Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Well, because Keira asked nicely, I'll try to do this on my iPod touch. Excuse typos and punctuation problems.

1) The Pumpkin Pie Show: Commencement. Best thing I've seen so far. Amazing.

2) Pitch Blond. The story of comic actor Judy Holliday's run in with the anti-communist movement in the 1950s.

3) Gibberish. Chris Gibbs works a crowd like no one else. If you don't laugh you are a sad, soulless human being. Or a robot.

4) Mal. Clowns are creepy and this show is great.

ADDED

To be honest, there's not much I haven't liked at this year's Fringe. Perhaps that's because I'm choosing most shows by companies I know rather than taking a chance on an unknown product. There's only one show I wasn't keen on, The Unlikely Sainthood of Madeline McKay, and even that wasn't that bad.

Jem Rolls's show, One Man Riot, was great. Rolls's is always good. Keir Cutler's Rant Demon was a solid show. Molly, a one woman show based on a section of Joyce's Ulysses was excellent, though, with it's frank sexual descriptions, not for every one's tastes.

My biggest problem this year has been the reviewers. I'm, frankly, often pissed off at Fringe reviewers (I'm at loss to figure out why Morley Walker goes to the Fringe at all - he hates almost everything). This year, I've notives that a significant number of both the CBC and the Free Press reviews were written about versions of plays performed at the Ottawa or Toronto Fringe earlier this summer and, as a result, don't necessarily reflect the version of the show currently running in Winnipeg. Let's leave aside the idea of theatre being a living art where no two shows are exactly alike. Don't you think that artists will tweak their plays based on the feedback they receive festival to festival?