Theatre 2023: Fringe Festival

My husband Rich and I watched four performances at the Toronto Fringe Festival this year and enjoyed three of them.  This is an acceptable success rate given the adhoc, open-access nature of the selection process for Fringe shows and the lack of reviews for the most part when we choose which ones to watch.  It has always been hit and miss what we end up with.

Our first show was a relatively safe magic act called “Absolute Magic With Keith Brown”.  This was Rich’s pick since he likes magic shows.  The magician performed the typical slight-of-hand card tricks and telepathy/mind-reading routines. Rich participated in one of the mindreading tricks where he was one of four people who secretly drew a picture and Brown guessed which one Rich drew (a wristwatch .. I could have figured that out!).  In the finale of that trick, the magician actually reproduced what the last person had drawn.  None of this was particularly novel for a magic show.  But what made the act interesting was the running story-telling narrative that Brown gave with his smooth, hypnotic (and distracting?) voice while performing his tricks, which actually resulted in a life lesson.  Through hutzpah and sheer determination, when he was able to wrangle a visit from the wife of the President of Iceland when he did a show in that country.  The lesson was that you will never succeed if you don’t at least try.

Next we watched a musical comedy called Choir by Barbara Johnston and Anika Johnson (sister of Britta Johnson who wrote Kelly vs Kelly).  This team wrote the musical Blood Ties, another Fringe show that then had a snippet featured in an episode of the SciFi drama Orphan Black. Through small vignettes, Choir follows a year in the lives of a group of teenagers who are part of the “Tierce de Picardie Children's Chorus".  This is not a pop music or show choir like Glee, but rather a youth choir that sings Classical music by composers such as Bach, Handel and Mozart. They are led by conductor Mary Dean, played hilariously and with the utmost camp by actor Dean Deffet.  The cast is comprised of over 30+ singers ranging from ages 11-18 and their voices blend in beautiful harmony although the singing abilities of the individual soloists are not quite as strong and belie their young ages. The short scenes range from funny to touching as the youngsters deal with cliques and social status (being choir cool vs school cool), singing exercises and performances as they prepare for a big competition in Sudbury, and of course peer pressure, crushes and dating.  This was our favourite of the four shows that we watched.

Our third show was a one-man puppet show called The Family Crow: A Murder Mystery where all the characters are crows including the detective Horatio P.Corvus who shows up at the Crow family mansion to investigate the murder of the eldest son “Russell Crow”.  Puppeteer extraordinaire Adam Francis Proulx provides the voices of the detective, who is also the narrator of the story, as well as each of the suspects within the Crow family including daughter “Sheryl Crow”.  Before the actual mystery part of the show starts, Proulx walks around the stage and explains that we are about to endure an hour of really bad puns and invites anyone who wants to leave to do so now.  We can’t say that we were not warned as the puns come fast and furious and are mostly groaners, starting with the play on the word murder which is also the term for a group of crows. Proulx spins an exciting tale as his detective prances across the stage interviewing each suspect who one by one also are found dead.  He has 5 lamps pointed inwards that illuminate the stage which he turns on and off with foot switches as he traverses back and forth.  This was an extremely entertaining play to watch.

Unfortunately, our last play Killing Time: A Game Show Musical was the one that Rich and I did not like.  Surprisingly we are in the minority since the rest of the audience seemed to love it.  This show was actually selected Patron’s Pick over all the other shows playing at its theatre and got rave reviews. The plot was straightforward with a smarmy game show host being murdered and the police arrive to question the suspects including a producer, stagehand, Vanna White-esque show girl and two contestants. Loving musicals, we did enjoy all the songs but found the acting to be so hammy and overwrought that it was cringeworthy for us as opposed to humorous.  The rest of the audience obviously disagreed based on all the laughter around us.  Maybe we just didn’t have the right sense of humour for the show and its intentional overacting. Too bad this was not a sung-through musical with all songs and no dialogue because the musical numbers were quite good.