This year, the 30th Edmonton International Fringe Festival in Old Strathcona has been packed with enthralling and inspired theatre. In fact, it's been an Olympian year with a combination of comedy, tragedy, horror, dance, rock, cabaret and acts in drag. Below is a sample of what local St. Albert artists have contributed.
The Seminar - ★★★★½
Phabrik Art and Design Centre (10055 80 Ave.)
Beauty is truly in the eyes of the beholder.
In The Seminar, a brilliant attack on cosmetic surgery and the extraordinary lengths people go to alter themselves, four black-haired clones push the boundaries of beauty and ugliness.
Hidden behind repulsive frozen faces wrapped in plastic and implanted with big, artificial butts, they proclaim, "My body is scientifically successful. I am the new perfect."
The one-hour production is set up like a seminar where they try to convince the audience to resculpt their bodies. After all, who wants to hang around with ugly people?
Former St. Albert Children's Theatre instructor Candice Fiorentino is the pushy frontman selling the transformation. Infused with a fiery religious fervour of converting uglies to beauties, she tosses out catchphrases such as: "Choose freedom." "Choose success." "Pretty people have more fun."
Melissa Heagy is a delight as the mad robotic scientist that surgically rebuilds an entire body in an hour. Brianne Jang completely charms as the ditsy 13-year-old that embraces plastic surgery for peer acceptance, and SACT instructor Sara Vickruck completes the quartet as the woman that wins a gift pack for a complete rebuild.
Special kudos to Vickruck, who also wrote the script along with Jang, and as director keeps the riveting action clipping along.
While cosmetic surgery has a place in our pop culture society, Poiema Productions sets out to skewer the insanity of extremes and holds up a telling mirror to our faces.
Puppet Pilots - ★★ ½
Upstairs at the Armory (10310 85 Ave.)
The premise of Puppet Pilots is intriguing — three puppets tire of performing the circuit in Alberta and dream of performing in Hollywood.
It's a widespread dream and every artist at the Fringe has tucked that fantasy in the back of his or her mind at some point.
The hand-held puppets are beautifully constructed and the cast — with SACT founding artistic director Maralyn Ryan, SACT alumna Bridget Ryan, Sheldon Elter and Tim Cooper — is top-notch.
But where this 45-minute adult puppet show falls apart is in the script. In between the monotonous Alberta circuit and Hollywood's audition circles, where they are snapped up for a pilot, the puppets encounter no challenges.
Their success is too easy. They have no tests to prove their worthiness at winning a pot of gold and unfortunately the story loses momentum.
Has This Ever Happened to You? – The Ron Cashmere Story - ★★★★
Fringe Cabaret Lounge, TransAlta Arts Barn (10330 84 Ave.)
Playwright Rick Kiebiech sharpens his spear battling over-the-top consumerism and rampant corporate ego in Has This Ever Happened to You? – The Ron Cashmere Story.
In this 75-minute multimedia comedy, Ron Cashmere is a corporate giant and the ideal pitchman with the gift of gab. He could sell a desert preserve to a canoe club.
Ultimately Ron is an inventor that creates a need for junky products, builds them and floods the market making gazillions along the way.
His mantra is: "We don't sell products. We sell choices."
But a year ago, Ron was on a plane that crashed in the Sea of Japan. There were no survivors. Just as his company, FOMPT, is at a standstill, he returns and shocks his bewildered business partner Lucy.
St. Albert actor Scott Bourgeois perfectly envelops the skin of this cocky pitchman who makes you squirm. Ron is a smooth survivor, a guy that finds a way of turning disasters into millions. And although Ron's actions are repugnant, Bourgeois adds a patina of charm that keeps you mesmerized.
As Lucy, St. Albert actress Leah Anderson is Ron's perfect foil, a more neurotic version with a conscience. Although Lucy holds Ron in check, she too succumbs to the god of money and power.
Several of the more interesting aspects of this two-hander are the entertaining commercials interspersed with live action. You almost feel like you're in the living room watching TV.
Complicateded - ★★★ ½
Phabrik Art and Design Centre (10055 80 Ave.)
Ain't love confusing? But how else do you get to appreciate what's really important without navigating the emotional landmines?
In Complicateded, two roommates fall in love with the same girl without being aware of the other's romantic moves.
Living in an apartment decorated with posters of women in various states of undress and empty beer bottles discarded on tables, these two buddies have been friends since junior high.
Nick (Corey Rogers) is the perpetual lust-and-leave slacker while Sam (Joshua Schilds) is the more level-headed buddy with dreams of being a graphic designer for comic books. He's also engaged to be married.
Sam meets the girl of his dreams, Haley (Kayla Manuel), a soft-spoken, easy-going gal at a coffeehouse. Even though he's going to tie the knot in four days, he makes a date with her. New in town, she heads off to rent an apartment and accidentally knocks on the wrong door — Nick's apartment.
Part Friends, part Barefoot in the Park, Rogers's original script is in some ways predictable. However, the script is also packed with zippy one-liners that build ridiculous situations into genuinely funny moments.
It's a straight-out character play and Rogers, Schilds and Manuel — all members of St. Albert Theatre Arts Guild Entertainers — have a fluid chemistry that fits like a jigsaw puzzle.
Just watching Rogers and Schilds reverse roles in a couple of hysterical scenes is worth the price of admission.
(title of show) - ★★½
Telus Building (10437 83 Ave.)
Slightly longer than most Fringe shows, (title of show) is a one-act musical that chronicles its own creation from start to finish. It seems the original Jeff Bowen (music/lyrics) and Hunter Bell (book) had three weeks to enter a play competition in the New York Musical Theatre Festival.
Not having any finished copy on hand, they wrote about everything that happened during their pressure cooker creation and mailed it in. It was staged off-Broadway and later on Broadway, winning several prestigious awards.
This 90-minute production, directed by Paul Kane graduate Lauren Boyd, is peopled with four emerging actors. St. Albert's Stephen Tracey (Jeff) is the show's dreamy straightman while Daniel Fernandes (Hunter) is by far the wackier instigator.
Jill Agopsowicz is Susan, a triple-threat performer afraid to quit her day job because it provides security, while Quinn Ritco-Dooley is Heidi, an actress who appears at every audition in town.
The show is loaded with promise in songs such as An Original Musical and What Kind of Girl is She. There are even a few belly laughs about half-naked men, girl action and masturbating moms.
It's too bad the action was off-balance, at times bursting with energy and at other times struggling with a sagging momentum. Unfortunately, it comes across as self-reverential and self-indulgent, something the original makers may not have intended.
