The 2008 Calgary Fringe Festival
The 2008 Calgary Fringe Festival kicks off
• Fetish (SeeJaneProductions Inglewood Silverthreads) — Japan’s seedy underworld market of used-panty vending machines proved irresistible material for Calgary playwright Michaela Jeffery. Her new play Fetish which she also directed is a one-act one-woman play about Julia (Jessica Robertshaw) a young ex-kiddie pageant queen who for a little extra cash sells her panties over the Internet.
Upon hearing of this rather curious and suspicious vending machine business Jeffery immediately went to work researching the motivations of these buyers and sellers. “The logic of it becomes readily apparent when you realize these girls presumably buy $5 or $10 pairs of underwear then retail them 12 hours later for $80” she says. “These are girls who don’t have to show their faces so it’s actually pretty brilliant if it wasn’t so disturbing. That’s kinda what got me.”
The universe of virtual gaming also provided Jeffery with some morally ambiguous ideas. “Any virtual interactive game on the Internet people will find a way to make it dirty because that’s just how we operate” she says. Jeffery describes virtual brothels whereby virtual madams recruit and extort gamers in order to generate artificial money which is then converted to actual money after being sold on Ebay. “It is terrifying and disturbing but kind of impressive in its own way.” (GB)
• Les Ms. (Robyn & Lisel Lantern Church) — The tangy taste of the epic Broadway musical Les Miserables comes to the Fringe in a tiny 100-calorie package with Lisel Forst’s and Robyn Lamb’s Les Ms. a madcap 45-minute distillation of the classic rock opera. Les Ms. is more than just a Cliffs Notes version but a full-on loving tribute.
The two were inspired by the encouragement of their friends when they saw Forst and Lamb clowning around and performing the famous confrontation between Jean Valjean and Javert. They then pared the musical down to its present length. “We’ve loved the musical since we were in our tiny teens” says Forst. “We got rid of the parts that we thought were boring like Valjean going to jail and then getting released. We kept the parts that were fun and the ones that the audiences absolutely love like Marius and Epinone singing ‘A Little Fall of Rain.’ That’s an audience favourite. We can’t cut it out.”
Let the two missies from Les Ms. show you why it was one of the longest running shows in all of Broadway history. They’re having a blast — and so will you. “We’re having such a great time and we’re really in the moment” says Forst. “It’s a little farcical but with a real reverence about the subject matter. All we’re trying to do is have fun be fast and always keep the old men awake.” (JM)
• Pussy Sushi (Swallow-A-Bicycle Performance Co-op Artpoint Gallery) — One of the most common misconceptions about sushi is that it refers to the raw fish. Sushi is actually the rice — the raw fish is actually called sashimi. What does this even have to do with Pussy Sushi the fringe show written and performed by Emiko Muraki and Laura Whyte? The play points out some of the absurd silly stereotypes and misconceptions that abound in our popular culture about both white and Asian Canadians.
“A lot of the laughs come from the misunderstanding between Bev and Tonka” says Muraki. “Bev is from a small poor town and is a little trashy while Tonka is an Asian-Canadian. They try to appreciate each other but in their limited experience in their small town they sometimes end up making naively racist stereotypes of each other.”
In the play the two characters leave their small town for the glamorous big city to try and make it big in the world of haute fashion — by working in a department store. Whyte a native of Medicine Hat says that the characters’ bigger-than-life natures were both inspired by conversations overheard in Medicine Hat. As she pokes a little fun at the stereotypes of her fellow Medicine Hat residents she explains that they’re just not valid. “The thing about small town living is there are these stereotypes” says Whyte. “The thinking is that they aren’t always the brightest or the most human. I’ve seen that they’re actually very well read and probably the most human people of all.” (JM)
• Use Me: An Undead Musical (Mittens Productions From the Ground Up in the Old Garry Theatre) — Waking up after your own death would be sheer hell but imagine waking up to find that your bones themselves were replaced with PVC piping. It’d be to say the minimum the worst day of your un-life. This is the fate that befalls the young incredibly bad poet Alistair in Mittens Productions Use Me: An Undead Musical . While the idea of the zombie musical has been gaining some steam only recently did playwright Jeff Kubik realize he was quite unintentionally adding another play to the burgeoning genre on the periphery of mainstream theatre.
“One of the strangest things for me was finding out two weeks ago that there was an actual zombie musical genre” laughs Kubik. “I thought it was a little bizarre looked it up and there it was.”
This is a play of many firsts for almost everyone involved. This is stage manager Anna Chan’s first show. Director Ellen Close a familiar face to many Calgary theatregoers as the festival director for Sage Theatre’s IGNITE! festival breathes life into the play. This is Kubik’s first musical the first of his plays to be mounted at the Fringe and also the least explicit comedy he’s ever written. “This was a way to explore something that I’m interested in which is the idea of what love is” says Kubik. “I like the notion of how pragmatic and full of use love is. It ended up being more dramatic than my previous works. My girlfriend teases me about how people will come out after seeing the play and think how I’m unhappy and a loveless person” he adds laughing. (JM)
• Glory Days (Artpoint Gallery Prairie Boy Productions) — The 2008 Calgary Fringe will be 57-year-old Rod McDonald’s “swan song.” After his final Calgary performance of Glory Days he will end his 16-year stint on the festival circuit. “There comes a time when you know it’s time” he says.
His one-man show tells the story of Patrick O’Ryan. The audience meets him and his two buddies as children in Vancouver. The story follows O’Ryan’s life through his boxing matches with Muhammad Ali and George Foreman to watching his wife die of breast cancer and finding a new life coaching kids in a small gym. “Many of these things are autobiographical” says McDonald though thankfully his wife is alive and well after 30 years of marriage.
McDonald says Glory Days is also about the importance of friends. “I still hang out every Wednesday night with my best friends from the first grade in 1957” he says. “The best thing about having friends is you never have to explain.”
The play also touches upon the importance of one’s roots. “Everything is based upon my life growing up on Dewdney Avenue in Regina” he says. The area is known for its crime drugs and poverty. “I grew up in abject poverty on Dewdney Avenue and I’m proud of it. You can’t hide who you are.” (KR)
• Eve: The True Story (Windsift Productions From the Ground Up in the Old Gary Theatre) — Lynn Marie Calder of Windsift Productions touches on religion in Eve: The True Story…A Sinfully Delicious Musical . Calder has been working on the play for the past five years. “I realized there were a lot of things in the traditional Adam and Eve story that really pissed me off. I thought it was time for a new creation myth” she says. “I can’t spill the total beans on what ‘really’ went down under the tree of knowledge but to give you a hint after this show ‘eating the apple’ will have a whole new meaning.”
In the Bible God evicts Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden once Eve disobeys His orders and eats the forbidden apple. In her version Calder says the serpent — disguised as God — is the one who kicks Adam and Eve from the Garden. What’s more Calder also depicts God as a “buxom well-hung hermaphrodite.” “I figure if Eve was created from Adam then Adam must have been both male and female. And if Adam was created in God’s image then God must also be both male and female” she theorizes.
Calder did a lot of research when writing Eve as well as taking a mythology course at the University of Calgary.
With eight songs in total the 55-minute piece is approximately half music half script. Calder describes the music as “Queen meets Broadway” including a “sexy seduction number” by the serpent called “This Apple Can Talk.” (KR)
• Circumference (Awkward Moment Productions Lantern Church) — Hailing all the way from Minneapolis Amy Salloway brings her one-woman show Circumference to the Fringe. This is her third autobiographically based solo piece. “After writing two solo shows I felt like I still wasn’t saying what I really wanted to say. I wasn’t getting down to the level of truth I really wanted to tell about what it’s like to live with a body that the world loves to vilify” she says.
After spending a year trying to get her health insurance to pay for gastric bypass surgery “in a last-ditch effort to get the thin body I’d longed for all my life” Salloway used those experiences to write Circumference .
It tells the story of Amy who desperate to no longer be fat ugly and dateless starts jumping through medical exercise and dietary hoops to get her health insurance to approve her for gastric bypass surgery. While on this quest she flashes back to the traumas of seventh-grade gym class and makes some unexpected discoveries about what it takes for a mind and body to reunite. “When I write plays about the ways I am imperfect and dorky when I write about the mistakes and embarrassments I’ve lived through it puts all that pain to use” she says. “This is the payoff — if audiences can be entertained by my suffering and imperfection and not only laugh at it but say ‘Hey I went through that! I’m not alone!’
“I also hope that maybe it changes some attitudes towards obesity and encourages folks to question our culture’s intense vicious prejudice against larger bodies” she adds. (KR)
For more information visit www.calgaryfringe.ca.
