Fringe

Sisyphus pushing that rock; where is the plank reviewer in this picture?The 2008 Vancouver Fringe Festival has restored my faith in ‘live’ theatre. From the heights to the depths, the festival offered an astonishing range of experience. And it is a vital festival. When I was excited by a show I was often exhilarated. When I was bored I was violently bored (and not stewing in the malaise indifference I feel at a well-produced regional flop). The best writing at this year’s Fringe was as good as, or better than, the writing on our main stages (excepting masterful classics like Shakespeare). The mediocre writing was as mediocre as the usual dreck. The best acting was as good. The best staging was as smart, if not smarter.

I’ll concede that our regular season shows, due to a level of professional competency, don’t fall as low as the major bombs at the Fringe. But as I noted above, these bombs are so much more enjoyable than the blandly competent failures we get during the rest of the year.

There's something sexy about being around a person who performs a job well. A friend and I once compared notes about being impressed – and somewhat turned on – by being a passenger in a vehicle when the driver had to respond quickly and adroitly to black ice on the road (in my case) or a deer stumbling out of nowhere (in her case). Effortlessly expert performance is hot, baby.
In a theatre, in some ways, you're in the same kind of position: you hope the people on stage will take you for a good ride, and when they do, it's pretty satisfying. When they do it expertly and with humour, it's a turn-on – mentally and emotionally.

I was impressed, moved, delighted and just downright pleased by the Road Show Company‘s production of One More for the Road, a late play by George Ryga (yes, he of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe fame). According to University of Calgary Special Collections (sources! they’re everywhere on the ‘net!) this one-person show was written for Ryga’s friend, Dick Clements, another performer. The piece is built around Dick’s recollections of the spoken and sung ramblings of Chester C. Sharpe, a sort of Everyman figure but also a composite of Ryga and Clements. John R. Taylor, who has worked in production design for film and TV and also acts, and who was involved with a 1990 Fringe tour of One More for the Road, directed this 2008 Fringe performance.

Christina Sicoli (Wild Rose) restores Andrew’s faith in humanity, or somethingWhen David Jordan contacted me about something that Simon Ogden had suggested, my first thought was “what?” Simon’s idea was to review every show in this year’s Fringe Festival over the first weekend. When I told my Plank colleagues about this, they too went “what?”

You mean every show?

Then I met with David and Simon and we started talking about a team of reviewers flooding the festival, Plank Magazine hosting the online forum and getting people talking on the site, debating the shows and generally hurting each others feelings and, man, was on board for that. And so were my colleagues and so, thankfully, are many of you.

This has been just an unbelievably fun adventure for all of us in Plankland. One of my colleagues phoned me on her way home to say how energized she was from the whole experience. And that energy is coming from all of you who have participated in the forums or who have just dropped by to read a few reviews before heading out to the Festival and, of course, from the performers themselves.

We want to also thank our Fringe reviewers who did such fantastic work: Cathy, Ingrid, Miranda, Rachel, Tyson and, of course, Simon! We also want to thank David Jordan and his team and the volunteers.