Victoria: A tale of one woman’s battle with the darkness inside her, In and Out of the Dark is Scoli’s journey to reclaim her joy. Shantelle Simone Laundry acts as the judge, darkness and light in this physical performance piece and her quick and fluid movements keep your eye, but unfortunately not your attention. Her oddball, half-mime, half-clown make-up fizzles into absurdity and the over-acting of particular moments loses any tenderness the play might have had.
Victoria: Meet Comrade Lavrentti Pavlovich Beria (Dennis Eberts). He appears nowhere in official Soviet history, but that never stopped him from bugging Churchill and Roosevelt’s bedrooms at Yalta. Or from sharing their secrets with Stalin over dinner. Opposite this boisterous intelligence kingpin is Anna (Christine Karpiak), a widowed American sent to interview Beria for the Washington Post. Unless, of course, she’s lying about that . . .
Victoria: The only "Improvised Theatre" troupe to perform at this years' Fringe, Rosa Parks Improv hail from Vancouver and have been together for about a year and a half; and it looks like things are starting to jell. The very nature of improv dictates that if you go to a RPI show it's not going to be the same show I've just been to, so reviews are a little tricky.
Rosa Parks: Paul's amorous feelings have been stirred
Victoria: You wouldn’t guess it from its boring, humdrum write-up in the fringe brochure, but Fall Fair is most likely the best show you’re going to see this year. Jayson McDonald, who has been a, if not ‘the’, fringe favourite for the past two years is back and brilliant, playing an assortment of characters all converging on the last open day of the local fair.
Victoria: Friday night’s opening of Like a Virgin was packed and turning away people even 30 minutes before show time. And seeing the performance, you can understand why. Jimmy Hogg’s exaggerated-for-comedic-effect sexual history/biography is piss-your-pants hilarious.
Victoria: Abridging Macbeth down to just over an hour is a feat in itself, but Maria Lakes distills Shakespeare’s great tragedy down to its most potent parts. Lakes abandons Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (Serge Saika and Lakes herself, respectively) to a blank and lonely stage for their love to boil and their sanity to dwindle. The results both haunt and astonish- often in the same scene.
Victoria: Need a way to get hot for the Fringe? Just head on down to the Metro Studio where four sexy performers will weave a musical tale of love, sex, shattered illusions and coming up short in this 75-minute show.
Watching From Grandma’s Attic, I wanted to feel nostalgic, as it's not only in old age that we look back on our lives. Barbara Eadie plays Bea, an elderly woman who reminisces and connects with her memories through song.
Victoria: This is a Howling Cow Theatre two-hander, a 60-minute quickie evisceration of William Shakespeare's original script adapted by Maria Lakes. The actors have many exits and no moments. There's more blackouts than bloodshed. Offstage killings sound like someone taking a shit. One actor, passionate as an empty chair, speaks with stones in her mouth. The other mumbles "I shall be king" as if hesitating to order bacon n' eggs for breakfast. He wears enough harness around his neck to hang himself several times. "All is had. All is spent." Pity it takes an hour before they're dead because the...
Victoria: Opening night for Full Blast drew in only a modest crowd (though something lured in Atomic Vaudeville’s Morgan Cranny), but the premise seemed promising. It seemed like something madcap and fun! A real spectacle!
