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: Ella Fitzgerald’s voice crackles the title song through the speakers, and immediately we are warm and think of home. But home is far from where we are taken. We are imprisoned, in Lebanon, perhaps underground, perhaps forgotten.
Victoria: Don't let the words "Performance Poetry" frighten you away from seeing Jem Rolls' one man tour de farce. Imagine, instead, a mythical hybrid of John Cleese and Eminem spewing out a rap line of observational humour with such speed and verbal dexterity that it'll make your head spin.
Victoria: On its opening night, technical glitches got the better of this dark Russian Folktale featuring the Tsar’s son Ivan, the Great Grey Wolf and a rather peculiar narrator. In a tale about choices Ken Lang, who wrote the show as well as plays the role of narrator and the wolf, leads us through the Ivan’s bleak journey towards his “happily ever after.”
Victoria: Having won over last year’s audiences, Nile Séguin comes out of the dartboard nook and onto the stage with a friendly stand-up act about genocide and racism . . . but with surprisingly good taste. History: Deleted Scenes and Extras takes you from Rwanda to Auschwitz with a shudder and a smile.
Victoria: A clown, Our Heroine, has to defend her sexually charged life when she reaches the Pearly Gates in this fun solo show. Vancouver playwright and actress Colette Nichol plays eight absurd characters—including a prude British grandmother, a Johnny Cochrane-style lawyer and God in need of therapy—but her singing voice is also a winning factor here.
Victoria: If this is the future, count me out. Vancouver’s Darren Boquist tackles Dawson Nichols’ 2000 hit solo show about a computer gamer, Nathan, who becomes trapped in a virtual reality program he was inserted into to calibrate emotional response; a murder mystery provides the set-up while poor Nathan’s mind and memories manifest in the virtual software. Confused? Add an onslaught of incomprehensible cyber-speak and a tornado of 20-plus characters and you have a show you may not understand, but one you’ll tell your friends about.
Victoria: Billed as the “first show of the 2009 Victoria Fringe” is a great way to start off your run, and to have your opening show be only a few seats shy of a sell-out is even better. That’s exactly what happened with local favourites, Peter Carlone and Chris Wilson as they left the crowd laughing with this “sitcom-esque” creation dubbed The Peter ‘n Chris Show.
Victoria: 4 guys, drug addicts who plan to rob a bank, hang around, backs to audience, smoking, watching videos, channelling Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, King Kong, 'The Birdman of Alcatraz' and Roman Polanski. The fridge at the edge of the stage is the mother of their world, provider of mayo, hot sauce, beer, morphine - also cold, dark refuge from frenetic violent reality and, most dangerously, each other.
And why shouldn’t he? Between the success of his last two shows here (Giant Invisible Robot, Boat Load), he’s quickly become a Fringe favourite. His latest work, Fall Fair, should continue that trend.
