runs the shop, a series of prostitutes, and an actual licensed masseuse who refers any sexual requests to the other girls who are willing to provide "more services".  One by one, we learn of their back stories, including how many of them, originally from China or Hong Kong, ended up in America.   Some of the stories  are poignant and even engrossing, but I did not consider any of them to be particularly funny considering this was billed as a comedy.  What does come through is the playwright's intent to show that the women who provide sexual services do so willingly and are not forced into these acts.  The women are sassy, defiant and sometimes irritated by their profession, but never seem victimized or abused.

There is a lot of potential in this material but unfortunately the execution was not up to snuff, at least for this first opening night performance.  Either because she did not feel well, as she apologized for at the end of the show, or was nervous since many of her family members were in the audience, the actress flubbed or forgot her lines multiple times throughout the show and did not make a graceful recovery when this happened.  This breaks the trance for the audience and makes it aware that she is playing a character, rather than embodying that character.  This was really too bad and I hope she rebounds and does better on future performances, now that the opening night jitters are out of the way.  I also was not enamoured by the heavily accented but muffled voice-overs that preceded each character change.  I couldn't hear what most of them were saying and therefore did not realize until half way through the show that they were giving background on the next character. 

Finally, Quarter Life Crisis could have been a decent musical, abet a bit too melodramatic for my taste, had the sound quality not been so dismal.  It was held in the same venue (Al Green Theatre) as deadmouse: The Musical, so I don't think it was a matter of acoustics but rather a poor staging choice.  They placed the musician/piano/guitar player up front while much of the action happened further back on the stage.  The result was that the music drowned out the voices and it was impossible to hear much of what was being sung.  This was not even the first showing, so you would have thought that they could work out the kinks by now.  Part way through the show, they tried to fix the sound by possibly amping up the microphones of the performers, but just resulted in loud squawking sounds of feedback.  As much as I love musicals, I am starting to have second thoughts about watching semi-pro musical productions.  It is difficult enough to hear the lyrics in musicals for the most part, but paired with amateur or sub-standard stagecraft and production qualities, the chances are even further reduced.

The story deals with Lenora, who comes from an upper middle class family, has graduated from University but now is lost and depressed at the thought of entering the real world, finding a job and getting on with her life.  She has an internet addiction, an adversity to working, moved back in with her parents and is seeing two psychiatrists, all on Daddy's dime.  I'm not sure if I was supposed to feel sorry for her, but I just wanted to kick her in the butt.  The actors had pretty good singing voices when we could hear them.  I cringed a bit at the cheesy dance moves in some scenes.  The only song and dance combination that really stood out for me was a number that involved Lenore reluctantly taking part in a corporate job interview that Daddy had pulled strings to get for her.  Sitting in a chair and dressed in bright red, she stood out in contrast to the prim and proper dark suits of the interviewers.  They paraded around her chair, peppering her with questions that she totally failed at answering.  The song and choreography reminded me of ones from Evita or one of Bob Fosse's creations. 

So, we are not off to a great start in terms of selecting Fringe shows that we enjoyed, but there's still five to go so we hope for the best.