Red patent heels, a gun in a box, and too many extension cords

Halifax Fringe Festival doesn't disappoint

If you know my old blog, you know that I review theatre on occasion. You might even have seen places where I've done so more formally. I especially like to talk about music, theatre, and other performing arts when they’re telling me something about the body and healing.

This week, Halifax has its annual Fringe Festival, which is delighting me first by being mask-mandatory, but also by presenting so much strange stuff so fearlessly. Granted, my model for such things is not the world famous Edinburgh Fringe but the smaller but also more manageable Minneapolis Fringe Festival, which I had the pleasure of attending only a couple times. Given that city has something like fifty venues of various sizes and types to work with, it’s still a sprawling event. Halifax’s is far more modest: the city itself is probably only about the size of the famous part of Cambridge.

Still, for a full ten days, the Fringe manages to put up an average of 20 shows per day in venues around the city. Here’s what I’ve seen so far. If you happen to be around, the Fringe runs through this Sunday. Come on out!

The America Show!

The America Show! is a tour de force by Jessie Woodward (an American, it turns out, from Maine) as the epitome of tense, hyper-thin, perfectly coiffed and made-up, seriously repressed, loud and entitled girlboss American Instagram influencer-type Jessica Kissinger (heiress, I believe, to the Elon Kissinger fortune). In the course of the show’s 50-minute runtime, our heroine and motivational speaker attempts to “educate” her benighted Canadian audience on the finer points of being an American, with modules in women’s history, second amendment rights, and Dr. Phil. As her desperation increases, we recognize in her unraveling something more than the usual Fox News host mania.

I’m always incredibly impressed when a single performer, who must command the stage mostly alone for an hour, can stay so engaged, alive, intense, and on point, even with audience participation. Woodward’s poise, flexibility, wit, athleticism, and dime-turn mood changes do a ton of work here, and all in four-inch red patent heels.

Helping with this heavy lift is her actual stage manager, also playing the role of her “stage manager,” which the pair told me afterward happened as the piece developed. Gina the stage manager is thus both the actual person calling the show’s cues, and the long-suffering Canadian foil, punching bag, and sanity checker to this crazed American's batshit seminar. It’s hilarious, and surprisingly dark and affecting at the end. I very much enjoyed letting folks know I was American, and saying, essentially, "I have no notes."

Spine and Socket Kiss the World

The same day, I watched a short piece that was billed at the start as one of the "fringiest" of Fringe shows, and it did not disappoint. Called Spine and Socket Kiss the World, its only description was "A storm. A spark. A story for the time between The End and the beginning we are waiting for." I was intrigued, so I checked it out. 

I don't know who this performer was; I rather want to find out. They were so shy about this piece, as they revealed later, that they didn’t even want to make flyers or promote it at all; their name didn’t even appear in the promotion materials. The show was a series of seemingly unconnected movements, sound themes, repeated gestures, poetic outbursts, audio and video interludes, and a little bit of singing. The performer seemed like someone who understood clowning, and I appreciated their patience, clear comfort and commitment; their willingness to stand there or sit there or unwind yet another extension cord with peaceful joy, plug it into just the right socket, then untangle it through the audience. It was one of the weirder pieces of theatre I've seen, and I've seen a fair bit of weird theatre; mostly I'm not entirely sure it cohered. But I found myself oddly moved, and I always try to pay attention to that. As an audience member said afterward, "I have no idea what I just watched. I liked it? But what the fuck?"

Actual Magic

Performed on the biggest stage of the Fringe, the Neptune Theatre’s Scotiabank Stage, Actual Magic is a sweet, smart, understated magic show by “actual wizard” Vincenzo Ravina. I’m not the most massive fan of magic shows, but I do enjoy a good one, especially if the fireworks, live tigers and woman-sawings are kept to a minimum.

The show resembled a stand-up comedy act more than anything else, mostly owing to Ravina’s dry delivery. In spite of his ironic insistence on his own vast talents and abilities, he lacks entirely in bombast or smarm. As a master illusionist, his schtick instead seems to be a kind of straight-man does magic tricks: a little bit Steve Martin, a little bit Steven Wright. And the tricks themselves are quite impressive, particularly if, like me, you have zero conception of how such things are done. All in all it was a lot of fun, and I might even see what he does next around Halloween.

All-Request Radio

I first saw Velvet Wells perform at last year’s Fringe, where they knocked out a one-person puppet-show musical about community care called (Re)Tired Magical Black Man. It was delightful and strange and daring, plus Velvet’s soulful and versatile voice always brings the funny along with the impressive. This year they went for an all-improvised top-ten countdown show where the premise is simple: audience members submit their favorite made-up track titles, the computer randomly selects one of them along with a backing track, and Velvet makes up a song on the spot. (Now do it ten times in a row!) It’s a remarkable ability, one I’ve only seen before on Who’s Line Is It Anyway? for brief segments — probably a minute or 90 seconds at most. Now try to make up a three-minute banger from a title you just learned 15 seconds ago and a randomly selected backing track that just started playing…go!

Since this was one of the only shows I’ve ever known to allow and indeed encourage recording, I’ll let “Howdy Howdy, Eat the Rich” speak for itself.

Knight of the Bat 2

Thursday night I did another double-header at the Bus Stop Theatre. First up was Fringe crowd-pleaser Knight of the Bat 2, which while it clearly harked back to the original (from last year, probably), also managed on its own as a sequel, which concept the play was also heavily commenting on. Confused yet? You won’t be, when you tune in next time…

The show partook of another of my favorite practices: Shakespeare mash-ups. But unlike my friends over at Tedious Brief, who generally make scripts that recreate a pop culture phenomenon (like Aliens, or Pulp Fiction) using the style and sometimes particular play plots or themes of the Bard to the purpose of elevating both, this show was more of a free-for-all jambalaya of Shakespeare, Batman, and the Marvel cinematic universe, played entirely for comedic effect. In this respect it was successful, even if some of the references to the earlier play flew over my head.

One Night Only

[CN: Themes of suicide]

I have to say that while the Fringe is far from over, this is my favorite thus far. Meet Toronto-based actor Nicholas Eddie, who if I had to define him using a single word, it would be “intense.” Intensely tall and thin, with intense eyes and an intense smile and a lot of intense energy radiating off of his pinballing body in the course of this paradoxically enlivening one-man show, which is set up as the night a young man decides to end it all.

One Night Only started in Toronto and has traversed Fringes between there and Halifax over the course of the summer, picking up accolades and apparently warning labels as it went.

Naturally the warning labels came from Ottawa.

But the result of this show’s slow burn across the eastern half of Canada is that it’s arrived fully cooked, and performing it in front of three people at 11pm on a Thursday weakened it not a whit. I was transfixed by Eddie’s pathos, anger, joy, desperation, his spiraling attempts to find some meaning in the seething, phone-driven isolation of modern life, his influencer-like “lifestyle stew” recipe with the ever-decreasing minutes of a day disappearing into an ever-more hateful slop.

And all of it haunted by the object in the open safe that occupies a small rectangle downstage center, the promised ending whose allure the character needs only avoid for one night.

As I said above about The America Show!, I can’t get enough of performers who manage to be that compelling and to be saying something important at the same time. I can’t wait to see what each of them has to say next.

Support local theatre, everyone.

Halifax Fringe ends tomorrow, but Fringe festivals happen in a bunch of cities around the US, Canada, Europe and Oceania. When the little theatres in your neighborhood aren’t scrambling to mount 50 shows three times each in 10 days or whatever, they’re often putting on marvelous little low-budget gems you won’t have heard of and whose occasional brilliance will fade into the obscurity of the ten or so people involved and the few hundred who saw it. It’s what makes theatre so magical, its ephemerality, and the (yes) intensity with which those who involve themselves in it devote themselves. There’s nothing quite like it.

I’m glad to have this chance again.