Curiouser
and curiouser

Lesbians, hockey-player-loving teens, online
love, tired clichés, an affair with Stephen
Harper and a centaur—the Montreal Fringe
festival is back

HALF MAN, HALF BEAST, ALL COMEDY? Awkward Centaur

by NEIL BOYCE

The Fringe festival is always a frantic affair: sprinting from venue to venue, and as the word spreads, lining up for tickets to hot acts you’d never heard of before.

With the Fringe’s growing list of partnerships—including Fantasia, Piknic Électronik, the St-Ambroise Folk Festival, Pop Montreal, etmultiple- cetera—all of the Montreal indie-type fests are beginning to melt together like a box of Crayolas in the microwave.

So, getting your Fringe fix is easy, the problem is deciding where to spend those brief 11 days as theatre, film, live music and the prospect of sex with an out-of-towner all vie for your attention. To navigate you through this big wet kiss of a fest, here are some highly subjective picks.

LESBIANS AND PUCK BUNNIES!

Susan Jeremy and Mary Fulham have a string of Fringe hits in their CVs. Great ideas, great writing and intensely personal characters are the hallmarks of their work. They collaborate once more in Brazil Nuts, about lesbians vs. U.S. Immigration.

Ace Lopes and Extensive Enterprises present the final saga in their wonderful G.I. Joe-based supervillain odyssey with Cobra: The Musical III: The Return of the King ... of Kings! Their “metal” approach to the work has won many hearts, mine among them.

Brooklynite Candy Simmons has already collected a stack of glowing reviews for AfterLife, her fulllength, one-woman play set in three different eras where free will, prejudice and karmic baggage all figure into the stories.

At a Fringe Off venue (the Bain St-Michel toilet), Puck Bunny— about girls who dig hockey players— looks like a cool collaboration between director Alexandra West and actor Joanne Sarazen; between them, they’ve done fine work at places like Geordie, the Segal and with Tableau d’Hôte theatre.

Talented actor-writer and Brault & Martineau salesman Graham Cuthbertson has graced these pages often, for good reason. His obtusely titled Pre/Intervention by Chrystie Delancey (Please No Spoilers) is, he says, both “well-crafted” and “not an intellectual experience.” Despite the ironic quotes, I’ll see it.

Penumbra, from company Lapin dans un Chapeau, had one of the strongest two minutes at the Fringefor- all: a rapid-fire rant of the seediest comments in the personal ads. Paul Van Dyck directs Katharine Dempsey’s script with Catherine Bérubé and Michelle Boback among the solid cast. Highly anticipated.

SPREADING SEXY-ELECTRIC-JOY: Dance Anima

JEM ROLLS AND FUCKING STEPHEN HARPER

Having created a new show every year since 2003, U.K. performance poet Jem Rolls at last presents his greatest hits show, Leastest Flops. A brilliant pyrotechnician with words, Rolls is a must for any Fringe-goer.

A Fringe without TJ Dawe? Impossible! Or almost: Dawe’s first solo-show Tired Clichés returns, with Alex Eddington in the lead this time. In Big Girls Don’t Cry, actor, stand-up comedian and all-around clown Rachelle Elie channels pop diva Om Shanti, here to celebrate the release of her new album, Look at Me.

With Cocktails, Montreal’s finest purveyors of penis-oriented humour, the Dancing Cock Brothers, are back with more filthy sketch work. (Also recommended, Without Annette’s Awkward Centaur and Uncalled For’s Today Is All Your Birthdays.)

For a few “sell themselves” entries, the title says it all: Rob Salerno’s Fucking Stephen Harper answers all the questions you’ve never asked about his unsavoury experience with the leader of our country. Also, fans of surrealist theatre will want to see Pablo Picasso’s Le désir attrapé par la queue, featuring characters like the Onion, the Big Foot, Fat Anguish, Skinny Anguish, Silence and the Curtains— all of whom talk only about hunger, cold and sex. From Montreal company Pretium Doloris.

THE OTHERS

A big segment of the Fringe falls into that Other, Interdisciplinary, Multimedia rubric of work by artists who can’t make up their minds: with Dance Animal, choreographer Robin Henderson (Blastback Babyzap, Vampire Lesbians of Sodom) returns to help spread “sexy-electric-joy-energy,” something we can all use.

Ardist jazz comedy Fidel sounds and looks fantastic. Their nifty Web site fideltheshow.com hooked me with nice visuals and a smooth soundtrack (which proves that the Internets work).

U.K. collective PanicLab brings together dance and physical theatre artists from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, France, Hungary, the U.K. and the U.S. as they tackle gender and sexuality for their piece Perverts!

Similarly, SportSexDeathPorn, from WTE Theatre (Wasted Theatre Education) marks the Canadian debut for the young, highly regarded New York City company. They explore the world of con games, past and present, drawing inspiration from true-life events, and getting raves wherever they perform.

TO JUNE 21. FRINGE INFO AT
MONTREALFRINGE.CA, (514) 849-FEST,
OR BY HANGING OUT ON THE CORNER
OF ST-LAURENT AND RACHEL.